Logic dive

When did you first learn about videogames? I’m not talking about the first game you played; I mean, when did you become aware that there existed in the world these things called ‘videogames’? In other words: what is your very first gaming memory? I was trying to work out mine recently, and my timeline is all a bit foggy.

I can remember finding a Pong-style console in a cupboard at home, which my mum told me was a Christmas gift for my sister. I thought this was weird, given that my sister wasn’t the sort to play videogames, and assumed it was a cover story – because the console was actually for me. But weirder still, neither my sister nor I got a console for Christmas that year.

Indeed, the first console I remember owning was a Binatone, and that was at least a year after seeing the one in the cupboard. No idea what happened to the other one. Perhaps it was a present for my mother’s fancy fellow.

But the thing is… when I saw that console in the cupboard, I knew what it was. I had an awareness of videogames by that point. So how and when did that awareness come about? I’m going to go out on a limb and assume I saw a videogame in action somewhere, rather than some still pictures in a catalogue or magazine. I’m so old that the games that were around when I was little were in black and white – and a screenshot of Pong wouldn’t have exactly conveyed what it was to a seven year-old who had no previous experience of videogames.

I’ve a very dim awareness of seeing Pong on the BBC’S long-gone science show Tomorrow’s World, but I also remember going to arcades on summer holidays, and having to stand on a box to play Gun Fight and Night Driver. Those games were released in the mid-seventies, a quick Google reveals to me, but I can also remember them knocking around in arcades a long time after the black-and-white era of gaming had passed. Therefore, there’s every possibility that I’m getting extremely confused.

Maybe I’m combining memories there, or my subconscious has rewritten history. Point is, I’m a bit sad that I don’t really remember the time I first laid eyes on videogames. I remember falling in love with them, I can remember being excited at the prospect of owning one, but I don’t remember the moment when, you know, videogames turned around in slow motion, flicked back its hair, and gave me that look.

Or maybe… that’s kind of appropriate. Maybe it’s right that I can’t remember, because if I strain really hard, what I do know is that it feels like videogames have always been with me. It’s like they’re as part of me, as part of my world, as genetic memory, or some evolutionary instinct, like fight-or-flight; when I see videogames my heart beats a little bit faster, my pulse races.

Truth is, I can’t remember a time when videogames didn’t make me feel that way.

I’ve a very dim awareness of seeing Pong on the BBC’S Tomorrow’s Worlde