Four - Just One More Go

I woke up this morning in a strange room: my front room. Traffic light colours phased at me through the mist-damp morning half-light: pixelated reds, ambers, and greens. Floods of weary cars swooshed through the lights and past my pollution-grimed window. My head was swimming, I felt something hard-edged, cold, plastic, alien to sleep, cutting into my face. I raised my head an inch and peeled the GameCube WaveBird out of my sunken cheek. Mixing with the eerie glow of the street was a second warm source of playing magic lights; the TV showed a repeating sequence of visual code. Timesplitters2 was beckoning me into one-more go at Atom Smasher. Sound sources began to split as I regained a kind of consciousness; the cars and the rain became distinct from the holding jingle of the game on screen. I became aware that I was clothed and cold, cushions under me were spent and flat from my game-coma, I'd played all night.

Vision would come and go with the sine wave of eyelid movement that was forcing me to wake up. But so little sleep I'd had that my body was tricking me into believing gravity had been doubled, tripled. A voice spoke gently, my own younger voice 'Remember me? Remember me?' my eyes stayed open long enough to register a change in the TV screen in the corner. The lurid psychedelia of game had resolved into a face. A speaking face: me, from then. Back then. I spoke to the digital-dream me "You're dead. If you we're ever me at all then you're dead now."

"You've forgotten haven't you? You have forgotten how it felt back then; back when it was all magic. Now you speak of frame-rates, polygons, and bump-mapping. Of packaging and platform agnosticism. You are so gay."

Just pretend it's a 14 year old. Okay?

He, I, was right I had forgotten. But here I was, crippled on my front room floor, cold and played out, happy but exhausted. When had that last happened? Why? Then the gravity switched off, I began to rise-up, lifting toward the high ceiling, WaveBird still tight in my palm. The C-Stick; I was pushing the C-Stick down. I was zooming out, I was the camera. I hoped it wouldn't get like in Super Mario Sunshine and that I'd find myself trapped behind an invisible wall. Time to experiment. I pulled the R-Trigger, the scene blurred. I let go. It was light, midday I thought. The future? So I pulled the L-Trigger, but curses I pulled all the way and it clicked. The light spiralled away and whirlpooled into a mere speck. Dark, light, dark, light, changes cycling and speeding away. I clicked again and it all stopped.

Daytime.

I spun the C-Stick and put myself down on the pavement outside. A boy, a paperboy I think, cycled past on his Grifter, a playing card clacking in the spokes in time with his pedal rhythm. The bike looked, duh, duh, dahhh, new. Fuck. I began to walk, people seemed not to see me, pretty standard in these sorts of time-travel situations I thought. Oh yeah and I probably should be careful not to do anything that might upset the space-time thing. Note to self 'don't mess with time.' The street was kind of odd, it warped in the middle, and there was a heat haze that made it hard to see beyond. I walked into the heat haze: Croydon became Oxford. And that's a trick Croydon Town Council would love to do for real.

That's how it really happened.

A few seconds disorientation and I realised this was home. Norreys Road. Should I go bang on the front door, or fly? C-Stick spun and I was in the knock-through dining room. There I was, I mean me too. 14 and absorbed by a Commodore C64. I was glad that I'd not met myself during a frenetic early-teen Fiesta session, its good how time-travel warp experiences are like that. Second note to self 'Remember to make time for a visit to Keith Smith's house later and see if his older sister is in the bath.' Ummm. We didn't even really have a C64 back then, we had an Amstrad. Time-travel is cool I thought. On the portable telly screen: Paradroid.

Over at the other end of the knock-through my brothers were watching pre-tit-era Noel Edmonds helming Saturday morning TV. I was in my pyjamas. Cute. In my young hand was an Atari stick. Roots! My thumbs were callused, the skin hard for evermore. Memories of the pride of those injuries flooded the inside of my brain. And what was I doing here, the 14 year old me? Guiding a 2D blob around a paper spaceship? I'd seen Star Wars IV through VI. I knew spaceships weren't like this one in the game. But I was every-bit inside that craft for real just as if the walls around me had dissolved into flat pastels and shot out into space. Total emersion. I cared about what was going on in those distressed freighters. I was going to save the fleet. I was going to make the world right again. Mum came in "Have you been on that all night? Shall I make some breakfast? You do the toast for me."

Uber gamer fuel.

"I have Mum and I'll do the toast in a minute, just want to have one more go."

Just one more go. Always just one more go. What does it matter now that we can make the bloodied face of a fallen alien trooper look as real as a TV road accident? What does it matter that I can enjoy a free-form experience surrounded by 5.1 stereo? All that matters is just one more go.

One more go.

"Oi! Koworld, Koworld" a disembodied voice floated through the light to me "wake up mate you're snoring. There've been complaints."

"Whaaaa?"

I blinked. It was dark, lots of bleeping, many people. A crowded room. Robotron to my left, Tempest to my right. Retrovision! It was all just a terrible dream...
...or was it!
...yeah, yeah it was.

KOWORLD, February 2003.

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