The quest for high scores is an ongoing trial through which we push ourselves, often for no better reason than self-fulfillment. However, this quest can be the cause of much pain, usually when the scores you think are so good end up being buried by somebody else, and you know in your heart of hearts that you’ll never be able to regain first place. Such has been a fair portion of my life.

Back in the early 1980s when I started playing videogames at home, I pretty much had to spur myself on to better things. My brother, Steven, is only sixteen months younger than I am, but other than the odd session on Circus Atari, he wasn’t that interested in games. He was into trucks, and as I’ve got no interest in vehicles – apart from a) whether they work and b) get me where I want to be – we never really hung out together. While I was sitting inside, discovering a way to play Chopper Command indefinitely or making a perfect run through Track 1 on Activision’s Grand Prix, he was outside digging holes under our path in the garden.

Listen mate, I can clock that game, so I’ll be having that shirt
off you in a sec. Not so cocky now, eh?

However, there was still hope for a competitive sibling scoring challenge. My youngest brother, Jamie, started to show an interest in games at an early age. I figured I’d let him have a few goes, at least: he could be like my little gamesplaying apprentice. I could show him how to play and get him interested, but still beat him into the ground. I didn’t think this would last long though, if other things were any indication. We’d got a snooker table for Christmas one year, and he started playing when he could barely reach the table; yet he still managed to beat us regularly. “Jamie Mode”, we called it, as he randomly smashed a ball and watched it fly into any pocket other than the one he’d aimed for.

No, he was much smaller than that. Not as lumpy, either.

It soon became apparent that Jamie Mode applied to videogames, too; either that or he was supremely gifted… But I tend to blame the former, that secret mode built into every game that only he knew how to activate. It started with Rock ‘N’ Wrestle, where I would be thrashing him all through the game only to find myself pinned right at the end. It soon spread to everything else.

I didn’t mind quite so much when he whipped my scores on Commodore 64 games. I didn’t have a disk drive, so none of my high scores were actually saved in the games themselves, just in my head or in the notebook which I’d nicked from school and then lovingly fashioned for score-keeping purposes only. But when the generation of consoles with in-built save facilities arrived, things started to go rapidly downhill.

The high scores must be in the back. I bet they’ve drawn the Bon Jovi logo on
the cover as well.

He got a Megadrive for Christmas. We played FIFA Soccer, and in our very first game it remained 0-0 until he scored a ridiculous goal with the last kick. That set a pattern that repeated with alarming regularity. I remember us having a Madden game that might have been bundled with the system, too: surprise, surprise, he pulled out the winning touchdown in the final seconds.

We obtained a 32X. The only game I was really interested in on the 32X was Virtua Racing. It was lovely, and I played it for hours a day, until I noticed he would routinely obliterate all of my times. On our SNES, I would load up Super Punch Out only to discover all of my scores and times had been knocked off by his superiority. With Street Fighter II and the Mortal Kombat games, he memorised every single move for every single character (and still remembers them all to this day); I could barely remember how to do a Fatality with Johnny Cage. It was soul-destroying to be uselessly flailing about as he was morphing from character to character, applying special move after special move to my sorry arse. For any games we had that involved high scores or fast times, you could guarantee that his name would be sitting above mine.

That’s an even better use for the 32X than Virtua Racing. Jamie would have
probably beaten me there, too.

The final straw came when I bought my SEGA Saturn. I loved that machine, and one of the games I particularly loved was SEGA Rally. What a superb game. I would play it for ages and when I turned it off at the end of the day, my name would be proudly displayed all over the high score table. The next morning I would get up and go to work. When I got home, after I’d eaten and read the newspaper, I’d go to my room and put SEGA Rally on. It was heartbreaking to watch the attract mode and discover that that shit of a brother of mine had wiped away all of my times with massively superior, almost untouchable times of his own.

Ahh… that feels good!

Then, suddenly, high score games went out of fashion, to be replaced by lengthy quests. He didn’t really play those, so between then and my moving to America, I’ve had a few years off from high score inferiority complex. I’ve since discovered MAME, though. I can load up any game, and the high score table will be filled by “MOY”. That’s me, that is. It gives me great satisfaction to play some of my favourite games of all time and have the high score tables populated entirely by me. But I’m moving back to England next year, and I know Jamie is likely to play all of these games, and more than likely he’ll thrash me at them.

The apprentice has become the master, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

PAULEMOZ, September 2004.

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