Gaming with your dad
When my mum and dad bought me a Commodore Amiga, it was one of the happiest days of my life.
My parents were art teachers and were not rich; thinking back, they must have spent a fortune on that computer. I’m sure I was incredibly grateful, but I expressed that gratitude by disappearing into my bedroom for weeks at a time and sulking when I had to come out in order to eat and poop. I may even have occasionally combined the two in order to save time.
Some of my favourite memories were of dad playing games with me, which he did frequently at the beginning. There was a flight sim called F18 Interceptor that we played religiously, although my lust for game abuse caused me to spend most of my time attempting to sink the Golden Gate Bridge instead of shooting down enemy fighters. I never understood why the USSR felt the need to focus their aerial fury on San Francisco anyway; nowadays, with my greater knowledge of political history, I understand the threat that liberal West Coast homosexuals posed to Gorbachev’s regime.
We all know who the real enemy is here, don’t we… BRIDGE.
When I stopped being a knobstopper and played the game properly, it was a joy to have dad sit beside me and offer advice, or fly the plane while I manned the controls. He was better than me at the start, but I soon overtook him because I did little other than play games, whereas he had other stuff to do, such as art and joints.
There was always the aroma of hash smoke hanging round his study, mingling with the tang of turpentine and the dark notes of the oil paints. It was a great place to sit and play a game for six hours straight. In the evenings I disappeared into Falcon or Elite while dad sat in his tattered old chair, roll-up in hand, contemplating this one painting that he’d worked on for ten years and never finished. I didn’t understand how odd that was at the time, but now it makes me deeply sad. His career had not advanced in the way he’d hoped for, and after a while, his creativity died. For the last years of his life, he just kept mashing away at this one impossible painting, transferring all his frustration to it. I hate to think about it now.
This picture arouses parts of me that should be reserved only for women and cars.
Not long after he bought me the Amiga, dad got himself the top-of-the-range Amiga 2000, a lumbering beast that sported a whopping 20mb hard drive and was pretty decent at art, hence his excuse for buying one. It sat majestically in his study, growing gradually browner, and the sum total of its artistic achievement was the black-and-white Christmas cards it printed out, featuring dad and his partner giving the world a big friendly thumbs-up. These cards were not received with floods of gratitude by my family, something that perplexed dad greatly.
After he and mum split up, I only saw him one weekend in two. On many of those weekends, I disappeared off to his study and played Pirates, shunning all enticements of TV and talk. Sometimes, when I was getting ready to go home on Sunday evening, he’d give me a wistful smile and say “haven’t seen much of you this weekend”. I wish I’d felt guiltier about that.
I also wish I wasn’t so fucking great at games, because maybe then he’d have carried on playing them with me, instead of quitting to go and do something he wouldn’t get repeatedly whupped at. The truth is unavoidable: my amazing gaming prowess is the entire reason why I didn’t have a good relationship with my father. It was my blessing - and my curse. I rue the day I first felt the joystick in my hand and knew that I was powerful.
Me at age ten, pimping my bitches.
When I have kids, I won’t try to stop them from playing games: that would be impossible, retarded and hypocritical. But I will make sure that I play those games with them, because it’s a great way of growing closer, and hopefully it’ll help me to bond with them in the ways I wish I could have bonded with dad. I’ll also make sure I never let the snotty little pricks get better than me at those games. This may necessitate me regularly playing until the early hours of the morning and sabotaging the computer when it’s the kids’ turn, but it’s for their own good. It’s for bonding purposes, Christ dammit.
Filed under: Gaming nostalgia
Did…
Did you photoshop those glasses on to her?
But yeah, I remember gaming with dad, too. More specifically, playing D-Generation, when we got too scared to walk into the room with the fake human who turned into a black and red bomb on legs and hunted you down. We got him to take care of that bastard.
Ah Tim you go from piss-pantingly funny to heartbreaking all too quickly. Seriously though, don’t beat yourself up over not spending time with him. You didn’t know what was gonna happen. He would be very proud of the man you have become I am sure.
I’ve been catching up on your blog as work is gay and have blocked any sites to do with gaming.
Just be glad that your dad actually played computer ganes with you at all and doesn’t spend all of his time watching a ray tracing image render or the hard drive defrag.
I remember when Doom first came out I had to get my mum to play it with me coz I was too scared.
xx
One of my fondest memories is of my whole family getting together to play Wii Sports for the first time. I’ve always wanted to play video games with my family, mostly my parents, but my dad gets motion sickness easily, and doesn’t understand those newfangled controllers, blah blah.
Anyway, my dad kicked all our asses at Wii Bowling. It was a fun night, and actually the only time everyone played together.
You can’t always get what you want I guess, but memories have a way of keeping us going for a little longer til we can get some sort of drug and/or alcohol induced memory loss to forget about the pain.
Man, Wii bowling is the only Wii sport I don’t suck several fucks at. I think it’s the most intuitive of all of them, which helps a lot.
We were in a school play, and I’m in costume in the picture, so I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one and say they’re not her normal glasses. However, I do think they suit her. If I saw someone on the street wearing those glasses, I would have to shake their hand.
Yeah, I guess with every bereavement there is the feeling of missed chances. It’s normal, I suppose. The only scenario where this wouldn’t be the case is if you actually murdered your relative, and then you’d just congratulate yourself on a job well done.
I used to play Duck Hunt with my dad all the time when I was little. I can remember it being really fun, but I remember how clear it was that he was a dad and I was a kid. While I was shooting maniacally at the screen, my trigger finger searing with pain, my dad would use his shots so carefully as to ’save some for the next game’. I don’t think he ever realized that it wasn’t like real hunting, and that you didn’t need to conserve bullets so frugally.
That painting story is a great visualisation of failed dreams.
I get sad that I dont have the depth to create such lovely metaphors for people describing me. My sons blog will be dereft of great literature describing me.
Don’t worry Gale, there’s still time for you to fail spectacularly at life. You’re a PWoT regular, which is an excellent start.
My life dream is just to own many lion bars, though.
Ahh shit, that reminds me. I still haven’t fulfilled my childhood dream of buying a jar of Nutella and eating the entire damn thing in one sitting with a knife.
Life is too short for missed opportunities. I’m going to carpe that fucking diem tomorrow, and you’re not stopping me this time, mum!
My actual childhood dream was to have my own place and be able to watch a whole episode of buffy without someone coming in and going “you still watch this, this is gay, you are gay, you know that?” and then TALK all the damn way through and insist on flicking through the music channels during the breaks when I KNOW they will turn back too late and I will miss something.
Something i acheived at 17 and have since rested on my laurels.
You seem to have a knack for appearing in extremely noteworthy pictures of school plays, Camerhil.
I feel your pain. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Babylon 5, and exactly the same thing happened. People just didn’t understand. Oh, G’Kar. How I miss your smooth, lizardlike face / head area.
I was an exhibitionist prick when I was a kid, constantly showing off in front of the whole world because I loved the attention.
Thank God I’m not like that now.
I AM NOT CRYING I AM NOT CRYING I AM NOT CRYING
STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT
That nutella ambition isn’t actually so much fun as you’d imagine. It starts off delicious and then somehow turns into the most corrosive of all the acids after you make it to around halfway through, leaving you a shrivelled wreck of a man. It’s pretty entertaining to watch, mind.
Did you actually try that yourself? To live the eternal dream and eat an entire jar of Nutella?
If so, you are the Icarus of our times, and I salute you.
i used to go to computer fairs with my dad when i 1st saw the amiga, i used to pinch him or stand on his foot to let him know that i wanted it, it was gratefully received by a clip to the ear.
he eventually bought me one with the extended memory thingy on the side after I conned him by sayin ITS SO AMAZING, you can even edit home vids on it. He got so happy, he got me elite, falcon, interceptor, the lot. Did he actually use it to edit vids on, hell no. i was not giving that baby up without a fight ;). In fact, i swear i still got them games boxed up in the attic somewhere.
i’m sorry dad, i didnt mean to pinch or stand on your feet
Great update, the only time my dad ever played games was when I first got the Amiga 500+ with ‘Bart versus the Space Mutants’, we spent hours trying to get past this one bit, then one day I got home from school and he’d found a cheat/glitch to get past it, good times!
I remember that game being absolutely fucking impossible. I seem to recall a kind of purply reddy stage with moving platforms which almost made me puke with frustration.
Good times.
I had that too! Man, just imagine having an entire megabyte of RAM. The possibilities simply bugger the mind.
“I remember that game being absolutely fucking impossible. I seem to recall a kind of purply reddy stage with moving platforms which almost made me puke with frustration.”
That’s the bit I was taking about! if you jumped three times on the third platform (they were bags of cement) it raised you up and over the rest. I’ve no idea how my da figured it out. I completed the game but still never did that one bit honestly.
AWWWWWWW
Tim, this brings a tear to my eye. As a lad I spent countless hours playing the original Final Fantasy and other RPGs like Shining Force and Shining in the Darkness…he would always man the controls while I watched and told him what to do, or mapped the entire game on graphing paper (I still have a 4′x4′ taped together graph paper monstrosity of the Shining in the Darkness labyrinth somewhere around here). Those were some damn good times.
Without getting too sentimental, I have to say thanks for writing this. Kind of nice to know that I’m not the only person whose childhood bonding was done with videogames.
I wonder, dya think the amiga games are worth anyfing now?
I mean, i got a box load of em still.
I am going to try and find em now, just hope the mrs aint reading this
I’ve been really touched by the responses to this. It really disproves the argument that computer games are a total waste of time, if they can be used to bring people closer.
I wouldn’t vouch for the quality of those old 3.5″ discs nowadays. I remember mine degrading at a terrifying rate. That said, there are loads of Amiga fanboys who would kill for mint condition boxes and manuals. I’ll never forget that awesome manual for Elite, full of stories about mysterious ships and places that weren’t actually in the game, but you always believed you’d find them if you searched hard enough.
I have had a few PS2’s and Xbox’s along the way and believe it or not, my dad loves ripping them to bits and adding modchips to them. God knows why coz he does not really play on them but he just loves tinkering with electronics. What else would you expect from an electronics engineer right?
Now that i have got my 360, i introduced him to PGR4, forza and recently RaceDriver Grid. He absolutely loves the graffics and realism of the replays, only problem is, when we play 2 player, its so much fun just ramming him off the track until he gets so peed off, he starts hurling abuse at me.
Do you remember Xenon2?
I tried so hard to get all the power ups so i could have a ship so large it would fill up the screen and jus obliterate anything in its path, but it never happened.
In fact, has anyone ever done this?
Oh shit, I did exactly the same thing with Xenon 2. It felt so cruel to be granted Super Nashwan Power for about thirty seconds and see what your ship is really capable of, then to be stripped of all those awesome lasers and explody things, being left with just your pissy little pop gun.
I recall completing the game, but I don’t recall whether I cheated or not. Knowing how callow my brain is, that means I definitely cheated.
hahahahaha
i got fed up with it eventually, i wanted my super nashwan power all the time. my lil bro at the time loved that line, “SUPER NASHWAN POWER”, think i need to remind him now, esp since he is 30, bet it will put a smile on his face.
it jus did on mine, damn “Supppppa Nashwaaan POWWWEEEER” now dats da shit.
oh, do you remeber SWIV, where you could either be the buggy or the chopper, that was a cool game, kept us in the bedroom for ages
oh i got one for you guys.
the likes or Repton, fortress, strykers run kept me amused for months
I used to have a BBC Micro B with a whopping 32k of ram. I have to say, thats the 1st machine i played Elite on and a whole lot of other mono coloured games like knightlore, then i got a Micro B+ with 128k and wayhay i got more than 2 colours
Yep…good times
Hell yeah I remember Swiv. That was an awesome game. I occasionally think “they never do stuff like that for the PC now”, but then I realise how wrong I am. There’s an absolute arseload of cheap shoot ‘em ups which are just as good as those old classics, but no one wants to play them anymore because they’re too simple.
I mean, I’m affecting a tone of indignation here, but then again, I’m not playing those games either. CURSE MY HYPOCRISY
I remember Xenon 2 and remember being vaguely scared of the weird monster that was in the shop. I definitely cheated…
My childhood dream was to drink undiluted squash, a bit like the syrup only squishy in the Simpsons. Now if I drink it too strong I wince.
My dad, who is in his late 70s, is fascinated by computers and likes to watch me work on mine.
The other day I sat him down in front of Bejeweled 2 and put the mouse in his hand. He already knew how the game was played, from watching me.
Seeing him clutch the mouse awkwardly, trying to click without moving the cursor, grinning at his first combo move and just generally getting that look on his face that only a gamer discovering a game can get, I felt closer to him than I had in a long time.
Also, I got a chuckle out of his reluctance to leave the game when mum called for lunch, since that’s usually my routine.
As for mum, well… she’s in her mid 60s and never learned to drive a car, so I set up my steering wheel controller and let her crash into a few tunnel entrances in Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed. Before long, she was negotiating turns.
Man, I gotta do more of that.
Great post.
There is something touchingly awesome about getting your grandparents hooked on games.
I guess games tap into the child in all of us, and the only times you’re truly free to enjoy that feeling are when you’re very young, or very old. The rest of us are lumbered with the guilt of responsibility.