Part 10 – The Importance Of Being Emulated

When my house finally collapses under the combined weight of all the arcade boards, consoles, Japanese game-related collectibles and bubble-wrap that I’ve been secreting away in the loft I’ll know exactly who to blame.

”Andy,” I’ll say resignedly, “this is all your fault.”

Andy was my main gaming friend through my twenties. We’d met through work and immediately formed a little gang bonding over King’s Quest and other early PC gaming classics. We obsessed about Civilisation together, played two-player Tetris over the telephone together, got frustrated with Lemmings together, upgraded from XTs and into the Pentium age together and drank enough beer to sink several large ferrets. We eventually went our separate ways work-wise but always kept in touch to swap notes on our top Civilisation scores and strategies.


”Up yours, Grandad! We’re off to play Joust…”

It was during one of our monthly catch-up sessions when Andy dropped the bombshell which was to change my life completely.

“Have you heard of MAME?” he asked, his face giving no hint of the significance of those four innocent little letters. “Nope, never heard of it. Who’s it by?” I replied, believing it to be a new game by – oh, I don’t know – Sierra or somebody…

He enlightened me. The idea that the humble PC (which, despite our best hopes, was and is a second-rate games machine) could somehow pretend to be an original arcade game was revolutionary. The rest of the night was full of “What? It plays Pac-man? What about 1942?” to a constant stream of “Yes, all of them!”. I went home that night with a small stack of floppy disks that Andy had thoughtfully brought along and a determination to stop putting it off and to get online at the earliest opportunity.

The Internet. Yesterday.

Emulation in general was a revelation to me – finally I had a chance to play all those Mega Drive and SNES games that I had long coveted from afar but had never plucked up the courage to bring home. But it was MAME that I returned to again and again, with its seemingly perfect emulation of Pengo, Pac-Man, Defender, Scramble, Commando... Each new release would bring with it fresh new classics to consume, fresh memories of nearly-but-not-quite-forgotten arcade gems. Games that I had only ever dreamt of were suddenly right there on my PC. Here, along with Doom, was the proof that the PC was king.

I became a ROM whore, scouring the internet for those elusive zip files containing the pure distillation of early eighties arcade goodness. They weren’t all good. For every download of Capcom’s original 1942, there was a version of the less-than-classic Playchoice conversion. For every Donkey Kong there was a Minky Monkey, every Mr Do accompanied by a Space Panic. But the gems – no matter how scarce – shined all the brighter in the company of their less accomplished cousins.

A diamond, shining brightly in the firmament.

This was the beginning, the start of a realisation that, as Blur nearly stated at the time, modern games were rubbish. Over the next couple of years I gradually stopped buying PC games altogether, preferring instead to download my fix. As videogames had become more complex, more concerned with the number of colours displayed on screen and more obsessed with guaranteeing “42 hours playing time!” it seemed they had lost something along the way.

The apparent surface complexity of Wing Commander simply couldn’t compete with the half dozen or so simple enemies that Defender threw your way. Zool, with it’s fifteen more or less interchangeable levels, just wasn’t as much fun as the basic challenge of playing through the four single-screen levels of Donkey Kong, and the emergent behaviour of Inky, Binky, Pinky & Clyde still puts the artificial intelligence of Command & Conquer and its ilk to shame.

But it was another pub conversation with a different friend, Steve, that was to put the final nail in my coffin…

ahchay, December 2003

mame: You knew this one already right?

Not just for storing old gaming gear in the loft.

I really must stop making major life decisions while under the influence of this stuff.

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