Pushing Buttons: the ghostly echo of games past sustains me
It occurred to me recently that I’ve been playing video games for more than 40 years. Sitting on a bus home that evening, I tried to recall my actual real first memories of them. All I could catch were odd scraps. Seeing Pong on a neighbour’s TV, courtesy of a Grandstand 2000 console – I guess that would have been the late 1970s. Playing Space Invaders somewhere – in a pub? A chippy? I remember the first alien laser blast hitting one of my forcefield defences – a memory I possibly share with Hideo Kojima: he said those very shields gave him the idea for making a stealth game.
are similarly fractured. The voice synthesis at the start of Ghostbusters, the knocking at the spaceship door in Rescue on Fractalus!, the microchip mini-game in Paradroid. Little snatches of innovation that took my breath away.
