The Fantastic Voyage

Sunday, 1985. My Dad chucks a copy of The Observer Magazine at me and goes, “There's a competition in there for you. National Computer Gaming Champion.”

I'm intrigued. First prize – a Sinclair QL, with plenty of Microdrives and things as well. To enter – answer a bunch of dumb questions about a really poor Spectrum game by the name of Xadom , which <cough> I thought I had on a tape upstairs somewhere. Yeah, I know. I've changed since.

”Now, take your time. No rush. I'm dead, y'see”.

In fact, nowadays I change every morning.

I thank you.

I think there were ten questions, and eight of them were easy. The other two weren't. The last was clearly meant to separate the men from the boys: find the fastest route from room 100 to 140. Rooms 100-140 only appeared on Rock ‘Ard difficulty level and you could only see the room on the map after you'd entered it, so this was obviously the tiebreaker. Sorted that one, then just had to find the other which took me far longer – but I got the right answer in the end. Send in, hear nothing for a couple of months…

Letter arrives: Please come to the Hammersmith Novotel, you're in the final. Here's Fantastic Voyage and Mighty Magus , which you'll have to play-off on.

Get in!

Now, I knew that I wasn't much of a gaming God. On the assumption that I would be dealing with Julian Rignalls (if their Dads read The Observer, at least) I was reasonably convinced that I was going to get my bottom handed to me. But, I knew at least I was smart, so I could try to out-think them. So, practice time. Let's look for those score exploits…

Julian Rignall. Familiar with mousse.
Good at Commodore 64 games.

Fantastic Voyage was a slightly dodgy maze game. About all I could do there was learn the map and try to get some practice in. With Mighty Magus I had a bit more wriggle room. The main skill was being able to recognise the thirty or so little indicators on the floor and knowing what they did. That I could do. It was even quite fun.

Before either, the alternative maze game: London . Us chaps from the sticks don't really have a good idea exactly how far you have to go to walk anywhere in the big city, so my feet were a touch sore by the time I got there, but at least I got to see 221B Baker Street on the way westwards.

”Elementary, my dear Watson.”“Well, Mighty Magus is, but I'm not so sure about
Fantastic Voyage .”

And thence to a large corporate suite in the aforementioned hotel, a quick introduction to 15 other finalists and eight Spectrum +'s (all with Fantastic Voyage loaded – arse!) and away we went. It turned out that at 13 I was the youngest there.

It didn't go too well. I couldn't complain, I beat my high-score, but I knew there were a lot of other people better than me. One guy even finished the game while we were there, I came eighth or ninth, and was relegated to the play-offs meant to keep us losers occupied while the final was on. Bugger. But since I hadn't expected to do too well on it, I wasn't as gutted as I might have been.

So six of ‘em went off to design a shoot-‘em-up using Games Designer , while we were put into a Mighty Magus play-off. That only left two Speccys, so had to go in five rounds.

See? The Spectrum could do colour. Very carefully.

After three quarters of an hour, I was still going. I had about 3000 points, plenty of lives, and there were people starting to look nervously at their watches. So they aborted, with profuse apologies, and restarted us with a 15-minute time limit. Fine. Forget lives, exploit everything for points. As the time starts running out, die if I see cash… I walked off with 7000 points. Very confident. Nobody came close.

But that still left a couple of hours to kill, so we sat around listening to the dodgy DJ (Capital FM were, I think, recording the event – what a disappointment that must have been for them) and doing the pop quiz. I think I won a Kenny Rogers album for me mum. The selection wasn't the best.

The real reason Lucille left him was the 400 girls he employed
as ‘personal beard-trimmers'.

One of the organisers asked me why I wasn't in the final as I'd nailed everyone to the wall on the second game (I avoided the temptation to blame the difference between my rubber-keyed Speccy and the +, since I had got my high-score after all). I put it down to bad luck, picking the game I wasn't as good at. I then asked how they'd decided which 16 people got through to the final, and she said they'd only had 16 correct entries. I smugly dropped my little bombshell.

“The last question was easy ‘cos half the game's in BASIC. Load the program in without running it, quick change to one line of code and it would print the entire map out for me from the start – I couldn't be bothered playing it for that many hours as it wasn't very good. I had much more trouble finding the ‘STUPID' error message, which was buried in the machine code.”

She stared at me, clearly trying to decide whether I ought to be thrown out for cheating. My dad had the biggest, proudest grin in the world.

Dad enjoyed himself too. The Observer had - for some unknown reason - sent quality journo Simon Hoggart, who he was a big fan of and after interviewing me as the youngest contestant, the two of them talked for ages.

Simon Hoggart. Raw, uncompromising sex.

Anyway, so I came seventh – top loser, as I prefer to look at it. Won a large silver plate, half a dozen Quiksilva games, an Observer sweatshirt which I'm sure my mum still gardens in and the promise of more gear (that never arrived). In a very slightly ironic turn of events, the silver plate is probably now worth more than all the rest of the prizes put together.

So, I'm not a computer game champion. But gimme the right game and I'm not too bad…

DIO, October 2004.

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