B.C - Before Clive

B.C
(Before Clive)

In The Olden Days

The poor unfortunate wretches who were born before computer games were invented had to find other, simpler ways of occupying their time (stop sniggering at the back).
The children of yesteryear just didn't have the technology to be able to plug in a Playstation and play an overpriced piece of crap until their eyes went woggly and their brains turned to mushy peas. So they had to do things like GO OUTSIDE and PLAY KERBY. Or that pegs game, the rules of which escape me now but I'm fairly sure it involved throwing a tennis ball at some pegs and shouting 'PEGS!' really loud. These were the innocent days of kids being able to enjoy themselves without having to save up all their pocket money and give it all to the devil-worshipping corporate scum who rule the world today.

Nowadays, if you even attempted to show a young child the intricacies and hidden strategies of Kerby, they would most likely stand there at the opposite end of the street and send you an abusive text message whilst simultaneously downloading the latest ringtone from the internet and sending a fax to Hong Kong.

It was Sir Clive of Sinclair who changed the way we live by bringing an affordable and quality entertainment product into our homes which would entertain us for years and years and stop us all having to go through all that 'going outside' lark where we would most likely be raped or kidnapped and sent to one of those secret Slave Children colonies in Doncaster.

But what about life before the ZX Spectrum? In the late 70's, Mr Sinclair was still pissing about with his calculators and far too busy to be even thinking about the children of tomorrow.
So, let us venture outside to the ARCADES where the video gaming industry was still in nappies, but about to break free of it's urine-sheathing constraints and change the way we think about how we spend our ten pences.......

The Arcades - The Early Years

Arcades have existed since about the 1920's but the problem was, they were rubbish. All the machines were mechanical and mostly consisted of either;

a) Those machines where you put a 2p in a slot and hope to nudge some more 2ps off the edge of a ramp in the blind hope that you will successfully end up with.....a pocketful of more 2ps.

b) Those 'grab-a-prize' things where you put a 10p in a slot and navigate a little hand-crane thing in the blind hope that it will pick up a soft toy or a key-ring that is worth about......10p.

Naturally, the only sort of crowd that these machines attracted was old grannies and morons. But this all changed in 1972 when Nolan Bushnell and Alan Alcorn designed the Pong game.

Released by Atari, Pong drew in the crowds from Skegness to Mablethorpe because
it was a breathtaking vision of the future. People who gathered round to play this
simple bat and ball game really felt as if they were involved in some weird outer-space
revelation.
Long-standing arguments were settled over a game of Pong. Wives were swapped
and shags were handed out over Pong. It was simple yet addictive and thrilling to
play with friends. In the year that this was released, crime fell by 40%. Yes, I may
just have made that statistic up but I want you all to realise how important Pong
was to the video gaming industry. It was the first and it was special and it took six
long years before anything else came close to surpassing it.

In 1978, the Japanese finally stopped fannying around with Samurai swords and gave the world something half-interesting. Space Invaders was designed by Toshihiro Nishikado and sent Japan into the kind of frenzy that you can only feasibly expect at an O.M.D Reunion concert. Yes, it was that big.
I say only half-interesting because the truth of the matter is (hush,let's whisper this bit) Space Invaders wasn't ever actually that good, was it? Most of us western folk got bored with it very quickly when we realised that Level 2 was pretty much Level 1 all over again only with added boredom cos we've already done it once.
Purists will tell you that you're a true master of Space Invaders if you can get past Level 6 which some claim is actually impossible. Sadly, I can't be bothered to prove them right or wrong because the mind-numbing tedium really starts to kick in very early for me.

Let's not be too harsh on it though, it's still the Godfather of arcade games and millions of future shoot em ups will be forever in it's debt. But thankfully, better and more imaginative arcades were just around the corner. One last interesting note about Space Invaders is that the 'aliens' were originally supposed to be human soldiers but this idea was dropped at the last minute when those crazy sword-slinging Japanese decided this might damage the tiny minds of their head-chopping Ninja children.

Space Invaders was very quickly superceded by Galaxian which was far livelier, had lovely wiggly sound effects and the aliens even came swooping down right at ya! Still very playable today and a perfect antidote to the monotony of Space Invaders. (and in fact Galaxian can very easily be played today using M.A.M.E which we'll come to later, viewers).

However, the true king of the early arcade games was Atari's Asteroids, released in 1979 just one year after Space Invaders and infinitely superior in every way.
Instead of controlling a tiny craft at the very bottom of the screen which was
always going to be hopelessly limiting, Asteroids started you off in the centre
of the screen and then gave you the power to thrust your craft in every
possible direction whilst shooting the oncoming meteorites, thus we were
able to manipulate the whole of the playing area for the very first time,
which was very thoughtful of Atari.
There were so many different ways of playing Asteroids and this is why it is
still fantastic today. Your average amateur would not bother with the thrust
option and just sit there like a static banana in the middle of the screen whilst
frantically trying to shoot everything approaching him.
A proper hardcore Asteroids junkie would be much more likely to thrust around
like a big mad bastard and maybe even use the 'hyperspace' option if they got
really stuck which, nine times out of ten, would take your craft out of a
potentially lethal spot and reposition it randomly right into the path of a big
fucking meteorite, thereby provoking desperare cries of "Shit!" echoing
throughout the East Coast.

There were of course many other notable arcade games around during the B.C period but I'd be here forever if I tried to list them all, and besides, the snooker is on in a minute.
But I can't let the early years pass without an honourable nod to Pacman or
Puckman as it was originally known in Japan. Designed by Moru Iwatani in
1980, Puckman was the first popular arcade game to feature something
other than the total obliteration of innocent but curious aliens as it's main
theme. The inspiration for the design of the actual Puckman character
came when Moru Iwatani ordered a pizza takeaway and took his first slice.
As he looked down at the rest of the pizza, Puckman was staring him in
the face, a moment which is even more beautiful than that bloke who
shouted "Eureka!" in the bath.
The dot-guzzling game does get very repetitive after a short while but it's
fascinating to think that 50 billion people still play Pacman every day.
Ok, that's another made-up statistic but the point is, people still love Pacman and will probably still be playing it in the year 2525 when we're all wearing silver spacesuits and getting around on hover skateboards.
There was a special reason why the title of the game was changed from Puckman to Pacman upon it's release in the western world. The relevant authorities decided that releasing an arcade game called Puckman was simply going to be an open invitation for young yobs to deface the cabinet and change the 'P' to an 'F'.
Thank goodness that board meeting was held, eh?

Luckily for all of us, by the time 1982 came around, we didn't have to bother quite so much with all those ten pence pieces in grotty seaside resorts because Clive Sinclair was on the verge of creating the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. We'll return to the arcade scene soon for a round-up of the other later classics but let us now bask in the glory of rubber keys, broken joystick interfaces and waiting 30 minutes for a game not to load in properly............