‘Kool-Aid Man’ Was The Best Video Game Ever… In The 80s [VIDEO]

Last week, my children and I were making several different flavors of Kool Aid to freeze so we could make homemade snow cones. During this process, I had a bit of nostalgia. I told my children about the Kool Aid Points that use to adorn the backs of the packages and how I would collect them for some pretty cool prizes.

I still own a few Kool-Aid Man cups and other various Kool Aid branded items, but my pièce de résistance was the official Kool Aid Man video game for my Atari 2600.

You controlled a little pitcher of Kool Aid as your avatar and the point of the game was to keep the slurpies from drinking all your Kool Aid (from your pool, I think). The slurpies were invincible unless their straws were out, so if you ran into them, you would bounce around the board uncontrollably. Once the straws were out, you could destroy them. Now that would be pretty easy or boring if there wasn't a way to make yourself also invincible, so every so often, a giant "W", "S" or "K" (for water, sugar and Kool Aid) would fly quickly through the game and if you could catch it, it would turn you into Kool Aid Man and make you invulnerable for about 5 seconds. Check out this game play video below.

I played that game so much it would literally overheat and a glitch would make you have to stop playing until it cooled down (the little Kool-Aid pitcher avatar would get stuck and just bounce in the corner). It was a glitch that everyone who has ever owned that game knows about and hates!

If you watched the video above, you probably thought it looks easy, right? Trust me, that was not the case. Every time you moved to the next level, there would be much more slurpies AND they moved at a lot faster pace. Some of the latter boards were basically impossible. I remember my mother hated the game, because she sucked at it.

All in all, for a game that I got for free, by just collecting Kool Aid points (plus shipping and handling), it goes down in history as one of my all time favorites.