Sickboy's
Wasted Youth - 5. Twenty Years Gone.
In his very, very, very long novel, Remembrance
Of Things Past, Marcel Proust writes of a character called Swann,
who is jolted by powerful childhood memories after biting into
a tea-dunked madeline cake. A few weeks ago, I was in a fish-and-chip
shop, where I noticed that they had potato fritters on the menu…
The chippy on my old school route was much celebrated
for its bizarre choice of coin-ops – one at a time, and
changed with surprising regularity. Ah, the buzz of synchronising
a lunch-time gaming session with the moment when a big van rolled
up outside and a NEW GAME was hauled down the ramp by a technician.
He would wedge the NEW GAME by the door and
step inside to respectfully see out the final play on the current
machine. When all was finished, he unplugged everything and swapped
over. In the time it took for him to wheel away yesterday’s
machine, we studied the NEW GAME in obsessive detail – absorbing
the instructions, marvelling at the pulse-quickening NEWNESS of
it all.
And there I stood - in a chippy, in the north
of England, in 1983, waiting for the big switch-on, munching on
a heavily salt-and-vinegared potato fritter.
I don’t remember once seeing anything
vaguely conventional turn up at that place. It was clearly a special,
secret testing centre, singled out by machine distributors as
the only place in the area where new games would receive proper
workouts from players with proven skillz.
More realistically, it was probably a burial
ground for the quirkier games that were bombing in big arcades.
Cheaper rental for the owner, and, for the game company, a captive
audience willing to try anything that soothed the tedium of waiting
for their fish.
So, back in the more recent past, I ordered
a fritter to go with my haddock and chips. Many things had clearly
changed - the place, the recipe, brand of grease, temperature
of fat, sanitation habits of the fryer… But the consistency,
taste, the smell of the thing as I brought it up to chomp…
SMECK!… I was twelve again, back at the Tunstall chippy,
wallowing in those slightly off-centre games that I never saw
anywhere else, watching the clock for the race back to afternoon
school. It was a shocking rush – as though I’d opened
the door of a long-sealed oven and been struck by a deep, rich
blast from the past.
There was Port Man (bloke with beard catches
stacks of barrels and chucks them up onto a swaying ship while
avoiding another bloke with a beard), Wall Street (two paramedics
with a trampoline bounce suicidal stockbrokers into an ambulance),
Goldbug (an odder, more languid version of Dig-Dug, with nightmarish,
shark-like, squidgy monsters), Hunchback Olympic (a bizarre-o
version of Track And Field with elements of the horrible, pixel-perfect
platformer), Dazzler (weirdy maze game with – as I remember
– snakes and vultures), various kooky shoot-‘em-ups
(Cosmos, Dark Warrior, Space Fortress, Uni War S)… There
was a lovely game called Venture, which featured a smiley with
a glued-on bow-and-arrow wandering in and out of various ‘dungeons’,
collecting treasure and shooting monsters which sloooowly disintegrated
after death…
And there I stood – in a chippy, in the
north of England, in 2003, in some dizzy kind of reverie. Drunk
on memories. Again.
Feel free to scoff at such indulgent nostalgia,
but it’s comforting to know that when I’m a grumpy
old great grandad, running out the clock in some dome-shaped sci-fi
care-home of the future, the orderlies will be saying: “It’s
strange. Nice enough old geezer. He doesn’t say much –
seems kind of sad most of the time. But, bring him a potato fritter
and he really perks up”.
29th June, 2003
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