Go Play Your Video Game (Part 1)

Remember Covid? Jeez, everyone seems to be acting like it's all over now, but looking back on my blog it was a great motivator for writing blog posts. To stop myself from going a little mad during lockdown I took it upon myself to blog about everything I could imagine...

The 20 albums that shaped me...

The 7 TTRPGs that shaped me...

The 10 TV Shows that shaped me... (surprised I managed to limit myself to 10)

The 14 Comics that shaped me...

The 24 Movies that made me...

and the 10 Books that hooked me...

It was fun, and kept my mind occupied during the dark times, and got me back into the habit of writing when I was just really wanting to sit in a corner and hide. And I really want to get back into the habit of blogging - though with a dayjob that is sitting on the computer all day looking at words it can be hard to be motivated to write about other stuff.

So what to write about? I pondered this for a long time, and I had a sudden moment of realisation. I was using blogging as something to do while my wife is hogging the TV playing The Witcher 3, and I realised, I hadn't looked at video games. 

Video games were a HUGE part of my life until a couple of years ago when I realised (a) I was rubbish at them, and (b) I don't really have too much time to sink into playing them. But maybe, just maybe, doing a retrospective of video games that had some sort of impact on me will get me motivated not only into writing the blog, but also possibly picking up a controller once again and playing a game...

So here goes:

Go Play Your Video Game (Part 1) - Invaders from Space

I grew up in a seaside town in Yorkshire. It's weird, I spent the first twenty-odd years of my life thinking it was tiny and boring, and I was desperate to leave (while simultaneously being terrified of going anywhere else). Now, after thirty years away, all I really want to do is move back to that quiet, to the seaside, to the familiarity and safety. 

Anyway, being at the seaside in the seventies there were the usual seaside attractions. There was a helter-skelter, some little cars that went around on a wooden track like a giant Scalextric, a boating pool, and a couple of amusement arcades. Of course, in the seventies they were mostly those penny-drop machines like that Tipping Point quiz, one-armed bandits, fruit machines, and those things that read your palm and printed out your fortune.

I have a very weird recollection about some buzz at school that there was a new type of game in the amusements, and discovering the little huddle of kids standing around the now iconic cabinet, and the resonating *thump* *thump* noise as the little aliens advanced on the city below...

Space Invaders was revolutionary at the time, and so many 10ps were pumped into that machine. Weird thing is, while it was possibly my first video game I'd played, I was never a huge fan. I just already had a bit of an addiction to video games. 

Before I ever got a home console, I had the Grandstand Invaders from Space game, a little (I say little, it was huge) electronic game that tried hard to simulate the Space Invaders experience with its tiny, tiny, tiny display...

And then, along came the Atari VCS and its Space Invaders cartridge with it 112 game variants (including invisible aliens if I remember correctly)... 

I played the heck out of that (not the invisible one, that was reeeeaaally hard). 

Anyway, that was the first video game I remember playing, all those many, many years ago. I'm going to have to ponder really hard about what the next one will be!

Until next time, stay safe and stay multiclassy.