my life in computer games part 1

8/8/2019 My Life in Computer Games Part 1

1/4

My Life in Computer Games Part One The Early Years Kevin Anslow 2006

1

Thursday, June 01, 2006

My Life in Computer Games, Part One - The Early Years

I played my first computer game in about 1979. It was a flat, trapezoid plastic thing my uncle

got for Christmas. It had two paddle controls on long cables, a dial for selecting the 4-5games it offered, and a wire that plugged into the back of the telly. Though this wire were

pumped simple images of a black background overlayed with white lines, some of which you

could move with the paddle during game play. I have tried in vain to find this thing on the

internet somewhere, but perhaps my memories just does not stretch back that far, because I

remember it as being orange, and no orange contenders appear in the many histories of

console games you can find on the web.

The only really playable game was all about a square dot that bounced backwards and

forwards on the screen. The game was called tennis, because in some ways it was, in others it

was the silliest and most bare boned fascinating few hours a person could spend. Not only

could you spend indeterminate midnight-oil-burning eons trying to get the little dot back to

the other side, when your opponent could not, but you could sit there and watch someone else

doing it - because, let's face it, it was that amazing to behold. In my case it was mostly the

latter, because my teenage uncle and his hippy friends were the ones doing most of the

playing. Nevertheless, the seed of a lifetime's obsession had already taken root. Little did I

know what was to come, and that at the age I should be settling down as a mature man, I

would still have not lost the thrill.

If the sense of wonder about these simple games seems little bizarre now when games are a

basic staple of life and computers are everywhere around us, it has to be remembered that this

was the era when a lot of things we take for granted seemed out of this world, and computerand media technology was in its innocence.

When I got my first digital watch I spent hours of bliss parading it around the playground of

the primary school I attended. Cordelia (I later adopted a duck through the RSPCA and

named it after her), the first girl I had a crush on, even wore it for a minute - even greater

bliss. But in any case, everyone wanted to see it; I had never known popularity like that

before. A couple of years later I was astounded to hear of a kid who had been given several

clips from Star Wars for his birthday. They came on 8mm film, and could be projected,

silently on his dad's cinema movie. No sound, but no contest, this was a favoured son and

many of us wanted to be him, if only long enough to get a few viewings of the silent dog

fights.

Digital watches, video games, having big screen movies at home, these were all impossible

dreams and space age wonders to a child of the 1970's, whose usual adventures were little

more than riding a push bike aimlessly around the place, going swimming, and damning

streams in the local woods.

Post Star Wars, and certainly riding on the tails of its popularity, arcade games started to

appear. Space Invaders, Galaxians, Asteroids, they were the first in most people's neck of the

woods. I first saw them at the leisure centre in the Sussex commuter town where I grew up in.

Even now, these games recall for me the smell of chlorine from the centre pool, and a gaggle

of excited kids huddled around one of the hooded displays in the lobby of the place. Usuallyit was a teenager with pocket money from paper rounds who played and little kids who


2/4


2

soaked up his glory vicariously, but once in a while one of us knee high to grasshopper

youngsters got on and lasted a whole.... 2 minutes.

It was never quite worth it, and with hardly a breath taken in the onslaught of the alien

hordes, the coins were gone and that was most of your pocket money for a week. Still, you

always wanted to do it again, because that was the magic of the thing - another chance tosucceed. It felt like your moment in galactic history; something happening there and then and

dependant on your own guts and instinct, even if you hardly had any of that. For bare minutes

you knew what it was like to be a man, and boy it felt good as much as it felt scary. I think

these games were my first experience of true heart pumping adrenalin. And the odd thing

about adrenalin, is though it supposed to be a sign you are in trouble, it keeps calling you

back for more.

It didn't matter that the colours of different rows of invaders came from cellophane strips on a

black and white display, or that the asteroids were white outlines like the murder scene taping

of the suicide leap of a world weary boulder.

Most games were and continued to be 2d for many years to come. But quite early on in

Arcade gaming history, 3D games did sometimes appear. I played Tailgunner and Tank

Simulation on holiday in Swanage one year, when my cousin and I spent ever more ingenious

ways of extracting coins from grandparents and other family members to spend minutes of

bliss in the darkness of the arcade away from the healthy brightness of the sand and surf.

There were other fun games in the video arcades in those days, classics such as Pacman and

Donkey Kong, Frogger and Centipede. These never truly inspired me. But it was 3D games

that still held a certain fascination because I think I wanted games to reach into another

reality, a played reality. What I liked about the game world was the ability to feel as though

you could explore another world.

A leap forward into the early eighties. My cousin's step dad bought a video player which

probably cost him a fortune. When my uncle hired us a video of Buck Rodgers in the 25th

century the movie - a masterpiece of bastardised airfix models making the same three

screeching swoops against a starry background and hammy acting from beings with dated

hair. We watched it 6 times in two days. It was about this time too, that computer games

started to be get more accessible, ie, they made it onto home computers.

There are generations around today for whom the name ZX-81 sounds like R2D2's mate that

bought it in a scene of the Phantom Menace. It actually was a home computer, a kind of

calculator with big ideas about itself, that came with I000 byte of ram (as opposed to the1,000,000,000+ bytes on the machine I am writing this blog on) and a 16,000 byte expansion

pack almost as big as the machine itself. The expansion pack was wonky and strayed out of

its connector all too easily, and for either me, or my best mate, to play games that took

advantage of its then quantum leap in program capacity, and thus pogram complexity, the

other had to sit behind the machine and hold it on while waiting desperately for doom to

befall the one at the controls.

The ZX-81 In plugged into the telly, as did is successor the ZX Spectrum, with its

characteristic black finish and grey dead flesh rubbers keys. Later other home machines such

as the Commodore 64 appeared and also plugged into the box. Believe it or not, these and

other dedicate console systems were the precursors of the consoles such as the Playstationand Xbox, which now dominate the gaming market and account for most of the games sales.


3/4


3

It is an old story. Graphics were pretty basic, so the effort went into making the games fun.

Which they were... I think. People still play them today with retro emulators on PCs, although

in all honesty my nostalgic adventures into Manic Miner and Jetset Willy on a ZX Spectrum

emulator made me wonder what was so fascinating about the original, the graphics were so

blocky I felt like I was in a sumo wrestler suit and I could not quite tell what was supposed tobe what. We were either desperate or blind, but at least I can remember the fun. Perhaps it

was the wonder of childhood.

I did not have a ZX series calculator with attitude, I had an Oric, a short lived, ill fated rival

to the ZX Spectrum that was, far as I can tell, badly made and not desperately well supported.

Certainly it suffered from recurring defects, and mine had to be sent back to the manufacturer

more than once because of faults, particularly with the keyboard.

In those days, the games were loaded from cassette tapes, that if you listened to them sounded

like a bunch of clicks and snow from the telly put down on tape for an androids' garage night.

You could of course copy these tapes fairly easily if you had decent audio dubbingequipment, so the era of game piracy was well on its way when this format appeared. Of

course the home computers were not just about playing games, they gave us an avenue into

the world of programming.

Most of the home computers of that era ran basic, the most simple and the slowest

programming language of the time. It was called basic pretty much because a lot of it used

instructions that sound roughly like their English equivalent. It was not that hard to learn and

before long I was writing my own game. The one effort that ever truly worked was a

variation on space invaders, which had one invader that ambled across the screen and was

replaced by a mate, when I managed to shoot it with the asterisk that hurtled up from my little

"h" base ship at the bottom of the screen.

I didn't create any more games; I was not smart enough to learn enough programming to

advance beyond my first effort. But others did. A guy in my senior school managed to sell a

game he wrote to a games developer and blew the several thousand quid they gave him on

partying with his friends. One person could write a game in those days, these days it takes

entire production teams of programmers designers and marketing people.

I didn't play games a whole lot in my mid to late teenage years, apart from anything else my

father did not give me any pocket money, so the arcade was out of the question, and we had

no TV for quite a while, so no home computer games, even if I had still had the computersomewhere in a drawer.

Now and again on a road trip, or on a ferry to France I got the chance to play, but really

during my late teens games did not figure hugely in my life. Perhaps this was just as well. By

then I had discovered writing in a major way, and spent most of my spare time writing

novels, the first one of which I completed at age 16. It was to become a rule of thumb, no

computer games = more writing done. Even now it is true, I would not be writing this if my

Gothic 3 RPG game for the PC had come out on May 5 as it was supposed to, rather than

being postponed to later this year.

I lived down in Brighton for a year when I was about 19 and there were oodles of games onthe arcades on Brighton pier, so I sort of rediscovered them for a while. Now I was earning


4/4


4

my own money and had enough to spend a once weekly couple of hours getting the gaming

urge out of my system.

1942, a WW2 dogfighter shooting game was one favourite, even now I can still hear the

whistling music that started the game level and the miaouwwwww roar of the plane engine.

There was also SDI, strategic defence initiative, I can hardly remember it now, but I liked itthen. The rest of them fade from memory now. By todays standards they were pixelated and

a bit silly, but it is always easy to laugh at what was the latest fashion with hindsight.

I emigrated to Australia at the age of 19, shortly after marrying a young Australian girl who

was hardly out of her school uniform. Games should not have been a big part of my life, but

the marriage had been a mistake and we soon went our separate ways. I was suddenly alone

without knowing many people in a foreign country and feeling sorry enough for myself to

feel like indulging myself. I didn't drink or smoke at the time, so my options on vices were

thin. Playing computer games, in actual fact, was about the only vice I had.

Games up to that point had always been a fun thing, a childhood fascination, but they becamesomething different after that point. A kind of lonesome male ritual, where for minutes, or a

hour or so, I could drown out the difficult perplexing real world, in combat with an enemy.

Perhaps I had lost my innocence or optimism as a whole and it intensified my search for

finding satisfaction or pleasure in some realm that did not trouble me emotionally, which

games almost never do, I am not sure, but certainly, that was when games became for me a

kind of drug or escape rather than a innocent excitement or diversion.

It became a weekend ritual then for me to spend at least two hours in the video game arcade

on a Saturday in central Sydney, before going to the movies. I even started to become more

serious in my play. I developed a determination to discover a kind of state of game play

where I was so thoughtless and detached, that I would kind of dance among my enemies and

become an undefeated high score wonder. Unfortunately, noble though these ninja aspirations

may have been, I had the sort of intense character that did not let go easily. On the few

occasions I did reach that Zen state of game play, I would suddenly start to worry it was not

going to last, and start panicking, my aircraft plummeting from the skies, or my shields down

to the final reserve.

This was also the year I played my first game on a PC, but that is another chapter and another

story.

my life in computer games part 1

Documents