I have moved house. Again. There are now new, different rooms to fill with all the things and machines that keep a family functioning.
Some of them, as ever, are games consoles. I wrote recently about the place that the ZX Spectrum occupied in our council house in Arbroath in the 80s. But we had a machine before that. A bizarre arcade box that came with a black and white TV and an assortment of Pong knockoffs. It bonded us, but once Sir Clive’s chocolate bar came along it was consigned to the loft, where it grew bitter and revengeful and later auditioned for the role of one of Ultron’s drones in that Avengers movie.
When I was older, I went to boarding school in the Perthshire countryside as a working-class scholarship boy. Affluent pals had a glorious assortment of Nintendo Game & Watches, an introduction to the joys of gaming on the toilet that endures to this day.
Bristol University was the opposite. None of us students had money for our own consoles because we blew it on Cyberball in the Mandela Bar arcade. And then came the 90s. Well … you probably know about me and games in the 90s.
In my flat in London’s Notting Hill, hungover after another GamesMaster bacchanal, I would be woken by the postman with a giant bin bag of free games. My flat was an expensive version of those you see on hoarders’ TV shows, crammed with consoles, discs and cartridges, including the single most impressive gaming machine I ever owned, the Neo Geo: proper arcade quality gaming, with a joypad of such obdurate construction you could use it to jack up a bus. Next to it sat my first Amiga, which gave me endless nights with Sad Andy playing Championship Manager as a two-player game, a competitive experience that took longer than the Punic wars. I will forever associate Championship Manager with a smell: that of cigarette filters catching fire in an ashtray resembling the mound from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Then came the PlayStation era. Ladbroke Grove, where I cried playing Final Fantasy VII; Highgate, where my wife coped with postpartum depression by throwing herself into Crash Bandicoot. She loves that game more than she loves me, but still isn’t sure which of us is the most challenging.
Convinced the millennium bug was going to destroy civilisation, I quit everything and moved to the Lake District. I converted an outbuilding into a games room, where I did nothing but play Championship Manager on my Alienware PC.
Once I realised planes were not dropping from the skies, I restarted life and work back in Glasgow. The 2000s saw the first of many incredible game experiences with my kids. Four-year-old Child #1 did the levels and I did the bosses on Super Mario Sunshine on the GameCube. It was the greatest summer of our lives, except for the one six years later when, now living in Edinburgh, she sat and watched me play Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360, utterly transfixed. Her Niko Bellic impression was the talk of the school.
A 2009 move across the Atlantic saw me grapple with NTSC and voltage in Nova Scotia, and whether my five-year-old son was old enough to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on the PS3 with me. (He wasn’t; he was rubbish.) But I asked him yesterday, and he still rates it as his second happiest gaming memory with me. His absolute favourite was the time I set up eight-player Super Smash Bros on the Wii U for his 12th birthday party in Toronto, using a 3DS as one of the controllers. His pals mainlined cake, pop and Smash Bros in the basement.
The 2010s also saw our party game of choice shift from Mario Kart to Quiplash on the Xbox One. I was proud that my three kids could out-entendre me before they were old enough to drive.
Games were there for bad times, too. The oldest, with whom I spent that blessed Mario Sunshine summer, got sick in Calgary. She spent a couple of years not doing much outside her room, but roamed vast lands and built lives in Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon and The Legend of Zelda. She badgered me about a game called The Last of Us, which was probably the point at which the switch flipped and my kids started recommending games to me.
I can barely remember a month going by without my son recommending something utterly weird on Steam. As we crossed into the 2020s, my youngest daughter stopped singing and dancing long enough to introduce me to Edith Finch, and to laugh mockingly when I gave up on Outer Worldson the last boss because I couldn’t beat him the 17 times I tried.
Few families have simple lives. Ours has been anything but. I wish we’d been blessed with consistency and stability. But we have had a version of that with video games. Through all the houses, they have been a refuge from life’s assorted brickbats, and a place we have gone as a family where we know we will always laugh with and at each other.
Life is like a long hike where you have holes in your trousers; sometimes you’ll reach for a memory, only to find you’re no longer carrying it with you. But my gaming memories ground me, even when others get left behind on the trail.
