I lived in the sticks, you see. And I mean The Sticks. Not the gaylord sort where you’re never more than ten minutes from a motorway, but the sort you get in the Scottish Highlands or indeed in my own birthplace – the northwest of Ireland, way out on the edge of Europe.

As a result, the health perils standing around Coyle’s Amusements in the nearest town, infusing secondary fag smoke and eating shoplifted sweets, was hopefully offset by the invigorating ten-mile round trip over hill and dale on my green Puch racing bike to get there. A 50p nicked from my mother’s purse (a whole five games worth) made the trip worthwhile. That, and the possible presence of one or both of the luscious Coyle girls – they of dark-skinned Italian extraction.

Mickey’s house. See that arcade? Exactly.

My mother didn’t approve because the arcade was the haunt of ‘corner boys’ who might lead me astray. In reality, the patrons consisted of schoolkids from the three secondary schools in the town, breakdown as follows:

1. ‘The Convent’ – run by nuns, took girl boarders, and my own alma mater. Boy pupils regarded by kids from the other schools as ‘quee-urs’ because we didn’t play Gaelic football. We were gay despite the fact that there were 250 girls and 50 boys in the school, you do the maths.

What nuns do for a buzz.

2. ‘The Tech’ – leaned towards a more trade-oriented education. Metalwork, technical drawing and so forth. Attended by basically knuckle-dragging farmer-progeny who were as hard as fuck.

3. ‘The Brothers’ – an outpost of the notorious Christian Brothers education system. Teachers were often chain-smoking homicidal maniacs, kids even harder than The Tech. My two younger brothers attended here. They can relate tales such as the one about a pupil being kicked in the face by a teacher for remarking that he had noticed that the teacher’s wife was ‘up the skite’, i.e. pregnant, again.

The Christian Brothers kids provided the most anarchy in the town. I remember standing around in Coyle’s Amusements one summer day when a nun walked past the open doors. A particular Christian Brothers wiseacre looked up from his game of Gold Bug and plucked the 2mm gasper from his mouth:

“Go on, Sister!” he opined. “You’re only an ould fuckin’ virgin.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

The Amusements, as the place was known, was also allegedly the rendezvous of drug pushers who would offer you “spiked sweets”. I went in there religiously over the space of nearly ten years and got not a tickle of anything illicit, I’m sorry to say.

I cut my teeth on Space Invaders so I must have started going there at about nine years of age. Eventually Galaxian (or ‘Moon Alien’) appeared. I thought of this as ‘the hard game’ and would only venture one 10p on it, since my game would only last about a minute due to panic attacks when the two red aliens swooped with a yellow flagship.

Some of those incredible, kaleidoscopic, mind-enhancing drugs that Mickey never got.

Then came Lunar Lander, but that was way above and beyond my fledgling skills. This was a time when almost everything was new in video games, and one didn’t instinctively grasp the correct approach for a new game straight away, unlike today’s video-soaked kids. Hunchback was the craze for a while, and the little known but excellent Robotron-inspired Space Dungeon.

Rumors abounded that Michael Margey was the world champion at Asteroids (he wasn’t). Scramble. Moon Cresta. Crazy Kong. Wild Western. You all know the names, you all put your hours in. Coyle’s always seemed to end up with the more obscure but presumably cheaper titles, so while it never had a Pac-Man it did have weirdo shit like Looping and Frisky Tom.

We learnt to tip the pool table when balls got stuck in the railways inside. We heated plastic strimmer blade wires with lighters to bend them, and jiggled them in coin slots for free credits [Brother! – Ed]. We lined our big Irish 10p pieces up, salmon on one side, harp on the other. We ran out of money and begged other kids to let us have a ‘man’.

That’s a trip to the cinema and a bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints right there.

Then, it arrived – the first time my jaw really hit the floor. Zaxxon. It was just Scramble in a forced isometric perspective but it was a big paradigm shift from the horizontal and vertical shooters that preceded it. For weeks I couldn’t figure out how to get through the second castle, until I eventually realised that if my shots were going through a gap then I would as well. Gah! I next got the same spine-tingling thrill from the first sight of a game when I saw my first hydraulic Out Run cabinet a few years later, and I didn’t get it again until shareware Doom.

After that, any new place I went to during those years, the first thing I would do is look for new games. In small towns and seaside resorts in Ireland and England. On car ferries, in chippers and pubs. I memorised them all. And now my top end Athlon/Radeon PC happily shifts Mr Do!, Tac Scan and Kung Fu Master while DirectX 9-powered effects marathons gather dust on the shelf.

School ended and college began, in a big town with more arcades. I played Jackal, Thundercade, Road Blasters and R-Type as Benson after Benson burnt holes in the cabinet glass. When not doing this, I chased skirt and got ripped to the tits. Well you did in them days. Not like today’s mortgage-sensible students.

A pack of Bendos, yesterday.

And I got a lump in my throat recently when I saw a Ferrari F355 Challenge cab and remembered the little boy twenty years earlier, standing in front of a Pole Position, clutching his last 10p in a hot little fist, and wondering if games would ever get better than this.

Maybe they have, maybe they haven’t.

ONEPUNCHMICKEY, May 2004.

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