Virtual Memory

At a certain point in my adolescence, a threshold between childhood and adulthood, everyday decision-making passed from interest to necessity. The world’s spell had worn off, and time, from being the stranger who led me from place to place, became the mother who dispenses advice about what should be done next. Play became secret, frivolous and removed from everyday life, intensifying the sense of loss experienced in that transition. I can not remember when I was a child who it was that was playing, myself or the game; but as an adult the answer that it is the latter has not ceased to be obvious. And this is only natural, for any game can produce a feeling of anxiety, the worry of being caught up in its flow, of no longer being able to recognise it as something external to oneself. The fear of being implicated in this way has maintained its hold over a generation of video game players who had stepped into its province in the 1980s.

To ask what those days of childhood were like and to understand the contradictions that are lived today is not possible without finding out how the memories came to be, because these memories impinge on things which lack substance. No memory is real but in the past archives had made it possible to count on remembrance as a form of verification. Now this idea has become outmoded because of their replacement by virtual memory. This is computer memory that appears to exist as main storage, although most of it is supported by data held in secondary storage. The memory of the first computer game I played is virtual to the extent that no record of it exists that cannot be repeated exactly at any time in the future. This is the reality to which Chris Marker was referring when he said that the future of a memory is also a memory. Computer games store memories that are waiting to happen and can be accessed, experienced or, to use the preferred verb of the present day, consumed. There has always been a philosophical question about memory, namely, whether we possess it in some kind of storage facility in the brain or whether it takes possession of us during a moment of recollection. In the era of computer games this question loses its lustre because it will not answer for virtual memory, which depends on nothing and is there, ready for use, but equally ready to be forgotten. Just like a game. Attempting to write an account of my childhood that centres on the play and the flow of computer games could be accused on these grounds of lacking credibility, for how much of this has really happened and how do we know that I am not simply making these memories up? No answer is possible, no story is available, precisely because it is the Real that here reflects on itself as a construction of actual and virtual memories.

My uncle - my father’s younger brother – had bought our first console: a NES with Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. The latter we had recognised from the beginning as a makeweight in the deal, with the trivial apparatus of the lightgun being of serious interest only to very young children and adults. Even in the earliest days of our ownership of the game it had a whiff of fairground entertainment that couldn’t match our dedication. Besides, we could always just walk up to the screen and shoot at the ducks. The clay pigeons were more difficult to hit but the less animated screen also made the attempt seem less worthwhile. Super Mario was at the opposite end of the spectrum. This was a game that demanded hours of commitment, and we worked harder than we had ever worked before in our young lives to make it a success. The levels were completed with great difficulty and, since the save function was then nonexistent, everything was a degree harder than today’s pampered gamer might imagine. My fondest memories lie in the discovery of the warp zones that transported us to future levels like a heavenly stairway. To go from the happy-go-lucky fourth level to the eerie black background of level six was a step that took great planning and effort. Jumps needed to be measured carefully, response levels had to be acute. Mario’s arrival in transformed surroundings always appeared uncanny and hesitant, without announcement or fanfare, allowing the shock of the new to strike with the greatest possible force. Over the months and years that we played the game this effect never seemed to diminish. It stood proudly at the end of a tradition of games that thrived on the decisive effect that basic animation was able to achieve.

On the occasion of my brother’s birthday, my father secretly took me outside the house to show me the boot of his car, where he was hiding his gift: Streetfighter 2. The special-edition box in which the accompanying Supernintendo – I cannot give it greater importance than the game itself – was packaged retains the unsurpassable glow that even at the time hinted at an idea of prosperity. For computer games were one of the portals through which I discovered a world of social difference that couldn’t yet be passed on through human communication. There were friends who owned Super Nintendos, and there were those who didn’t. The divide was uninteresting, insurmountable.

The game brings no new memories but the box in its faded gold background was an instinctive triumph on the part of its designers: not only did it do the job but it also appeared to be its own reward for doing so. For the first few weeks, the box protected its contents except when they were in use, and at all other times it was stored in the musty cupboard under the stairs. Soon after, though, when our resistance to its invisibility began to crumble, we put the console next to the TV in a corner of our dining room. Some measure of its attraction can be taken by the fact that, prior to its arrival in our lives, my brothers and I had designed a hand-made game using fighting cards made of paper, on which the imagined attributes of each character of Streetfighter 2 was entered. We would proceed to do battle with dice on the basis of the hit factor of the player who we had drawn. All of this was possible and to an extent necessary because for schoolchildren of a certain age there was no escaping the names of all of the characters. The content of many of our conversations was shaped by it, we all lived in its singular glow; so much so that the slowest (because heaviest) of the footballers at lunchtime would be nicknamed E. Honda, after the sumo wrestling character; and a friend of ours who we later realised was suffering from an illness related to the growth of a tapeworm inside his stomach received the cruel epithet of Dhalsim, the Indian fakir.

The names of computer games seldom lack in intensity: Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and Golden Axe were all great successes in their day. Even the less pugilistic affairs impose a clammy and needy quality: Mario Kart, Tetris, Sensible Soccer. Was it the natural intensity of adolescents that the game designers had tapped into, or did computer games possess a dark quality that was previously unknown in play? It is hard to be sure. Games seem as assured of their fate as it is possible to be considering the vicissitudes of the market, although few badly-named games, if any, have challenged the hearts and the minds of players.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World was a Mastersystem game, one which I remember far more vividly than the famous Sonic the Hedgehog. Perhaps it is because it was the game that one of my father’s closest friends – who by definition was an ‘uncle’ – was playing when we visited him for the first time in his new home. He had been lodging with us for several months previously, and from the perspective of his former insecurity the possession of a console, let alone one that we did not own, seemed audacious. What was more, the machine was a Sega and to us Nintendoids therefore an object of profound mystery and suspicion. As a visitor to a foreign city instinctively compares the worst traits of that location with the best traits of his home, so I observed with distaste the clunky and obvious design of the Mastersystem, a name which seemed to deny itself the right to exist. Yet there it was in my uncle’s living room asking to be played, and my curiosity to see what Alex Kidd was like (in comparison to the righteous Super Mario 3) got the better of my aversion.

Need I add that I was disappointed by the experience? A small boy with one huge fist as a weapon against a world of traps and enemies. It was beyond ridicule and I smirked inwardly at its egregious gameplay while carefully noting the details of the landscape, its fairy-tale quality, and the freedom of movement and expression of the main character. This was how my uncle spent his free time in this foreign country, where for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, he worked in a petrol shed (we never called it a station).

The aura of the console has changed. Most people who play computer games today own a PS2. The market for other consoles is comparatively non-existent. No competitive rivalry exists, certainly no Jaguar-like model of exclusivity which only a chosen few can afford to own. Everything is available should you want it, and if you want it then it goes without saying that you will be able to afford it. Things were hardly the same way a decade ago, when besides the trade war between Nintendo and Sega there was the spectral glimmer of the Neo-Geo lurking in the inner life of schoolchildren like a secret domesticity lived behind lace curtains. It appeared that we were all so in thrall to this apparition, in our own private ways, that we were gratified to have our secret revealed to us from time to time, for this is what happened when a new boy at our school, S C, made friends by word of mouth that he owned a Neo-Geo. As far as I know he never made it clear whether he owned one or not, but the special quality that being associated with it had lent him made such nagging questions seem irrelevant.

Has anybody seen a Neo-Geo and, if so, do they remember what it looked like? One of my friends, I K, who was a dedicated liar and as such gifted with the ability to tell some thrilling stories, told us that he owned the console as well as its piece de resistance: the legendary beat-em-up, Samurai Showdown. Very few of us had played the game but everybody understood what was at stake in not knowing about it, and so everybody pretended that they had a favourite character and combination of moves. Only my friend, however, was continuously able to dig up new stories about it, thus feeding the notion that he was the genuine article. And to this day I believe that the myth of his school-wide popularity rested on his ability to preserve to the last detail the appearance – never mind the truth – that at the end of each school day he would return home to the bleeding embrace of Samurai Showdown.

I made the unlikeliest of friends through the swapping of games. L E, one of the school’s toughest kids, from an Irish family, borrowed Super Mario 3, with the gaudy and dispiriting Super Mario 2 coming my way in return. He lived in a flat above the local swimming baths, which were later demolished after many years of neglect. There was also M P, from whom I borrowed Cobra Triangle, and for whom I lent in return a game that I can’t now remember. Cobra Triangle was one of the most difficult games that I had ever played. As early as Level 2, many of the rapids that needed to be crossed by the gameplayer’s tiny vessel refused to negotiate with it, rendering further progress merely imaginary. As frustrating as the game were the weeks I spent in its miserable company, seldom playing it but waiting to return it to my friend, who had been playing a canny game of his own in avoidance and delay. One day I went to his house to confront him about the matter. (On reflection, 'confront' seems too reckless a word to use in the face of a powerful young man with four even more powerful older brothers. One of them passed by me on his way into the house as I stood by the doorstep, muttering to his sibling, ‘Who is this Indian?’ I wavered on the matter of correcting him that I was in fact Sri Lankan.) I waited for an explanation as to why my friend had not returned the game when I had plainly drained the last drop of fun out of his offering. He was a master of evasion, though, and used it to gain the upper hand in our conversation. Fortunately for me, my friend’s mother, a forthright West Indian lady, appeared at the scene to ask him what was the matter. A moment later they were out of sight and in discussion, and a moment after that I was surprised and a little fearful to hear the sound of her palm connecting impressively with the side of his face. He returned with a countenance which was surprisingly unaffected except for an expression of determination, which he had successfully channelled into a business-like calm as he returned my game to me.

Mario Kart was the ‘other’ SNES game, a plucky fighter for our attention and affection under the dominant shadow of Streetfighter. But there was one level in the game which was the equal of anything else I had seen. It is very hard not to describe Rainbow Road with the hindsight that later experience has brought, but it is impossible to forget the vibrant play of darkness and expansive colour which filled the screen as it raced through my mind. The racetrack was formed of tiled rectangles arranged in a non-uniform way, each one emitting a flickering light in a different tone. It was so difficult to negotiate, such an effort merely to stay on the road and not constantly to fall off the side where there was nothing but empty space.

As a child I had been disappointingly uninterested in space. The cosmic forces of the universe spoke to me no further than the edges of the map of the solar system that hung on the wall of the school science laboratory. But it was precisely in this disinterested state that the confused exhilaration of Rainbow Road had the brightest effect, for I was less struck by the massive expansion in the range of the senses that the experience seemed to foretell than by the twinkling colours which lit up the screen like the runway to an unknown destination. The music of Rainbow Road was also unimaginably joyous. The melody was probably composed with a synthesizer, but the sound was achieved by stretching the notes played by string instruments beyond their natural limit. The elastic, elongated tone which resulted seemed to be filled with the expectation of things to come. None of this proved helpful in improving my ability to race the circuit, however, and I lost count of the number of times that I slid off the track and into infinity.

As significant as the landscape of the game world, and far easier to ignore, is the environment in which the game is played. It may surprise people to recall the number of different places in which they have played computer games. The introduction of the Gameboy has made all such estimations strictly relative, but before its heyday there was a form of travel that thrived on the curiosity of children and the competitive instincts of their parents, and above all the sheer boredom of sea voyages, to expand the range of locations in which games could be introduced. I am of course referring to the ferry, and it was on such a vessel that I played 1942, a World War II aeroplane simulation. It’s graphics were bold and colourful, there was a freshness about the phenomena of flight which restored the thrill of earlier flight sims in which contingency was a key factor in getting a plane to move in a straight line on the runway, let alone take off. The plane in 1942, however, was large enough in comparison to the screen to appear swollen, resulting in the unfortunate circumstance, at times, of concealing enemy fighters until it was too late.

This inner voyage took place in an arcade machine on a Danish vessel, which plied its trade between the towns of Arhus and Fredericia. Of the journey I remember only, and possibly falsely, pitch black darkness and mist. Such is the image of northern Europe I still carry with me. More plausible is the memory of the strange elation of having to insert coins with holes at their centre into the game slot. The Krone was the single interesting detail about Denmark. Considering the unfavourable exchange rate of the time this is a story that my parents, from who I borrowed a large sum during that journey, will also have remembered very well.

I seldom played on an arcade machine except for Street Fighter 2 and even this did not happen very often. Having access to the game at home, I simply wasn’t interested in saving lunch money to play on another machine. My one clear memory of an arcade matchup was when I played my friend A G in a half-hearted battle after both of us had boasted for weeks of our superiority at the game. He picked Ryu and I foolishly thought to trump him by picking the more elementary Guile. Immediately I realised that I had made a mistake, not in picking a character whose moves were relatively easy to execute (and defend against) with a joystick and big buttons, but in picking a fight against an experienced arcade player. It wasn’t so much his resounding superiority over me in every department that bit so hard that day, nor his ‘perfect’ in the first round – indeed I had managed to salvage some pride by taking the second in a scrappy affair. He would put that one down to complacency. No: what seemed unacceptable to me was my inability to rely on the age-old Plan B of button-bashing when things were not going my way. My friend was equal to every bizarre combination that I attempted to execute, responding with counter-attacks of brutal swiftness and precise targetting. Even during the respite that the second round afforded me, I realized that I had got away with tactics of shoddy blocking that a couple of quick throws would make light work of overpowering, and so it happened in the third.

Striker was a football game that British children with Super Nintendos naturally owned. For a couple of months in the early 1990s we probably played it for more hours in the week than we did any other single activity, including sleeping. It was a game that could build up delusions of grandeur. A friend once visited my house to play this game, which my brothers and I had of course assumed our invincibility in. He beat us all one after the other before returning to his home. The graphics were larger than those of Sensible Soccer, but the view and the gameplay were probably quite similar (we were one of the seemingly 0.1% of the population who didn’t own that game). The most interesting alternative in Striker was the ‘indoor’ option, which was a concept that was totally antithetical to professional football but for the same reason capable of arousing curiosity. Indoor mode allowed you to select only 6 players per team and Germany were naturally the best considering the game was developed in the aftermath of the 1990 World Cup. The names were familiar to us by this stage but one stood out for the opposite reason: a German striker named Sauer. Who was he? I recognised the former stars of international teams who were included in the game: Charlton, Mirandinha, Kempes, and others, but Sauer appeared to be a very useful striker who I couldn’t recall having ever actually existed. Whether he was real or not, in football simulations which followed Striker the trend of fabricating players would be notched up a level as EA Sports claimed exclusive naming rights, leaving most of the other companies to make up the names of entire teams and leagues.

When I was very young my brothers and I often stayed over at my grandmother’s house, where my uncle also lived. The latter was the first person we knew who owned a PC to which we had access. At first, this access was strictly controlled, since he was a computer programmer who needed the machine for his work. But we soon gained his trust – as much by our refusal to respect the arbitrary boundaries set by him as our ease in handling elemental aspects of MS-DOS. We knew only as much as it took to enter into the world of his games, of which there were many, including platformers such as Commander Keen and an early version of Duke Nukem. These were interesting adventure games that could only take you so far: for the remainder of the journey you had to play games such as the evocative RPG, Legend, and the spellbinding puzzler D-Generation. Legend stayed years in my mind for the gratification it offered when a successful spell was procured, relevant ingredients bought, potions made, and finally the spell cast to defeat an enemy or help one’s own characters. The uncanny mood of vulnerability that it evoked, especially in the sections in which the four brave adventurers found themselves in sprawling underground labyrinths, was shared by D-Gen. I felt a weird pang of recognition upon learning that the aim of the latter was to locate the whereabouts of a mysterious scientist named Derrida. The Tron­-like ambiguity of geometrical perspective and the metallic sheen that overlay all of the basic colours that were used, added to the startling effect of the simple and precise graphics. D-Gen is a game that will never lack for wonder, but the esoteric heart of my uncle’s collection was undoubtedly Cadaver and the Payoff, a game whose very name seemed to grant the end of a former understanding. This game is so hazy in my mind that I can’t clearly recall what it’s object was, how it was played, or even how it looked. I remember only a room composed of tiles, not every one of which was designed to be stepped on, and a character who wasn’t quite human and not quite Fraggle but who wore a long wizard’s cloak. Yet this game whose elementary commands now completely escape me had remained inexplicable throughout my childhood: Who was Cadaver? Why was the pay-off? What was going on?

Much later, my uncle owned Wolfenstein 3-D, the murderous intensity of which achieved a perfect arc of terror at the moment that the end-of-level baddie – each time a hideously well-armed incarnation of Hitler – appeared, owing as much to the extremity of his presentation as the weird gloopy sound that the tinny 8-bit PC speakers managed to churn out to announce his arrival. Each form of der Führer was designed with a particular method of killing, be it machine-gun arms, ku-klux-like flame throwing, or the particularly sadistic version who was able to hurl knives at your character from a very great distance. The monolithic size of the rooms offered very little respite in the face of such deadly accuracy. The sound that accompanied Hitler’s arrival is what brought the memory of the other details into focus, demonstrating how at the centre of every recollection is a sensation that echoes across the intervening time.

For a while I was hooked on a wristwatch game, a simple Mario-esque single-screen game that I was unable to turn away from during break times at school. My friend J P, who owned the watch (he was a good friend), was also the first person to own a Gameboy among our group at school. The heady excitement of being able to walk all the way back to the beginning of the level in Super Marioland seemed to me totally at odds with the limited possibilities of the format. Then there was Tetris’ inexplicable attraction. Blocks made in combinations of four perfect squares, falling with perfect regularity from the sky, which must be composed, if necessary by rotating them up to 360 degrees, to form unbroken horizontal lines or walls. Each formation of the latter would remove them from the screen in a puff of air accompanied by an invigorating ker-ching of points. Allow ‘unfinished’ walls to dominate the screen and they would clog up the arrival of new blocks, and the game would shortly be over. It was the game’s simplicity that allied it to an idea of genius, both of the designer and of those masters who we would sometimes hear about, who were able to amass scores of thousands of points with ease.

During another friend’s birthday party I spent most of the proceedings engrossed in a hand-held version of Top Gun, explaining my unsocial behaviour on account of a (fabricated) headache that I was suffering from. These little one-offs were very dear to my heart. A handheld American Football simulation, a sport I know nothing about, continued to hold my attention for months after we had received it as a gift. The extent of the tactical plays available to the player was mystifying, so I used only one or two of them, and these without much sense of purpose. Fifty yard touchdowns were a rare pleasure, during which the repetitive intensity of the lines of the gridiron reminded of the effort that was being expended to reach the end zone.

From my friend I K I borrowed a handheld game that – wonder of wonders – glowed in the dark. It was a motorcycle racing game that involved the simple negotiation of ramps and short jumps, but in combinations that would have occupied me for years had I not had to return it to him relatively quickly. It came with several appendages, including a peripheral controlling device – not a control pad. The game was built into the machine. The strangely passive joy I felt at night lying in my lower bunk bed, knowing everybody was asleep and that I was the only one in the house who knew about this form of enjoyment, let alone had access to it, was related to the strongly verdant glow of the colours of the screen against the pitch black surroundings.

Computer games have several magical properties, the lighter or darker shade of which is – as with most things – entirely dependent on the player. The first trick is to be able to make time disappear entirely for long stints, only for it to return, to our incomprehension, hours later. Scratching our heads we wonder where it had gone. Role-Playing Games (RPGs), of which I had little experience as a child, are held to be able to exert the greatest powers in this respect, but I witnessed similar effects during many afternoons spent playing my brothers at Streetfighter 2. The second magical dispensation is the spell of wakefulness that computer games are able to cast on the player. Some innate anxiety had always prevented me from falling too deeply into this spell, but by dint of a contrast which was to remain long with me, I remember late nights for weeks on end when on my way to the kitchen I would pass through the living room, where my father would be trying to negotiate a sequence of tricky jumps on Super Mario. The third property also relates to the experience of time, and refers to the patience that games are able to draw out of the most easily distracted of children. It has been remarked how RPGs, and more recently Pokemon, have taken advantage of the age-old pursuit of collecting. It may be that in making an association with childhood the meaning of collecting does not go far enough, since it fails to give an idea of the confused excitement that accompanies the act of accumulation; and this has never been better expressed for me than with my own hoarding of acorns in a bedroom drawer during a particularly generous autumn of the early 1990s.

Most of my childhood was spent indoors and at home, a situation which at the time I believed was conducive to much self-pity. Besides school, our living room (which was really a large dining room) was our playground and the place of whatever reconciliations limited experience could offer. I remember the patterns of the carpet on which I used to deliberately tread when I listened to my mother or my father lecturing me. It seems impossible now that I needed to be told anything at all. The one time when this cloistering was broken was during our trips to stay with our cousins, who lived in Switzerland. We went yearly, for several years. Each time I remember wondering for weeks beforehand how they would look and where they would be living. In their second or their third home in that country, I can’t remember which, they arranged all of their gaming equipment around the television, which itself was accommodated in an intimidatingly large wall cupboard.

My cousins owned numerous games, two of which I remember particularly well. Adventure Island 2 was a game in which the player was required to collect eggs while riding on scaled-down dinosaurs across a two-dimensional, primeval landscape. My cousins’ impressive handling of the beasts was an element of control which I was never to master. My poor excuse is that the depiction of archaic reality was simply too spellbinding to focus instead on the gameplay. Tecmo World Wrestling, which was also on the 8-bit NES, even today, and despite my general dislike of button-bashing games, holds a special place in my heart for the delight it took in switching between camera angles during the execution of a ‘finishing’ move. The arrival of the supreme bad guy, the mysterious B King, brought a respectful dimming of the ringside lights. The dominant blue and pinkish colours of the game screen also seemed to signal the best of intentions, although nothing came close to matching the exhilaration of grabbing my opponent by the legs and spinning him round and around, gathering momentum until in a triumphant climax I would let go by pressing the B button. I would then watch with glee as the accumulated centripetal force launched him out of the ring and into the stands.