At that time video games were everywhere except in the home. In pubs they stood and twittered in corners. There were little tables with video games built in. Player One sat at one side and Player Two sat at the other, and their mates put ashtrays and pints in the middle of the screen and laughed. There were video games in pubs, chip shops, amusement arcades.
Home machines weren’t advanced enough to play real arcade games then. The best you got was Pong, and a poor version of that. That’d be on a console with wooden sides and huge silver knobs. To play real video games you had to leave the house.
I would walk into Borth with a pocketful of pound notes. Cars crammed with tourists and their kit – lunch boxes, kites, pets – drove around me. There were no pavements and the verges were of swampy mud beneath a thin veneer of moss. The smell of the estuary would wash over you if the tide was out, a rank stink of rot. On the other side of the estuary, a few miles away by boat but half an hour by car because there was no bridge this side of Machynleth, you could see Llandovery. Llandovery was a town which attracted more tourists than Borth but had less car parking.
Out to sea, you couldn’t see anything. There were seldom any boats and never any large ones. There was a harbour over in Llandovery, but the yachts didn’t come our way.
I’d walk past the golf course, watching out for stray shots. These were common and not always accidental. Not all of the locals welcomed students.
The amusement arcade at the near end of town was in a wooden building. It might have been a barn at some time. Now it was full of machines calling for attention. There was a single row of six one-armed bandits, the old ones made without software. They took two-pence coins and had jackpots of twenty pence. The one second from the left had an OUT OF ORDER notice on it for three years. It may still be there, out of order, on its own.
There were penny falls with prizes that seemed to have been welded to the spot. There was a betting game with tin horses on sticks racing around a striped track under a glass dome. There were machines with prizes arranged beneath a claw that would touch them and then leave them where they were.
Past all that, at the back, past the booth containing a miserable middle-aged woman and the spare change, were the video games. There were only three, but they were already taking most of the money. They had bright screens and they made more noise than anything else around. Written on them were instructions in a new version of English.
Not to miss shoot for top score!
Tapping button for super jump!
On the left was a classic Space Invaders, one for the retro crowd even then. Next to it was an Asteroids machine, with its simple vector graphics. Finally there was a Missile Command, the one where you controlled the cursor with a trackball. There was a game for the early eighties. Missiles would drop from the sky towards your cities. You’d launch countermeasures, aiming them with that strange trackball. But the missiles would get through, levelling your cities. Nuclear devastation, mass deaths, game over.
If only Ronald Reagan had seen that console. The SDI money could have gone to something useful instead.
I’d change a pound and slowly feed the machines. Missile Command was cheerily nihilistic, but Asteroids almost pointedly demonstrated the futility of working. You controlled a little triangular spaceship which sat in the centre of the screen. Large irregular boulders – the titular asteroids – arrived and began to move across the screen. Two large rocks, moving slowly: no trouble, you’d think. You’d line up your ship and press the fire button.
But after you shot a large rock, it broke into two quite large rocks, which headed off in new directions. Now there were three rocks to avoid. If you shot a rock, it subdivided into smaller rocks, and those into smaller ones, until the screen was a mass of debris.
Once they were very small, shooting them destroyed them. But by this time, you were in trouble because one of them inevitably caught you unaware and you lost a life.
The way to play Asteroids was not to shoot the asteroids. Even in video games, work only leads to more work.
After spending a pound I’d wait and watch the screens. They were still a new enough phenomenon to keep my attention. After half an hour of that I’d change another pound and feed the machines again. I’d repeat this cycle until the pound notes ran out, and then it’d be back out into the drizzle and back to the college.
Those old machines fetch high prices at auctions these days. In the early eighties no one would consider owning one. No one serious even played them. They were a piece of cultural ephemera, a passing fancy. They were the eighties embodied – flashy, expensive, violent, pointless – and no one noticed. In the twenty-first century we can see them for the revolution they were. At the time, it was only adolescents who gathered around them, throwing in the dole money.
There, Tina was right. I really was looking out of the window and thinking about arcade games.
III
Dr Morrison didn’t join us for the experiment. His presence, Betts told us, wasn’t necessary. It might influence the results. He passed on his instructions by way of Betts. That didn’t surprise me. Tina had once told me that psychology experiments were eight parts bluff and two parts cruelty. Betts arranged us out of sight of one another in a room with closed blinds and dim lighting. Large mirrors standing on easels were positioned around me. Betts covered them with cloths.
‘I’ll have to ask you how you’re feeling. I have to record it all. I have a cassette recorder, but you’ll have to speak clearly. You will need to look where I tell you to look. I will be touching you as part of the experiment. Not all of the time, but I’ll need to give you the odd prod. Mick, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Remember how I remapped your hand? We’re trying to disassociate you from your senses, and map your Self to somewhere else. Are you both ready?’
We said that we were. I was bearing in mind that everything Betts had said might well be part of the experiment. Eight parts bluff and two parts cruelty, Tina had said.
‘We’ve started,’ said Betts. He’d positioned himself out of sight. The experiment consisted of him removing cloths from selected mirrors, so that I saw myself from different angles. On some of the mirrors there were two or more reflections somehow overlaid.
‘Look to your left,’ he’d say. My reflections would look in all directions. Something would touch me on my left ear, but in the reflected versions it’d be the right ear, or both ears. The thing that had happened with my hand began to happen to my entire body. It began to feel like it wasn’t mine. I would raise my right hand and see my left hand move, or both hands.
I wasn’t sure which hand was moving.
It began to feel the way I’m told meditation feels, the sense of the body slipping away. I was feeling increasingly relaxed.
‘Look to your right,’ Betts said. ‘Tina, what are you seeing?’
She said something that seemed to come from a great distance. She sounded as though she was outside, in the damp landscape. I could see the landscape in the mirrors, presumably reflected from the window. I hadn’t noticed it before.
A tiny figure was running towards the college from the mountains. It seemed to be coalescing from the clouds.
I let myself enjoy the show. No doubt Dr Morrison wanted me to react to the approaching figure, now clearly a human being. Betts would be slyly watching me, waiting to see what I did. So I didn’t do anything. I watched it come.
Whoever he was – it was a male figure, I could tell that much – he was coming too quickly to be real. The mountains weren’t as far away as they looked, being smaller than you thought they were, but they were still a fair distance away. The running man was already close to the campus. He looked dwarfish, no more than four feet tall, a grin you could make out at a distance of several miles playing across his coarse features. He wore baggy grey clothes and pointed shoes.
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