According to a magnificent feature at 1Up.com, forty years ago this week, Ralph Baer became the first person to ever develop and play a computer game hooked up to a television. The game was called Ping-Pong, and though pony-tailed purists give credit to 1962's Spacewar, most people acknowledge the creation of Ping-Pong in 1967 (obviously the father of Atari's Pong in 1972) as beginning of the arcade era.

So with video games officially entering middle age this week, call in sick to work (tell them you have Pac-Man fever, of course) and celebrate the big birthday, geek-style.

Have a Video Game Film Festival:
I thought there were a ton of movies based on video games, but according to Wikipedia, there are only a handful of films with video games integral to the part. Huh. Apparently, one scene in an arcade doesn't rate. (Sorry, Midnight Madness.) In fact, there are so few, you could watch them all in one day . . . with some related activities to celebrate, of course.

* Watch the brilliant documentary Once Upon Atari, then invite Towlie over to play invisible tank pong with maximum walls in Combat.

* Watch The Wizard, then apologize to your parents for freaking out at them when they wouldn't buy a power glove for you when you were a kid. Alternatively, you could have a drinking game where you have to drink whenever there's a glaring video game continuity error, but don't complain to me when you pass out in thirty minutes.

* Watch Emilio Estivez in The Bishop of Battle story from Nightmares, and cry softly because arcades as easy to find in the mall as Duke Nukem Forever.

* Watch The Last Starfighter, then play Star Raiders 2 on Atari 800. If you do well, tell all your friends you're going to be recruited to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. Don't forget your towel, hot shot.

* Watch Wargames, the movie that lead to parental and congressional freakouts about teenage hackers who could star World War III from a payphone! Oh Noes! Invite some Mooninites over to play Lite Brite and Defcon.

* Watch Tron, then invite Tron Guy over to play Trak-Ball and Frisbee, in a gymnasium lit entirely by ultraviolet light. In fact, if you do this, invite me too, because this sounds pretty awesome.

And while we're on the subject of movies, does anyone else remember scenes from the 80s where the kid is playing Pole Position, but the sound is clearly from a different game, like Defender? That used to drive me crazy. Come on, Hollywood! You already expect me to accept Tom Cruise as an actor, so you've got to meet me halfway here.

Play the Classics in an Emulator:
I will never forget the first time I came across MAME. It was just before I met my wife, and I was playing Doom late one night in the dark. Alone. Again. In an effort to track down some new WAD files, I stumbled onto a now-defunct site which claimed that I could play classic arcade games from my youth right on my computer at home. It was an outrageous and unbelievable claim, surely part of some effort to trick me into doing something I'd eventually regret . . . but the lure of Mr. Do! and Tempest was impossible to resist. I downloaded MAME, and then some roms for, uh, evaluation (which I quickly and legally deleted 24 hours later. Yep.) I was hooked, and played arcade classics I loved, like Berzerk and Pac-Man, and once-beloved games that I hadn't thought about in decades, like Thief and Kick.

Of course, the legality of MAME and other emulators is murky, so I'd never encourage anyone to download Andy Holfe's brilliant Arcade Ambience, track down a complete set of MAME roms, and spend an entire weekend with everything from Gyruss to those silly Japanese pseudo-porn games based on Qix . . . but there are a lot of legal alternatives, many of which you can play right on your 360 or Playstation (and don't forget the Virtual Console on the Wii, which is its own thing entirely.) There are also lots of self-contained units that hook up to a television, to bring something resembling the arcade into your home, or recreate those classic console days, when Shasta and frozen yogurt ruled the world.

I love emulators. As a parent, I get to share games with my kids that were important to me when I was their age and younger, and as a Gen Xer, I get to relive those days for less than twenty bucks. Ah, who knew you could put a price on nostalgia? Walt Disney, that's who.

If you're one of the damn kids today, it's unlikely that these games are going to Dig your Dug, but if you're a parent of one of the damn kids today, many of them are as much fun to play now as they ever were. So, after your film festival, you can . . .

* Play the Atari Flashback 1 or 2. It's amazing to me how Adventure is still fun, and how hard it remains to jump over the crocodiles in Pitfall.

* Get carsick while playing Mattel handheld football.

* Play the Midway and Namco collections on your favorite console. Beat Smash TV, and wonder why you ever spent more than one quarter trying to finish that piece of shit. Play Sinistar, and try not to get scared all over again when he says, "Beware! I live!"

* Play the Activision collection on your Gameboy, and try to score enough points to qualify for those Activision patches you had twenty years ago.

* Play Intellivision Lives! with only one thumb, to recreate the experience of using that weird Intellivision controller.

* Download a Commodore emulator, and track down a copy of COMPUTE!'s Gazette. Build your own game by copying the code from the magazine and compiling it yourself. When you're done, spend the rest of the day PEEKing and POKEing at the code to find the one character you transcribed incorrectly, and locate it just before you have to get off the computer for dinner. To complete the experience, have your mom come over and turn the machine off without writing your program to the cassette drive.

As a child of the 70s and 80s, video games were one of the biggest cultural influences on my life. I may have learned everything I needed to know about being a teenager from John Hughes, but if aliens ever attack Earth, or I'm ever trapped in a maze with robots, I'll have video games -- and Ralph Baer -- to thank for my eventual victory.

Wil Wheaton always wanted to be a contestant on Starcade.