Saturday morning as a kid was pretty fun times. You could get up early, watch some good TV, piss around on bikes and – when we were allowed in other people’s houses – play some games. I could retell some great stories about such adventures lost in space. Like the time Gavin Richardson and myself used to play a borrowed cart of Pitfall! on the Atari on some old black and white TV set at 7 in the morning while his older (and much bigger) brother Paul slept and moaned all the way though (giving us both a slap every now and then) or maybe when Michael Stoker let us play a Phoenix clone on his dad’s BBC and his father caught us and gave a stern ticking off as, “The BBC is not a games machine.”

Fred Harris would have been proud.

“Hello! I’m TV’s Fred Harris, and I’m proud.”

Nah. This story centres on Gavin and Myself. I called at Gav’s at 7 in the morning on the Saturday (as usual) and he was strangely already awake. He cooed me into the front living room and showed me this new game he had for the Commodore 64. Ghostbusters was the game of the film we had not seen yet but we wanted to. It looked good. This Activision game was a strange one as we had not as yet played an Activision title on the C64 as they were still largely into Atari 2600 games. Gav loaded it up and sat back while the computer threw out lots of spoken words. Wow. “Ghostbusters!” “Hahahahahaha!” Fuck me!

It was great. A big chocolate feast of visual and musical excitement. It had everything we wanted from a game and cor! It was a film too. Gavin played the first round of getting ghosts and collecting money and we got into this strange swapping of joysticks every time we did a ghost bust. Two-player heaven. Huge scores were collected and Gav had to “do” the final screen of running between the marshmallow man’s legs as I was wank at it. Still this was a game we loved to play between us. After our normal hearty meal of Pot Noodle (always Chicken and Mushroom, of course) and a can of warm Diet Coke from our local corner shop haunt, we played on.

All day. And unlike the other games before it, it did not piss us off.

We became expert Ghostbusters. We could play the game with fewer traps than could be selected at the beginning and still win. We were Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray. We were also high from our Pot Noodles.

“Hello, we’re TV’s famous Ghostbusters. I’m Dan Aykroyd!” “And I’m Bill Murray!”

Still it got to 3 in the afternoon, and we ventured into Manchester town centre to mooch around the shops and see what games were out. Boots, at this time, sold some of the best games and had computers on display so you could play them. We walked into the shop and heard the now familiar tune by Ray Parker Jnr. Yes, it was on display and no-one was playing it. Grabbing the joystick we commenced play. Using our now finely-tuned gamesmanship we soon got into the swing again. As we played, I turned around and quite a number of people had stopped to watch. No little kids or weird men but shoppers. We had the music up loud and people stopped to see what we were doing. Either it was the speech or the tune that made then interested I do not know. While the Marshmallow man was getting baited again, more people showed up and about 30 people crowed around this small TV causing more people to stop. We felt on show. Still we played to the crowd, laughing as we played. It got to the final screen when all hell broke loose and we cocked it up, with cries of “Wooooo!” from our new guests. Remember the final reel from Rocky? It was like that.

“Hello! I’m TV’s famous Boots the Chemist! You should see
what’s going on round the back.”

Putting the joystick down on the Commodore 64 keyboard we then walked past the parting crowd as another street urchin picked up the stick and inserted the name “big cunt fuckers” as their name. A joyful moment of gaming bliss had passed us by.

To this day, I cannot play Ghostbusters without about 40 people behind me watching. I have never got into a game like I did that one.

Maybe Fred Harris would have liked it?

PEEK'N'POKE LEE , May 2004.

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