Ever danced in the dark to Spandau Ballet with a hard on? That last slow one at the youth club disco? There you are Victoria Edwards in your arms, both of you acting out your best smooches. But then horror: she can feel your building stiffy right through those white jeans you’ve kept clean for a whole night. Is she an ‘avoider’ or a ‘presser’? That’s the only important question in your mind. There’s a heartbeat of anticipation and then ‘oh no’ Vicky is an avoider and she arches her back to avoid pressing any part of her girl anatomy against your out-of-control trouser joystick (see, see, I can keep it on topic you just don’t trust me that’s all).

True, funny how you remember.

I wonder what Victoria Edwards is doing now? Actually, I don’t wonder – I know, I’ve looked her up on Friends Reunited (or ‘Ex Girlfriends Stalked’ as the judge called it) and she’s fine. Doesn’t mention my 1984 stiffy though, so either she’s been mentally scarred forever, or she has forgotten.

I always believed the Shopkeeper to be the real star of Mr Ben. What did he do when he wasn’t appearing ‘as if by magic’? The Shopkeeper’s enigmatic smile always troubled me; was he enlightened or had he ripped-out a bottom burp just moments before? Perhaps that was his secret: magic guffs? Guff to appear in the King’s kitchen, guff to appear at the Knight’s banquet, guff to nip down the town centre to see his accountant ‘Mr Shopkeeper, I have to tell you that you will lose the fancy dress store if you don’t start charging your customers. As things stand you have spiralling rent debts, the VAT man is on our backs and you have failed to keep up with your protection money as demanded by those nice Kray fellows.’ I think it was probably a hard life in 1970s cartoon streets, what with those confused bowler hats, animation below the standard of a Czech public information film, and no video games. Now if the Shopkeeper had installed a Space Invaders cab in, I dunno, 1979 he would have had streams of punters flowing through the doors. Paradoxically those punters would be looking for, and achieving exactly the same imagination-high that junkie Mr Ben was seeking when he put on a deep-sea diver’s outfit.

Nobody, unless they were mental, thought that playing sit-down Star Wars meant that you were actually in the real Star Wars universe but then-again, it did sort of feel like maybe you were. Just as much as Mr Ben probably knew he wasn’t meeting Neptune but still felt the cold of the sea, so too did we feel the graze of tie-fighter laser fire or hear the hollow pop of exploding Death Star towers. We felt more immersed in those games then because of the gaps, our imaginations were triggered at a deep instinctive level, we never believed Mr Ben was a dragon hunter but we sure as hell believed we were fighting the Empire. That doesn’t really happen to me anymore. I know I’m not Zoë in SSX Tricky (what! Her spandex and lycra bodysuits offer less wind resistance, that's worth ten seconds a lap against Eddie’s stupid afro), and I sure as hell didn’t think I might possibly be Max Payne in New York. I even tried ‘bullet time’ recently; I just hit my head on the pavement and squashed my bag of donuts.

In Oxford we had a place that might well have been what the Shopkeeper’s accountant was wishing for. It was a small, seedy, pre-teen-tolerant café on Gloucester Green. It was near the romantically dangerous and foul smelling bus station: a warm hangout for drunks, tramps and skivers alike. All equal in the ability to buy a drink and to make it last a whole afternoon. What drew my fellow ‘double maths’ refugees and me were the cabs there. Before my time it was Galaxians and Defender but for my golden glory year it was Return of the Jedi. I’d fill my burgundy leather bomber jacket with 10p’s and go be a king. I’d go live in the space inside that glass screen. The images would flex out the monitor at me and wrap around me and become real. The Shopkeeper, as if by magic, would only bring me back when somebody tugged my arm to tell me the bus was here. I always had to get home before Mum got back from work. I had to be on the 16:45 truant special.

Its not there anymore. The Return of the Jedi cabinet is in a landfill or on an eBay page. They tore down the bus station and built a nice shiny new one. It still smells of piss but the timetables are now vandal proof so, y’know, that’s progress. They demolished that café too; it’s gone. Just a room really with greasy food, tea, coke, a table and a stand-up games cabinet. Nothing worth saving but even so I have tears in the corners of my eyes as I type. Spare me the icons of innocence bullshit, this is something else, a closing of a gateway, a link to dreams out of reach. You know that feeling when you walk out of a cinema having watched Blade Runner, The Matrix, or True Romance and, for a few wonderful moments, you walk taller; you walk more aware of your surroundings than ever normally you would be. That moment where WHSmith's looks like it could be sheltering replicants, or when you slip on your shades and Elvis talks to you? That moment is one of the human imagination’s finest feats: you believe. Just for sixty seconds, you actually believe. The magic, right in that memory hole, becomes more real than debts, jobs, mortgages, heartbreaks or grief. That is video games for me, that moment where you zone and you believe. We get more of those, my friends, from our passion than most people get in an entire lifetime. We, we heroes of electron worlds, we believe and we live in magic.

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