Is this worthy of a blog post? Perhaps not. Anyroad. I was a gamer, once, in my adolescence & teen years. Didn't really escape into my twenties & on with the real Drive or Desire to be a gamer. I like a game. My dad worked for Bally Arcade Company, in Dogwater, Alabama, and once smuggled out the various components & boards necessary to build his own tabletop Galaga at our house. We also had a Bally Old Chicago pinball machine, with the hand-painted glass backboard. These items lived on our screened-in front porch, and I'd go fuck around on 'em anytime I pleased. Which was often.
Unlike most kids in Dogwater, Alabama, I spent a hot minute growing up in an arcade, and could play whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Tempest, Centipede, Crystal Castles-- you name it. I didn't Tron often, because I sucked at light cycling, which we all know was the best bit.
Of course dad didn't work there forever. Dogwater didn't have much in the way of gang shit, but there were some small-time crews who tried to lean on the arcades. Dad quit Bally after some heavies showed up with a sawed-off, looking for a cut, as I understand it. Sometime in the mid 80s he decided to partner up with a drug buddy (read: coke fiend) who was an audiophile and they started one of several electronic repair businesses. This would, in fact, become the pattern: the business would rock awhile, and then somewhere along the way the drug buddy-cum-business partner would flake out or fuck up the books and then it would be time to start fresh, with some other connection dad had made.
Honestly, I didn't know the coke was around. Dad liked weed more than anything. (I remember once he was on peyote & managed to fall off the roof of our house...) But there was a little coke, I realize, now, and that maybe explains some of his more temperamental glitchouts. Not all of them. But more than could be laid at the feet of capitalism & a deep fear of Planned Obsolescence, which he attempted to embed in me.
This chasing of technology would persist, and extend to computers, naturally. So when the first home computers rolled out, we would adopt the first of whatever. There was an Atari, of course, ergo I played the notorious E.T. that seems to have become legendary in its unutterable bugginess. I don't remember much about the Atari home system apart from Frogger, honestly. Then we made the leap to the early Apple systems, and I wound up inheriting the Apple IIc from them when they got the first Mac. Along the way I became, well, addicted to certain Broderbund games.
Namely Lode Runner. It became my favourite. Next to Below The Root and Cosmic Osmo, and, yes, Prince of Persia. Games involving lots of running & climbing & eventually dead-end exploration were pretty much my cozy zone. "What's that over there? Why can't I reach it!?" But there's a certain sadistic pleasure to Lode Runner in the fuckedness of blowing holes in the floor and trapping your pursuers there, which none of the aforementioned can equal. It's right up there with blowing up all the humans on the ground on Defender, so one may rocket endlessly through the vacuum, zapping youfoes.
My inner bastard rearing his ugly head.
Sure, eventually I wound up with an NES and the Apple IIc became a dust magnet. I had a text adventure game phase, same as all of us, but when graphics became The Thing, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Zork and all that were in the rearview forever. It was me & Mario for a damned long time, because I was frankly bad at speedrunning but insisted on trying no matter what. I was addicted for quite a while, and eventually bought a secondhand Playstation (& Metal Gear Solid, natch) from a co-worker. But by the time we entered the 2000s and my art partner became one of those asshole who rejoiced in trouncing you at GoldenEye, a lot of the joy of gaming had left me. Gaming was, in fact, part of why I stopped working with Josiah, because he became one of those insufferables who'd rather gloat over your fragged digital corpse than collaborate. There was no teaming up in the game realm with him, and that dynamic backwashed into our art. I got turned off games, more or less. It was worse than watching someone turn into an addict to network teevee.
Anyhow. Games left a bad taste in my mouth for a very long time. And since I was never great at them, I left them behind. But lately I have been bitten by the nostalgia bug. And the Internet Archive has that stuff, in vast quantities. So maybe I'll git gud again. Or maybe I won't. But what the hell, right?
Maybe it's 'cause my husband is a gamer. One of the nicest you'll ever meet. <3
