I had one of those ads pop up on Twitter recently. You know the ones. Not the weirdly suggestive ones trying to get you to download some crap free-to-play mobile game. The ones that show you something you never previously thought you needed – because you didn’t – but now you’ve seen it, you think your life cannot possibly go on without it. Like a cage for barbecuing vegetables. A watch that doubles as a miniature air fryer. This one was for a tiny inkless printer you can use to print stuff from your phone and turn it into stickers.
People my age had this 42 years ago, though. Only back then it was the most derided peripheral ever: the Sinclair ZX Printer for the ZX Spectrum. My mother brought both machine and printer home in 1982, proclaiming that we would now be able to do word processing and write books like the families in the posh part of town. Before you scoff and say, “But Dominik, you grew up in Arbroath. There IS no posh part of Arbroath!”, let me stress that there IS. It is called Dundee.
I tried to explain the ZX Spectrum to my son Charlie recently; he has been getting ready for university 3,000km away and occasionally he pushes the wrong button on his phone and accidentally answers it when I call, so he has to talk to me. When this happens, I am even more surprised and ill-prepared than he is, so we tend to resort to talking about games rather than grants.
“What was the first game you ever played at home Dad?”
“Horace Goes Skiing.”
“Who goes skiing?”
“Horace. Hungry Horace to give him his full name.”
“Who was he?”
“He was an asymmetrical blue blob, with legs but no arms. Google him.”
“Jeez, Dad. That is the saddest looking video game character I have ever seen.”
“Back then we made do with what we had, son. Times were tough, but we muddled through.”
“What console was this? The original Nintendo?”
“No son. It was the ZX Spectrum.”
“Cool name for a console.”
“It wasn’t a console. It was a computer.”
“You had a computer as a kid? You told me you were poor.”
“We were. The ZX Spectrum was the first affordable home computer.”
“So, you surfed the internet with it?”
“No. We didn’t have the internet.”
“So, you could do spreadsheets and Word documents.”
“Didn’t have those either.”
“But you could type your schoolwork?”
after newsletter promotion
“Technically.”
“And print it out.”
“Sort of. But it printed stuff on to a tiny strip of shiny toilet roll.”
“Oh! Like that cool thing from my Twitter feed today! That looked amazing!”
I sigh. “Yes, son. Just like that.”
“Could you turn them into stickers?”
“No.”
“Sounds rubbish.”
This conversation gets me wondering about how many others of my generation became gamers by stealth. Whose parents bought a Spectrum or a C64 to help with schoolwork or teach kids coding, only to see it convert their little munchkins into hollow-eyed disciples of Hungry Horace, checking into Maniac Mansion and never leaving?
Did it happen with the Amiga to the preteens of the 90s? Did parents buy one of those so their progeny could learn spreadsheets, with half an eye on a nice safe future in accountancy, only to see them dreaming of a career on the touchlines after countless hours of Championship Manager instead? Did parents walk in on kids playing Champ Man and think it WAS some form of spreadsheet?
Maybe it still happens today. Parents buy a giant Ninja family PC, because it’s what they have at work, and then one day their child learns that magic word … Steam.
I imagine things have evolved now and parents just buy their kids consoles and don’t care what the neighbours think. But when my kids started gaming in the early 2000s there was still that lingering thought from the 90s that games would turn kids into monsters. “Where are your children, Dominik?” In the basement playing Super Mario. “What’s that?” Educational software about how to get through life as a plumber when it seems the whole world is against you. “Oh, that’s good. It’s so important for them to learn a trade.”
I should have encouraged my kids to think of video games as a trade. One of their fellow Canadians, Félix Lengyel, has just signed a $100m deal to move from Twitch to another site where people shout loudly and incoherently while playing video games. This is a better deal than LeBron James has with the LA Lakers. Of course, Félix Lengyel isn’t called Félix Lengyel online. That would be ridiculous. He is called xQc. He took the last letter of his first name and the abbreviation of the Canadian province he is from: Quebec. I supposed the British equivalent of that would be to take the last letter of your name and the first 2 letters of your postcode. I’d be … dDd. How … er … wonderful.
It’s clearly too late for me to become an accountant, but maybe I could stream myself playing ZX Spectrum games. Anyone fancy throwing some coins at me shouting loudly into a phone while doing a speedrun of Atic Atac? Support me on Patreon and I’ll even print you some stickers.