Gaming (Part 1)

Eventually, the council relented and provided us with a house. After the cramped living within two rooms at my Nana’s flat, we now had seven (including two toilets: one upstairs and one down). To celebrate, my dad bought a colour TV for the living room.

Three things happened when I was around 8 years old that began my lifelong fascination with computer games and gaming.

The first and second were because of the rise of the arcade machine. An arcade machine was a large cabinet. It housed a bulky cathode ray television screen and the electronics hardware that had one game installed on it. The front shelf of each cabinet held an array of buttons and controls. Underneath the front shelf was a slot into which you put your money. Ten pence was all you needed to play. The cabinets had the livery of each game painted upon them. An “attract mode” would show animations and graphics on the screen, while the speakers blasted out sound effects to lure you closer so that you might dip into your pocket and “insert coin” as directed by the screen.

I remember when the first arcade machine appeared in the waiting area of our local chippy, The Golden Fry. A brand new cabinet, rare. Its name was “Space Invaders”. On the front and sides of the cabinet were shadowy crab-clawed beasts posed to hurl down missiles. On the front were five buttons, two for moving your cannon left and right, one to shoot. The other two were for starting a one-player or two-player game, assuming that you’d inserted the correct amount of coins. You could hear the deep base rhythm of the invaders as they moved across the screen long before you entered the chippy, and when you went in, the sound blared at you. The local kids became fascinated, first by the noise, and then by the visuals. We bought fizzy drinks and crisps and chips. The older kids bought cigarettes and smoked them as they waited or played.

Around that same year, after our local chippy got invaded, my dad would drive us down to Edinburgh as a family to visit his mum in Portobello (Edinburgh’s town by the sea). My brother and I would walk the mile up the prom from Joppa to Bath Street to get to the arcades. When we started making that pilgrimage with our fifty pence pieces in our pockets, we found only a few machines in one smokey room off the prom: “Sea Wolf”, “Asteroids”, “Space Invaders”, “Galaxian”, and “Lunar Lander”. On subsequent trips back, that one room expanded, and where before there had been a wall, there now stood a passage into other rooms filled with cabinets with names like: “Battlezone”, “Berzerk”, “Defender”, “Missile Command”, “Pac-man” and “Tempest”.

We’d take our fifty pence to a person in a booth where they would change it for tenpence pieces. We would try to make our five goes last for as long as possible. It became a very serious (and difficult) decision about where to deposit our coins. If you chose unwisely, you would be penniless in minutes. In subsequent trips, we’d take more than just fifty pence. We would save up in advance and split our savings based on how many trips to the arcades we could fit in.

The third event around this age was when my dad took home a small angled box with six switches, a grilled top, with a faux wooden panel on the front. The Atari Video Computer System. Something new to plug in to our colour TV.

The games were now in our house, we could have unlimited goes, and each go was FREE! Each game was a cartridge you inserted into the front of the Atari. I loved watching TV with the family: “The Professionals”, “The Incredible Hulk”, “Starsky and Hutch” and “Doctor Who”. I couldn’t wait for those shows to end so I could bung on the Atari and play. Or get up early before the rest of the house to play games like “Air-Sea Battle”, “Combat”, “Indy 500”, “Video Olympics”, “Breakout”, “Night Driver”, and eventually “Asteroids” and, of course, “Space Invaders”.

It didn’t matter that the graphics weren’t the same, or the audio was all squashy and almost unrecognisable. My brother and I would replace the deficiencies in our remembered imaginations of how they sounded and looked in the arcades. The gameplay still felt good and was just as exciting. Different, that’s all. Also, did I mention that every play of each game was free?

In my memory, these events are all mushed together, and it’s hard for me to tease apart what came first, but the order presented here is as good as any. The arcade machines in The Golden Fry, the trips to the Portobello arcades, and the ever-present lure of the Atari made me fall in love with video games.

This was only the beginning.

It wouldn’t be long before I began pestering my parents for what I saw as the ultimate in home computing: the ZX81 with a 16k RAM pack. It would make for a perfect eleventh birthday present. I sold it to them as a tool, something not just for playing games.

I must have been pretty persuasive, obsessed, or both. Because, by some miracle, I got one.