Burying your mistakes

Video game archaeologists are a thing now, apparently.

So when did the future become the past?

Apart from all the other reasons (aches and pains, not understanding what a ‘One Direction’ is, inner-ear hair growth etc.) it’s another sure sign I’m getting old.

This particular history lesson is a warning from a time when video games consoles had just been hewn from the rawest of plastic, and squash consumption left you with orange glass-marks either side of your mouth for the rest of the day.

In a time before video had finished off the radio star, the late 70s saw the thrilling arrival of interactive games (of any shape imaginable, but only if it was made up of squares) you could play on your television, as long as your Mum wasn’t watching The Generation Game, and it wasn’t past your bedtime. And you could afford it. And you hadn’t been sent to bed early for smacking your little brother round the head with a Monopoly board. Again.

What with VHS recording and the digital watch, the largely brown and yellow (with a bit of burnt orange) 1970s came alive with technological brilliance to entertain us, as long as you didn’t mind staring at a screen. Ooo, how times have changed.

Console King during this time was Atari, whose rapid success helped the Star Wars generation feel part of the Sci-Fi future with exciting graphics, thrilling game play, lots of beepy noises and getting you told off by your dad for forgetting to plug the aerial back in again in time for Grandstand.

Their 2600 console (imagine the dashboard of a Ford Cortina and you’re in the right area) had already seen the wonders of Asteroids, the triangular ship that spent all day shooting rocks and yearning for the occasional alien space ship, and Centipede, a terrifyingly poorly rendered creature that split into bits when you shot it - but carried on attacking!, by the time 1982 rolled around, all snoods, ra-ra skirts and excessive amounts of hairspray.

ET was a smash at the cinema, and it seemed sensible for the Extra Terrestrial to have it’s own game. Hastily written in five weeks, Atari made millions of copies, only spotting the two fatal injuries it has inflicted upon itself too late: The game was awful, and they’d made more copies than there were actual machines to play them on.

With the situation looking so bad that even a Co-operative Bank would feel pretty smug, they buried the lot in the desert, as you do in these situations.

Like some sort of Holy Grail quest, a dig has finally uncovered some copies, allowing us to once again see what a gigantic cock-up it all was, and enabling ‘kids these days’ to wonder out loud how we could ever have thought that sort of thing was cool, before forgetting what they were saying mid sentence and continuing their attempt to beat the high score on Candy Crush on their phone.

Game (still) over.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on the 2nd of May 2014. You can view the edited version used by the paper on their website here 32 words went missing, including the description of 1982's attributes, the co-op joke, and "cock-up" being replaced by "shambles".

I really enjoyed writing this one, which was surprising, as a nasty case of having no idea what to write about had been taking place for quite a while, as I stared forlornly at a blank Word document.

This also marked the anniversary of my 1st column 2 years ago. Yikes.

(Interesting CD from Mojo magazine playing right now: Revolver Reloaded. Some interpretations of the songs from the Beatles album, which, to my mind, is a great thing to do. The Beatles were amazing, but they certainly aren't sacrosanct.)

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