My video game cherry

Do you remember the first film you ever saw at the cinema? The first single you bought? The first person you kissed? Chances are that the answers will be yes and send you off on a nostalgic trip down memory lane. But….do you remember your first encounter with video games? I do and you will now all be lucky enough to hear about it.

Christmas 1977, revolution was in the air, I was five years old, I had big hair and my trousers were flared. We had just moved into a new house and Santa had been very kind to my brother and myself, alas no video game type things but for another few hours I didn’t even know that they existed. Later in the day we headed en-masse to my Grandparents house for the family Christmas dinner, which was always good fun. Dinner and present giving out the way us children settled down to play with our new wonders, from the house next door the boy we knew only as Eddie came. Eddie was older than me but younger than my brother but had this air of cool around him that we liked. While the adults were enjoying a few libations Eddie suggested that we go through to his house to see his presents, a quick check with the adults and we were off.

The paisley pattern on the stairs and orange-bulbed lights led up to Eddies house, it was very 70’s. We were ushered into the front room where sat the television with strange grey box wired up to it, this was the “best present ever”. Made by a company called Grandstand it was an early video games system all based around the basic premise of Pong, that is, a controllable stick character at each side of the screen hitting a ball back and forth, the controllers were sticks with twisty knobs on top that made your character move up or down the screen. This console was the deluxe version though because it had a choice of different games including football, squash, hockey and I think shooting. We started playing and were drawn in for hours, passing the controllers back and forth for endless fun. Our eyes were sore and our fingers twisted but still we played on, not fully understanding how much this game would change over the years and become the monster that we know today. There was a cloud though, Eddie had got the Sex Pistols album for his Christmas as well and after getting bored with the game insisted on showing it to us. Inside the gate-fold cover was a picture of a naked punk woman with sticky up hair and wild eye make up, I became convinced she was a werewolf and was coming up the stairs to get us so I ran back to my Grandparents house, game over.

Over the next year you couldn’t escape the world of video games they were everywhere and you always knew at least on person who had a system. It wasn’t until Christmas 78 or maybe a bit later that I got my own game. It was a very basic handheld game called “Blip”. And get this, it was battery operated and also clockwork! It was a tennis game and you had to predict from three buttons where the ball would land, I played it for years until a better game (tabletop Caveman) came along. That was the beginning of my video game obsession, how about yours?