There was this moment the other day. I was on the phone to NHS Direct, my youngest daughter had a UTI. Well we thought it was a UTI. You know; before I fell in love with an ex-nurse girl I would have said ‘my youngest daughter had stingy wee.’ Now it’s all ‘urinary tract infection’. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The nice NHS Direct lady established that my daughter was ‘conscious and breathing’ and then got into the nitty gritty of the paperwork. ‘What’s her date of birth?’ the lady asked. I couldn’t remember. Give me half an hour, a calendar and some logic and of course I could work it out—day, month, year—go with the count-back. But on the spot, in a semi-emergency, I was stuck.

I can remember how it felt when she was born though. Oh god but I can. No need to even close my eyes and the video of her entry into my world plays clear and real. The enormity of the event; the sheer brain-stopping blue-wave-tube-crush of it. The memory of the emotional conflict, filling and emptying, and re-filling my heart is dulled by nothing. Not even time. I cannot spontaneously recall the date my baby was born on but I can describe to you every single little emotional detail, change, charge and curve of the event.

Ask me who the lead programmer on Phantasy Star Online was and I have no idea. I do know where to look and I know I’ve even read his name but I can’t remember what that name might be. What year did I buy it? I’m not sure. Ask me to tell you when it had it’s European release and I have no idea. But what I can tell you is just exactly how I felt when my Hunter stormed into his first ice cavern. Jesus but I can tell you. The utter thumb-paralysing moment of pure phosphorescing beauty. The wave of giggling that came over me as I walked around ray falls of crystal water. And I can tell you of the utter love I felt for my sofa-TV-ice world at that moment.

I cannot tell you of names, dates, places or programmers but I can tell you stories that describe magical moments. Moments that, in subtle ways, have shaped who I am. I can look-up numbers but I can remember feelings.

I’m glad the internet is full of detailed archives of retro gaming, full of those details I can’t remember. I’ve spent happy half-hours wandering around sites dedicated to case-changes on Atari consoles, or looked-up the complete set of Dreamcast Japanese releases. I’m glad that we have Edge too to tell us about rag-doll physics and of how hard it is to make ends meet in the world of videogames. I buy it every month and will do so until it goes bust or until the staffers actually come round my house and start slapping me, shitting in my dinner and laughing at my stupidity.

But where is the spirit? Where is that emotion that I talked about, why does the industry need 2000 words to say ‘fuck-me that’s special’. Do ‘insiders’ not feel what we feel? Do the uber fanboys only see numbers? Retro gaming archives could be archives of VHS tape brands, or famous potatoes, or of changing world-electrical standards. Edge just isn’t much fun, and the screaming-monkey Official-Xbox-100%-Unofficial-PlaySchool4-PCCC-Gooner magazines try to persuade us to love and trust them at the same time as telling us we’re all idiots for liking WarioWare or Quantum Redshift. There are loads of games around that feel just as much like silly fun as our original ones do. And they keep on coming, and they will always keep on coming, and I don’t care which suit or cynical wannabe-Rock-journalist say’s they won’t. They do, they are and we love them.

And yet I’m writing this piece thinking ‘1,000 words Koworld’. Well fuck that; I’ve said what I feel and there is nothing more that I want to say or you want to hear. So I’ll finish with this: Mr Driller Drill Land on the GameCube made me laugh my fucking head off. It’s probably full of technical flaws and is nothing more than a rehash of the previous games. Some of the new stuff doesn’t really work. It’s an import and you can’t save games unless you’ve got a Japanese cube. But at one point, playing it fresh out the cellophane, I just giggled uncontrollably. I don’t know who made it but I love them with all my gaming heart and that’s what playing games is all about.

779 words.

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