Game Central's Tenth Anniversay

K. Fields
2016-05-25T19:17:27-04:00
General

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Game Central, which debuted on May 25, 2006. It’s hard to believe. For this milestone, I envisioned a major site update or even a site redesign. Alas, that didn’t happen. It will have to wait a bit. Still, I wanted to post something new. Something different. After a bit of contemplation, it came to me. Most of my gaming memories came from my personal time outside of school or outside of work. There was one fond in-school gaming memory, however, from my senior year of high school. It was the Book Football League (BFL). You remember paper football? Of course you do. Almost every American kid has played it at one time or another. Imagine substituting a small hardcover book for the little paper triangle. Now you have something! My friends and I played book football in our many study halls that year. A lot of those study halls were in the cafeteria. Playing on the large cafeteria tables, a small paper football didn’t cut it. Instead, my friend Jeff brought in a book, which worked quite well. Kickoffs and field goals were an adventure as the “football” went flying through the air, its pages fluttering. Jeff solved that with a liberal application of wood glue to seal the book into a solid rigid brick.

It took some digging but I finally found the original book football. It was a small hardcover of Low Man on Totem Poll by H. Allen Smith. Initially, we took some heat from one teacher who accused us of destroying a book. We explained it was personal property and didn’t belong to the school. A couple of teachers were hostile to the Book Football League and wouldn’t allow us to play. Most of the teachers were cool, however. In fact, the gym teacher at the time casually followed the BFL and would ask for the latest scores and standings.

The front cover of our book football, with its official BFL designation.

Originally published in 1941, I wonder if this was a first edition.

Here is a top view showing the glue that kept the book sealed through dozens of games.