I can still vividly recall the dawn of video games, telling Mom I was going to check out the Pong game in electronics as she shopped at Zayres, a department store chain that disappeared generations ago.

Pong was basically a slow-motion electronic version of tennis. Blip, blip — and if you hit it with just the right English — blop!

I know, lame, right?

But it fascinated me at the time much like I imagine fire transfixed early man.

Still, there was something about it that also seemed so boring. The game itself quickly grew tiresome, so the real intrigue involved this feeling that the game represented a sea change — the birth of a new age of technological advancement. The first calculators offered the same promise.

Soon after Pong came digital LED hand-held electronic games and I was a fiend for them. I had baseball, hockey and football games because I was a sports nut. Then came the big leap forward — Pac Man and Asteroids.

Then, of course, the greatest evolutionary milestone — Atari. Video games at home!

For years, I told myself and anyone else forced to listen to my whining, that I hated video games because they killed the pinball machine industry. That wasn’t entirely true I came to realize over the years.

It’s true enough I loved playing pinball machines. And, as a teenager, I was scary good at it — the best in my neighborhood at least. One summer, during a neighborhood pinball wizard contest, I had absolute strangers — kids I’d never met — threaten to decimate my high score. And me, as well. I’ll never forget how one particularly nasty kid kept banging into my elbow “accidentally on purpose” while I played “Star Trek,” my favorite game at the 7/11. I was a patient boy and let it slide, but after a few times I let him know I wasn’t pleased and for that minutes later I got ambushed with a sucker punch so vicious we careened into a stack of Sunday newspapers as he chaotically slammed his fist into my throat while the store clerk frantically tried to restore order.

Yeah, I grew up in a tough neighborhood.

I think it was the same kid some weeks later who arrogantly bragged to me that his friend was laying waste to my high score, which stood for six months, just as I coincidentally walked into that same 7/11. I offered up a Buddha-like smile and congratulations — mostly because I instictively knew that was the best way to irritate them. It worked. He stalked back to his friend, stung with the disappointment of being denied satisfaction.

Knowing better than to push my luck, I waited for them to leave, put a quarter into the machine, which I hadn’t played for weeks because I was bored with it, and leveled their puny high score with ease. I told the clerk to put my name back on top of the game’s display board, as was the custom when one racked up high score.

Petty, I know. But I was 13 years old, OK? (And, speaking of Petty — Tom, that is — I even wrote a feature-length screenplay loosely based on the events of my life that last summer pinball reigned that I titled “Even the Losers.”)

So, yeah, I jumped on my bike with my pals and rode up to the neighborhood arcade to play Pac Man, etc., knowing even at that time that those games would destroy my beloved pinball. Why? Because I’m an early adopter. I love new technology. I just don’t slavishly adore it. You still have to win me over. And over the years I grew less interested in video games even as my generation dug in deeper with Nintendo, Sega and later XBox and PlayStation.

Why? Well, because, frankly, I suck at most of them.

As good as I was at pinball, I was that bad at the video games. It was rare I could master any of them. I was particularly lousy at Pac Man. Still am. And let me tell you, it’s no fun when an 8-year-old nephew can kick your ass at Wii (though since I got one myself and have had time to practice I think I might ask for a rematch. On second thought, he’s 11 now. I might get hurt).

So one evening recently when Mona wondered aloud if we should check out a flight simulator in Anaheim I thought, why not? Should be fun. I love doing just about anything with her, but I really  dig how she’ll come up with these quirky escapades.

I was also a little worried. If I can’t even figure out your average PlayStation flight-simulator game, how am I going to do in a real one?

When we arrived, they had us put on real-enough looking flight suits. Hoo boy. This was serious business. They even had a pre-flight briefing … in a separate room! Yikes! I’m going to get embarrassed big time.

I wish I could say this is one of those improbable stories when the protagonist defies all the odds and puts in a superhuman performance. But then I’d be lying. I was awful. The worst of the bunch. Hell, even Mona shot me down once — with relish!

I got zero kills, I think. I crashed my plane on the runway. I mostly flew around in circles like a demented sharecropper on qualudes.

Still, it was fun. Even when I was wiping out at Galaga or Frogger or Dig Dug back in the day, it was all good. I was with my friends, just hanging out.

And there’s nothing more fun than that, now is there?

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