I read something recently that made an argument that, for all intents and purposes, my generation was the first proper Gamer Generation, and it once again made me doubt my nerd credentials; while I have surprisingly fond memories of borrowing a friend’s Sega Mega Drive* so I could play the original Sonic the Hedgehog, I couldn’t really make any claim that I was a gamer at that point, or any point afterwards. I don’t have whatever that particular gene is, no matter how hard I try. (And I have, occasionally, tried.)
The thing is, I used to, before then. In the mid-1980s, I spent a considerable amount of time with my Amstrad CPC 464, the awkward home computer that had a tape deck attached for ease of loading in any number of ill-produced games such as Oh Mummy (Pac-Man, by any other name, except the ghosts were Egyptian Mummies) or Biggles, based on the deservedly-forgotten time-travel movie flop of 1986. At that very specific juncture of my life, I was a gamer, and an avid one, at that; spending hours playing the lo-fi games on my particularly lo-fi computer and buying the magazines that offered reviews and cheats and whatever passed for news at the time of what was to come. (Amstrad Action and Amtix, you were oddly important to me at some point.)
In what was a strange glimpse of a world that lay in wait for me, I remember that the last Amstrad game I got truly obsessed with was 1986’s Batman, a video game produced by Ocean Software that I can remember with unusual specificity. Or, rather, I remember the cover artwork and print ads for it, and the feeling when it came out that it was a weirdly retro piece of pop culture to be basing a game around: Batman, in 1986, was already getting a very serious, very cultured makeover in comic books like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, but that hadn’t reached me just yet. Instead, Batman was re-runs of the 1960s TV show and half-remembered comics from my (even younger) youth, and this game: an oddity based on something I thought no-one really cared that much about.
But I loved the game, as frustrating and non-sensical as it was; I spent hours playing it and failing to get anywhere close to the end despite all the cheat sheets, and I didn’t care. I was so excited by how odd it seemed, how much it felt like it was something that was mine in its design and hyperfocus and the 8-bit remake of the TV show theme and that cover artwork, which I stared at for far too long. It wasn’t a particularly good game — in writing this, I discovered that someone remade it for the internet, so I’m about to find out just how not-good is really was all over again — but it was my game, and the closest I ever got to being a gamer, per se.
It was all downhill from there.