3. Last Night, A Video-Game Saved My Life.

‘70s childhood illness was a bittersweet mistress – the suzzies and stilettos of time off school, but the flabby forearms and tashy top-lip of there being nothing on TV but ‘For Schools…’ programmes.

I once hobbled home with lymph nodes like golf balls and a screamer of a fever, crumpled onto the sofa and tuned in to something about the fruit import/export industry. There followed a day or so of writhing, moaning and reading and re-reading Marvel comics. I picked at my uncle’s boring, far too grown-up EE Doc Smith books and – eventually – exhausted the imaginative-play potential of white bread chunks floating in Heinz tomato soup.

"Get off me you quack. Are you even qualified?"

Then, my dad came in and plonked a cardboard box down in front of the telly. One of his fishing mates had gone on holiday and very kindly agreed to lend him (me) something for the duration. Expecting another batch of comics or maybe a few Subbuteo teams, I looked inside and felt a big ol’ crackle of stomach-flipping kiddie-rapture. It was – and I’m getting little palpitations just writing about it 20-odd years later – an Atari VCS and a Space Invaders cart.

The setting-up was a dad thing. As he fumbled with the connections, I sat back, prayed, and pored over the packaging (112 variations!). I indulged in a little air-gaming – tweaking and twisting the joystick’s creaky rubber-base and hammering the button with an increasingly twitchy thumb. My dad, being a dad, was under contract to inform me that I would probably break the joystick if I kept doing that.

"C'mon, smell the vinyl wood finish."

And then, my dad sussed the TV tuning, slotted in the game, and the real world kind of receded into a wobbly, peripheral blur. The sore throat, clogged head and nauseous tingle never stood a chance. I settled right into the zone, blasting the blocky little bastards as they crept down and across, down and across – each step accompanied by that pitiless crunch of static. It wasn’t quite the Space Invaders I knew from the coin-op, but it was there – in my house, on my telly, and I could customise it to my liking (hard, easy, moving barriers, zig-zag shots), and I didn’t have to put 10p in every time I wanted a go…

I was convinced that I’d never go to bed again.

A couple of days later, the sickness had passed. I strung along the cough and devised quite an impressive morose shuffle, but no-one was fooled. It had been a gritty, wheezy, filthy old virus, but the VCS and Invaders had relegated it to a manageable fuzz. Some games, like music, films and the occasional book, can get you through shitty times.

Last year, my two-year-old son picked up a standard dose of chickenpox. He hardly flinched – but, having avoided it as a child, it took great pleasure in bending me over and having its foul, prolongued way with me. If you can think of a bit of yourself where you’d really rather not be covered with livid, itchy spots, then that’s where I was covered with livid, itchy spots. I had a rampant fever and could barely eat, breathe or speak because my throat was covered with livid, itchy spots.

Kill them. Kill them All.

Lemmings.

I sat down and I played through Lemmings. And when I’d completed everything – played and re-played all of those uber-sadistic, one-pixel-out-and-you’re-a-goner levels – I fired up Oh No! More Lemmings. And I completed that, as well. Because there was something about that fastidious, trial-and-error micro-management that packaged away the aches and shakes into a backwater part of my brain that kept them nice and quiet until the call of stoopid reality finally became unignorable.

I look forward to a particularly virulent strain of glandular fever which at least has the decency to synchronise with the release of Doom 3.

SICKBOY, April 2003

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