game over

On the video games which defined my childhood.

This post is partly inspired by Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which follows the relationship of two video game design- who am I kidding, you’ve probably already read it.

---

It is 1989 and I am five years old, blowing into the cartridge of my favourite Atari 2600 game, Road Runner. The cartridge is a little larger than a deck of playing cards; the console is connected to a small joystick with a single red button. I am on the floor of my bedroom, leaning against my bunk bed, the bulky television brought upstairs and placed on a chair. My posture is bad and will cause me problems in later life but I don’t care; I’m trying to dodge trucks and avoid Wile E. Coyote.

Three years later, I’m skulking around the corridors of Nazi Germany in Wolfenstein 3D, discovering health packs behind huge portraits of Hitler and shooting guards with a gun which juts out perpendicular to my body. The muzzle flash is a star of red and yellow pixels; a face at the bottom of the screen glances left and right and looks more bloodied the lower my health becomes.

I am sitting at my father’s computer, the cathode ray monitor cumbersome on the faux-pine desk. Later that night I gleefully tell him how I killed one of the level bosses and his chest burst open; he responds that I shouldn’t really be playing a game this violent at my age. The next year, Doom is released. I play that, too.

When I am nine or ten years old I play The Oregon Trail and lead my family from Missouri to the Willamette Valley. I choose the number of oxen wisely, and think carefully about which time of year we leave. I shoot bison until they disappear and all I can manage to hunt is a couple of birds. My sister contracts dysentery; later, she dies. Even now, the sound which played when something bad happened still haunts me.

FIFA International Soccer is released in 1993, and I use my pocket money to buy it, and there are six floppy disks inside the box which I have to insert one by one to install the game. The gameplay is fairly basic and everyone stands like they’ve soiled themselves but my imagination fills in the gaps; I know the volley from outside the box didn’t actually curl as it flew through the air, but I could pretend it had. My father’s cathode ray monitor is still there, but the desk is now white, and there’s a pull-out shelf for the keyboard.

Big Red Racing is released two years later. I play against my cousin, both of us hunched over the same keyboard, my fingers over the W/A/S/D keys, his on the arrows. The monitor displays a split screen; I get cross when I lose.

Our PC is now in the living room, and we have dialup (oh God, the sounds, I could bathe in them now), and I play Command & Conquer: Red Alert against the same cousin whilst he sits in his living room, a few miles away. We have to move quickly; the internet cuts out after two hours. He beats me. He always beats me.

I lead nations, start wars and forge alliances in Civilisation II; point-and-click my way through Sam & Max: Hit the Road and Monkey Island; build worlds in Theme Park and Age of Empires; revel, as a young teenager, in the bikini-clad lady-sprites of Duke Nukem 3D.

It is 1998: I am fourteen, and Half-Life has taken the gaming world by storm. I now have my own PC, tucked in the corner of my bedroom at my father’s house. The monitor is still cathode ray; wires trail from behind the desk to two small speakers positioned either side of the keyboard. I have a bulky CD player on a shelf, next to a poster of Britney Spears, and the cast of Friends, and a photograph of a tiger, because they are my favourite animal. My bed is unmade; clothes lie rumpled and creased on the floor.

My PC isn’t quite good enough to run the game smoothly, so the movement lags a little, and the audio stutters. But I still complete the game, and use the software to build my own levels, with decals and soldiers and scientists with aliens gripped onto their faces. I look out of my bedroom window and see the girl next door, getting into the back of her parents’ car. I really fancy her.

Half-Life was probably the last video game I played to excess. After that, life got in the way: exams, marriage, kids, another marriage. Nowadays, I actively try to reduce my screen time, despite the fact that screen time defined so much of my childhood.

But, often, I find myself scouring YouTube for video game walkthroughs, worlds I once knew like the back of my hand, and I wonder if it is the game I miss, or the feeling of playing: of discovering something new, the smell of dust behind a warm monitor, the glow of the screen, the joy of pressing play. The quiet comfort of a world not yet hyper-connected.

It does not matter: it is game over.