Crazy Climber Memories
When I was younger my family would often drive from our home state of Illinois to Tennessee to visit my grandmother. It was pretty cool. She owned a hotel and we'd have the run of the place during the hot as hell Tennessee summers. It was one of those old style southern white washed hotels that served smoked ham and biscuits at breakfast time and smoked ham, creamed corn and biscuits for supper. Which was served around 4 in the afternoon. It was really great.
Near the border of Tennessee and Kentucky there was this clothing store called Crow's that my mom liked to hit up when we were in the area. Crow's had really low prices on jeans so we would stock up a few pair for me and my brother for the upcoming school year.
It was a cool store with a faux western motif before things like that became popular. Besides clothes they had toys and stuff like lasso rope, spurs and doo-dads for your saddle. Maybe it wasn't a faux western store after all. Maybe it was a real one and a lifetime of seeing faux western stuff has made it so that I wouldn't recognize the real deal if I saw it.
One year during the peak of the video game craze Crow's put a little arcade in the back by their toy section. That was the most awesome news ever at the time. We had video games where I came from of course but my parent's were looser with the quarters while we were on the road then they were when we were at our local arcade so I was expecting a few dollar bills as opposed to a quarter or two to play with. They came through, and the game I remember playing the most with my family trip loot was Crazy Climber.
Crazy Climber was this game where you were a Human Fly type character that could scale up sky scrapers as easily as you or me could walk down the street but like any game worth it's salt there were obstacles to slow your roll. Stuff like this bald dude who hucked flower pots at you and signs that fell from the roof of the building plus the windows on the building would open and close at inopportune times. If you tried to grab out for a window as it happened to open, you fell to your doom.
Later in the game other things like Condors and Gorillas would appear to mess up your day but the most common difficulty that you came up against was the windows. They would close on you just as you reached for them causing you to annoyingly plummet to the earth.
Crazy Climber was different from most other games in that it had two joysticks, one controlled the left side of your body and the other was for the right. You had to use the two controllers in tandem to advance your daredevil up the side of the building.
The game consisted of four different skyscrapers. I was only ever to make it past the first one but I read online that there were four and without any contrary evidence I am going to accept that as the truth.
Crazy Climber was popular enough that it got converted into a couple of different video game systems, the Atari 2600 and The Famicon. Later a Japanese only release that was, according to Wikipedia almost exactly like the original but with sooped up graphics, was created as well.
Overall it wasn't that Crazy Climber was that great of a game that makes me remember it fondly it was the location and the time that I spent in Tennessee with my family that makes me remember it so well. I think that's whats so great about some of these old arcade games. It's not that they were that fun to play it's just that we remember them in the context of what we were doing in that stage of our lives.
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