games

I was recently asked to name my top 5 arcade games of all time. This to me, is like being asked to name your top 5 songs of all time - it could change daily depending on mood or requires further criteria; games that changed your life, games that you played most, games that have stood the test of time, etc. For a while, I considered Holland, 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel to be the perfect song - raw emotion, brilliant song writing, dirty raw sound, honest and real. I could listen to it any time of day and it would always make me feel something. It reminds me of a time and place; a set of emotions - it was the soundtrack to a section of my life that resides right at the end of a chapter. Today however, while I maintain it's a great song, it wouldn't be in my top 5 songs of all time. Maybe tomorrow but not today.

For me, games have had a similar if not more profound impact on my life - and I'm talking a very early age. This is not a geek-cred wang measuring competition, but to give you an idea how far back this goes, I remember typing out code onto a Spectrum computer at around age 10. I remember typing code from computer magazines into an Apple ][ plus to draw a picture of a sports car and then not knowing how to save the code, so once the computer was powered down, all the hours of coding were gone. Our family had an Atari 2600 back when I was in primary school, I played friends Colecovisions and Commodore 64's. Amstrads, Amigas, x86, NES, gameboy, etc etc.

As well as this, I was playing arcade games from when I was just a lad. I remember riding my BMX down to the local gym because there was a Phoenix table-top cabinet there. I used to have an after school paper round that earned me a princely sum of ~$5. The round was on a tuesday after school, and once it was done, I'd blow all five bucks on doughnuts, coke and Twin Cobra. When I was around 12, my mum was working in Melbourne at a TAB. If I had the day off, sometimes she'd let me come into the city with her and spend the day watching a movie, eating McDonalds and playing video games. It's one of the fondest memories I have of that time. Above the Hoyts mid-city cinema just outside the entrance to each of the theaters, there was a huge game arcade. It was here I experienced the stand up Discs of Tron cabinet. It was also here I played Outrun (moving cab), Wonderboy, Space Harrier, actually a bunch of games by Yu Suzuki, 720 degrees and loads more. I think this is where my love of gaming has it's roots. There were a number of other game arcades around Melbourne at that time too, all with the latest Japanese games in them, moving cabinets and all.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I started going to bowling nights with family friends. I didn't bowl mind you, I went as it was a social outing and because this particular place had Double Dragon. That was one of the first arcade games that I truly fell in love with. I think this was also around the time that games went from 20 cents to 40 cents. 100% increase, I was outraged! A few months on, and new machines kept appearing - Super Bubble Bobble, Bad Dudes vs dragon Ninja and then out of nowhere, a game that looked nothing like anything I had ever seen - Super Mario Bros. Yes, it was an arcade game before it appeared on the NES, and yes I fell in love with it immediately. God knows how much money I spent on that machine.. probably not much actually, I never had much money.

I could mention family holidays where I spent two weeks either in the games room, or in our caravan playing my NES but I wont. Well actually I just did, but thats all I will say about that. During my mid teens, I had become a true gamer. I had a NES, a SNES, a gameboy and would play mine or anyone else's consoles at any opportunity. In the town that I grew up in, an arcade had also opened, and the big game of the era was Street Fighter II. I would play that, New Zealand Story, The Simpsons and a bunch of other obscure games that this arcade had. Unfortunately the arcade quickly turned into a hang-out for undesirables and rumours had begun to spread that people were selling weed there. OMG DRUGS. The place was open for maybe a year, before closing down to the cries of "good riddance" from the backwards fucks that ran the place. At this point, I couldn't wait to get out of such a town.. but we are talking about games, I digress.

I used to spend a lot of time at my next door neighbors house throughout my teens years, and the vast majority of the time was spent playing games. NES, SNES mostly. I wasn't a Sega kid, but I knew other kids who were, so had access to play them. I also worked in a toy store during high school, and this particular one used to hire out games, so I could basically borrow any game I liked for free. As a result, I played a LOT of SNES games. I also once entered a Tetris competition and made it through to the final (held at Myer melbourne when they still had a roof top carnival). Unfortunately I was knocked out of the comp but won a Super mario t-shirt which I wore really only around the house. You see at this time in gaming history, whether you played console games or pc games, you were one in the same - a nerd. Gaming was NOT a cool past time, and gamers were marginalised. Well maybe not marginalised, but we were definitely a niche group. Looking back, there are upsides and downsides to this. When Sony released the Playstation and used marketing to make gaming seem cool, the entire game industry changed. It's because of this that we now get AAA titles like GTAIV, but it's also because of this that we now get AAA titles like, well pretty much everything EA and Ubisoft make. Shit games like Tombraider get more attention and sales than much better games because now they have a marketing budget. Uh oh, I'm digressing again.

N64, Playstation, Gamecube, PS2, Wii, DS, PS3, etc. I'm now in my 30's and two things have remained constant: my love for music and my love for games. Music: bands, songs, instruments are dotted throughout my life, providing mood to memories, or emotion to situations. For me games play a similar role. They evoke that extra depth when remembering a time and place, they take center stage in parts, they have played a huge role in who I am today and why I choose to study what I did at university. Sure it's nostalgia, but it's much more than that.

I think rather than try and choose 5 arcade games, I may write about games that I love and games that had a profound impact on me in future posts. Yes, but not right now.