Blast From The Past – Anyone Else Remember TV Powww? [VIDEO]

I was in a meeting recently and TV Powww was brought up. Many people reacted with WTF is TV Pow? I was one of those people - for a second, and then I remembered. I cannot believe people actually played TV Pow, let alone watched it. Trust me, if you remember it you know how ridiculous it seems today. If you don't remember it - prepare to say WTF too.

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TV Powww was basically a video game people would play on TV from their homes. Yep, they were selected via mail entry. The winning player would be called from the Bozo the Clown studio (or a local affiliate studio), and play live on TV. Now think about this, someone is playing a video game at home, through a land line phone. No joystick, no controller and certainly no Ipad or cellphone. All the player had to use to play was one word - POW.

Are you dead or what? It's true! The at home player would give directions over the phone while watching the game on their home screen. When the viewer determined that the weapon was aiming at the target, they said "Pow!", after which that weapon would fire. According to Wikipedia there are two stories as to how the game 'fired' at the studio. One is that the game was actually was voice activated (not) and the other is that an employee in the control room manually hit the fire button when the caller said "Pow'. I am going with the second explanation. I mean come on, the game originally aired in 1978 and only lasted into the mid 80's - the technology wasn't that great then, or was it?

Your kids may not care that you walked 10 miles to school in the cold without shoes, but they will certainly crack up when you show them TV Powww. Yes kids there was video game life BF - before FarmVille.