A friend recently asked me when my ‘gaming birthday’ was. It’s one of those questions that infrequently does the rounds, in one form or another, especially in these email enabled times. Sometimes it’s accompanied by some sort of quiz which purports to show which identifiable stereotype most applies to you. They’re sort of the 21st century equivalent of those pop-quizzes they used to do in the back of Smash Hits which would tell you which member of Bananarama would be least likely to spurn your advances if they ever had the misfortune to actually meet you. Anyway, the crux of the question was to try and identify the point in time that you stopped being a ‘casual’ player of videogames and became a gamer.

I’ll take the one on the left ta.

Lunar Jetman wasn’t it.

That moment in time, when videogames became something more than a weekly dalliance in the bar of the social, will forever belong to Manic Miner - the game that I was given, along with the Sinclair Spectrum needed to play it, in Christmas of 1983.

Time, I’m sorry to report, has not been overly favourable to Manic Miner. It was a revelation at the time but - through a mixture of my changing tastes, an increasing understanding of what turns a good videogame into a great one and, arguably, an unhealthy dose of overfamiliarity - it has now become more of an exercise in frustration than a game that I would willingly sit down and play through again.

The second game I got for the rubber keyed marvel, and the first game that I ever spent my own money on, was Lunar Jetman.

Now this, this was the real deal. Arcade (to my 13 year old brain anyway) quality graphics, smooth scrolling and all the screechy zappy blasty noise my little heart could desire.

They just don’t make title screens this good anymore

But, for all its arcade trappings, Lunar Jetman is not an arcade game. Not in the way these things were counted back in the early eighties. Attempts to zoom around the screen like a mad thing shooting everything that moved met with almost immediate failure - on the rare occasions that the initially confusing and, 20 years later, still crippling controls didn’t lead to immediate death at the hands of a flying green rectangle, you would run out of fuel and die when a kamikaze red thing thundered into the earth taking you with it. Further experimentation showed that occasionally hiding out in the truck thing you started next to replenished your fuel supply.

After all that, once you finally get the hang of flying around without cratering for three minutes the bastard game only went and pulled the rug out from under you by blowing up the truck in one of the most brutal instant game-over shots in videogaming history.

It was then that I realised that this game wasn’t a bit like Defender, or a bit like Scramble, or a bit like Moon Patrol, or a bit like... Well, it wasn’t a bit like anything really. It was its own game, with its own rules and its own foibles. If I was going to succeed at this then I would have to learn them and learn how to cope with them and hopefully how to beat them.

So that’s what colour the ground on Mars is, Magenta

And, with the scant information provided by the instruction card and the occasional tip gleaned from Crash magazine, learn them I did. Little by little I figured out how to use the bomb to blow up the alien base, how to patch the holes in the ground using girders picked up from your truck (actually, a lunar rover. Obviously), how to safely transport the bomb on the back of your lunar rover and how useless the pea-shooter that you could also put on the back was. Teleports too fell by the wayside as being fundamentally pointless. I learnt to cope with the flying green rectangles, suicidal red things and even the strange yellow things I came to call ‘Fred’ for no particularly good reason. I even learnt the value of a well timed suicide run myself – not a game winning strategy by any means, but a game (or Earth) saving one on those occasions when I misjudged the timing of that final last-ditch bomb run.

Lunar Jetman was the most played game on my Spectrum by a long way. I played it, at least weekly, for all the long years of service that the speccy gave me. Even now that I have moved on to Xbox360 ownership it still comes out for an occasional outing. And it still gets my pulse racing today every bit as much as it did twenty years ago.

Lunar Jetman then? Not so much my gaming birthday, as my coming of age ritual.

April 2006

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