2. A thousand words

Given a game like Pele Soccer on the Atari VCS, what good would a screenshot on the box actually be? Best leave the visual side of things to some in-house pen & ink artists. Atari must have had a small army of illustrators on the payroll, all conjuring up wonderfully detailed and misleading interpretations for their box art: warlords anyone? It wasn’t just Atari of course; Activision had their stylised renditions of the actual gameplay adorning their boxes complete with dramatic motion blur; Imagic had shiny silver foil; Parker had erm… lots of grey and some nice coin-op logos. Any box for a 1980s home computer title looked like pulp sci-fi, even the business software.

That one in the middle, up the top, that's Eusebio.

These were the dark days before affordable photography of course. This lack of photographs meant the reviews in C&VG all had an air of extra mystery to them. Back then we had to read the lowdowns on games and imagine the screens for ourselves. Oh how groundbreaking something like Minotaur might be on an Apple II. Obviously, we’d never even seen an Apple II back then, let alone Minotaur running on it. But the games for that machine were so damn expensive that they had to be coin-op quality at least. Not that we had any idea what the current coin-ops looked like either.

My favourite section of C&VG was Arcade Action; two bright yellow pages that described the cutting edge of coin-op gaming circa 1982. It would feature write-ups on a handful of new games along with a set of rubbish tips for an existing game. These were also the days of innovative game design, and to help us imagine what a game of Robotron or Joust might actually look like the C&VG artists provided us with some helpful sketches.

To this day I fail to see the connection between a western gunslinger shooting at green bean-like aliens wearing pink jumpsuits and any part of the game Robotron. According to the artists Space Dungeon featured a spaceman on a hover-bike a bit like one of those wheelie-stool/seat/step things you find in libraries. All I could figure out about Pengo is that it featured multicoloured dancing bees, or penguins, or both.

Perhaps they realised with Tempest that they simply couldn’t draw anything helpful because the review of that game was the first time Arcade Action included an actual, real, photographic screenshot. For me it was love at first sight. I can’t remember anything of their review just that picture. It was of Staircase V (level 9) with a pulsar transplanted from one of the red levels. That one screenshot in a magazine is something I knew would stay with me forever. Byte magazine had a similar article on Tempest (that was the one and only time I EVER bought Byte) which also had some screen shots. The Byte article though was only in black and white and pretty dark at that. But it was still something.

Now I was obsessing and it was the first time that videogames had done that to me. Just because of a screenshot.

Just beautiful.

I got the call on a hot Thursday afternoon. We were up in the science block utterly willing the lesson to end when it was whispered that they had a new game down the local Pool Rooms. And that it was a good one too. Not another of those instantly forgettable things like Pioneer Balloon or Fantasy that we got from time to time; played once and then ignored. No, this one was 3D! This one was in a proper cabinet! With artwork and everything!

Then there it was in front of me; the object of my 13-year old desire. We stared at Tempest’s now-legendary attract mode for over an hour, partly in awe but mostly in poverty. We couldn’t play a single game because we’d already blown all of my paper-round money.

I saw Mrs Wilson's nipple through her dressing-gown
once. That kept me going all Winter.

This game was so far beyond anything I could have imagined. It was just beautiful, with the autumn sunlight fading outside and the screen vectors glowing with every colour of the rainbow. When that Saturday came, and I could walk up to the cabinet with pockets full of jangling ten pence pieces, the love affair was at last consummated. Tempest whupped my skinny arse that day but I knew that if there was ever a game that I had to own the high-score table of: this was it.

It took time, practice and a second paper round, but before long the initials BOF were a permanent fixture in those top 3 all-time score spaces (thank heavens for non-volatile memory). It was the only game that could ever draw a crowd around me. Not that I noticed, as I was blissfully unaware of anything but the game; eyes focussed on the tube centre, spinning and shooting faster than I could think, feeling the pulsars rhythm, catching my breath on the flythrough. I didn’t know it at the time but I was getting my first taste of “The Zone”. All I knew was that it felt GOOD.

Tempest stayed at the Pool Rooms until the day the council shut the place down. It was the last game I played in there before they closed the doors. I wouldn’t see or play another one for almost fifteen years but I still had that picture to remind me of the one time I was unbeatable on the most beautiful game in the world.

fuseball, September 2003.

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