A couple of days ago I was rummaging around in one of the many boxes of crap piled up in my study, when I found my old Nintendo Donkey Kong game (you know, the old orange clam-shell one). I don’t know why I’ve still got it – maybe out of sentimental gratitude for all the dull church services it helped me through during my boarding school days. I showed it to my 8-year-old son (Finn) who was distinctly underwhelmed, until I told him that this was the ‘original Nintendo DS’ (hey, it has two screens…), and explained that the little guy was Mario of Super Mario Bros fame, at which point he stopped looking at it as though it was a fossil, and was asking where you put the cartridges. I slipped in some new batteries and – hey presto! – it still worked! Not bad for something that must be 25 years old. Finn couldn’t get the hang of it (oddly, for someone who regularly beats me at Fight Night 3), but I was straight back to jumping those barrels like a pro (assuming there are such things as professional Donkey Kongers – and assuming that they call themselves ‘Donkey Kongers’). All I needed was for someone to say “Please rise for hymn 339” and “Let us pray” every so often and it would have been just like the ‘good’ old days!
That got me started reminiscing about the different video game systems I’ve had. (Hey, it’s a parent’s prerogative to bore their children with stories that start “When I was your age…”) I’ve never particularly considered myself a ‘gamer’, but now I look back on it, maybe I am…
I blame it all on my parents. My dad came home one day with one of the original Pong machines (no doubt picked up at a car boot sale, or won in a card game or something…) under his arm. This was my first taste of ‘electronic entertainment’ and although I can’t claim to be blown away by the experience (revolutionary though it was), it did provide more entertainment than watching Heino warbling away on the Deutsche Hitparade (we lived in Germany at the time). Consequently, the Pong machine spent more time plugged into the coax input of the TV than the aerial did.
Several years later I started to get ‘into computers’, badgered my parents into buying me a  Sinclair ZX81 for Christmas, and was delighted to discover that you could also play games on it. Kids nowadays won’t believe that you could get a fully-functioning game of chess in 1K, but you could. And it could beat you. (Or at least it could always beat me, but that may be because I can’t play chess.) The flagship game, though, was 3-D Monster Maze – although you needed the 16K wobble-pak for that. The ZX81 screen (actually your TV) was black-and-white and a mere 40×20 characters in size.  ‘Graphics’ could only be achieved through creative use of ‘standard’ letters and block shapes (like those used on Teletext), and any movement necessitated a full screen refresh. All of which makes 3-D Monster Maze an extremely unrealistic ‘gaming experience’ by today’s standards, but back in the day was still enough to make you jump when you turned a corner and the ‘monster’ (a blocky T-rex – see screenshot) hurtled towards you at a full six-screen-refreshes-a-second!
I outgrew the ZX81 in about a year, and moved onto a BBC ‘B’ (thanks Mom, thanks Dad). This was color, had true pixel-level graphics, and was fast enough to run arcade-style games. Many evenings when I should have been working towards my ‘A’ Levels were spent working towards the next level of Space Invaders, Defender, and Missile Command (I learnt that it’s very difficult trying to mimic a trackball on a QWERTY keyboard, if nothing else). The BBC ‘B’ lasted well into my early college days (I was on a Computer Science course – I justified this as research!), during which flatmate Rob and I would spend hours playing text-only ‘adventure’ games I can’t even remember the name of. You know the type: “You are in a cave. There is a light to the North. What now?” NORTH “You are in a woods. There is a cave to the South. What now?”. We never did find whatever we were supposed to be looking for.
By the time I left college, technology had finally caught up with my full slacking potential, and I bought myself a Sega MegaDrive. This was my first real games console, and I spent way too much time blotting out the memory of a painful break-up by playing shoot-em-ups and fighting games (!) on it. Thankfully this didn’t last too long, and I soon swapped my MegaDrive for sex. (No, not literally – I didn’t barter it with a prostitute; I just got myself a new girlfriend and was too busy having sex to play video games.)
A couple of years later I was living in Belgium with said girlfriend (now wife), and I picked up a PlayStation (One) to keep her busy whilst I was out at work. Sadly, it kept her too busy. I’d leave the flat in the morning and she’d be sat in bed playing Tomb Raider. I’d come home from work in the evening, and she’d still be sat in bed playing Tomb Raider! Funny how things change – I went from playing video games because I wasn’t having sex, to not having sex because my girlfriend was playing video games. “Let me just get past this level.” “Ok, well let me know when…zzzzz.”
The PlayStation was finally consigned to the cupboard when we had our first child (the aforementioned Finn), who seriously cut in to our leisure time. That lasted until Finn was four years old at which point I decided to give him the great start in life my parents had given me with that Pong game, and bought him an Xbox. Actually, I think I officially bought it for the wife (“Happy birthday, honey!”) to give her something to do whilst she was awake all night with the lump that would become Freya growing inside her. Either way, I probably spent more time on it than either of them, clocking up some serious time on Halo and Max Payne.
When we left the States we gave up the Xbox (NTSC) and bought a PlayStation 2 (PAL) – mainly for the backwards compatibility with the PlayStation One games that we’d kept hold of. This one really was bought for Finn, but again, I think I got the most use out of it. “Here, let me just get you past this bit.” “Here, let me show you how to do that.” “No, you’re doing it all wrong. Just give me the controller.” Obviously we had to leave that behind when we moved back to the States (that old PAL vs. NTSC thing again), but I didn’t waste too much time before picking up a PlayStation 3 when they came out on general release. At least this time I wasn’t kidding anyone and fessed up to buying it purely for myself.
So here I am, 40 years old, and once again wasting time on video games that could easily be spent more productively. The current game of choice is Resistance: Fall of Man. This is rated “Mature” (running around a make-believe world pretending to shoot things – ho, very mature!) which means that I have to wait until the kids (and usually the wife) have gone to bed before playing it. I power it up at 10pm and before I know it, it’s 2am and my eyeballs are all dry because I haven’t blinked in four hours.
The other night I was just about to call it quits, walked over to the TV to switch it off, and then decided to give it another quick go. Being too lazy to walk back to the sofa, I just stood there, two feet away from the TV.   As this is a 50″ plasma, it filled my vision. The effect was unnerving. After a couple of minutes of swaying around following my character on the screen, I was nauseous and almost fell over. Maybe it’s my age, but that Donkey Kong is looking like a much safer option…
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