An ode to Keith.

For a while now I’ve thinking of writing about something that I really hate, the pocket of gamer culture that’s there just to inject venom and spread hate. The git guds, the fan boys, but this isn’t going to be it. I’m going to write about something I love. My dad.
Growing up we always had some kind of device to play games on, from Spectrums to N64s my brother and I filled our time in the far off lands of Hyrule or in deepest space listening to the satisfying docking music from Elite.
My earliest gaming memory is from a late eighties Christmas, 86/87 is my guess, laying on a highly patterned carpet playing with Battlecat while my brother sits in front of a tv that’s deeper than it is high or wide playing a zx spectrum, the black one with the separate cassette deck, we upgraded to the ZX 2 at some point but I have no idea when.

We’d pour hours upon hours into games like Jet Set Willy 2, One Man and his Droid or Horace goes skiing, not really knowing what we were supposed to be doing or where we were going but we had the most fun imaginable in these blocky escapes from reality.

I’m confident my dad was the linchpin in all of this. We were too young to know that we wanted a computer, I don’t remember playing or even seeing a computer before that Christmas. Dad must have seen it and convinced my mum that we wanted it.

“Yes Edith, this is the one they keep going on about, I know it’s expensive but you can’t put a price on a parents love.”

He’d silently slog his way through games while we slept at night. Slaying villains, shooting down space pirates, crawling through the deepest dungeons. When we sold our NES so we could get a SNES for Christmas my brother and me would lean over the stairs to see a slither of the pad in my fathers hands as he guided Link around the screen. We would do this most nights leading up to the big day, like a sneaky little advent calendar.

Over the years dad has played many a game and while my friends dads were having house parties or going to the pub my dad would sit stoically in a chair and play video games, content in his bubble. When others were screaming at their TVs that so and so was offside dad was furrowing his brow and ejecting a barely audible tut at the computer because he’d failed to kill ‘The King’, the end boss from the 1992 Amiga game ‘Legend’ for the tenth time in a row. 

He’d play X-COM and Tomb Raider and World of Warcraft. Diablo and Diablo 2, Starcraft. He’s 66 now. Newly retired. What does he do? Upgrades his PC, gets X-COM 2 and Elite Dangerous and gets back in the chair. When other people start getting interested in gardening or ornithology he’s researching plasma weapons and shooting down UFOs. He’s flying across the galaxy Smuggling goods and outrunning the.. Space police? I don’t know what you do in Elite. 

I can’t imagine ever getting bored of playing video games and dad is proof that I probably won’t. I’m sure my interest will dip and my style will change but it’ll alway be there, bubbling away beneath the surface until I retire. Then I can spend my days in the chair, plodding through games with a coffee for company. 

I’ve got a lot of things to thank my dad for but that zx spectrum is probably the biggest. That’s where it all started, the life long love of pixels and pressing start. 

Here’s to another 30 years of gaming. 

Here’s to dad.