Every child of the ’80s remembers the day his or her family entered the digital age. It could have been with an Atari, a Colecovision, or even a mighty VIC-20; no matter: they all hooked up to the same TV we’d always known, and transformed it from a box that passively delivered Diff’rent Strokes into an amusement park conveniently located right there in our own living rooms. Now we could play eighteen holes of golf, race cars, and fight space invaders, all in a single Saturday afternoon. Truly, we were living in a golden age.
But then, your older sister would come home and want to watch Fantasy Island and you had to turn the device in your living room back into a plain old TV. That’s where the handy little TV/game switch came in. In coming years, your TV would come to have so many devices hooked up to it — stereo speakers, VCR, DVD, TiVo, and multiple videogame consoles — that you’d need a whole hub to toggle between them, but back in the day, your TV was in use as a TV or a home arcade, and one little switch was enough to get the job done.
The TV/game switch was humble. Unassuming. A relic of a bygone age, its pivotal role in our formative years is largely forgotten today. No more. Glarkware has given the TV/game switch the recognition it so richly deserves. Wear it next to your heart, and remember.
