One of my guilty pleasures is video games. I’ve played them since Space Wars on mainframe computers. There was a buzz in the local sports hall when Space Invaders first marched across the screen and the coin box got jammed with ten pence pieces. 

My mum was what we now call an ‘early adopter’. She had gone to the local Currys and come home with the latest thing in home entertainment. It was in fact the first games console. A rectangular black box about 14 inches long 7 inches across, and an inch or two thick. The top surface was covered with a grid of dimples about 3/4 inch in diameter. Besides these were two rotary dial controllers each with a red button next to them. At the top were a couple of switches that accessed the other versions of the one available game; Pong.

Waited, my sister and I, for mum to hook up the RF lead an fiddle with the tuning dials on the black and white TV. Mum plugged in the 9 volt PP3 battery and brought the beast to life. Squeezed up close to mum on the sofa, we grabbed hold of the controls and pressed start.

Boop. The one sound, and only sound it could produce from its minuscule onboard speaker.

I know, it sounds horrendous compared to what we have today, but remember, not everyone had a colour TV, not everyone had a TV! I’ve no idea what the box cost or who made it. What I do know is, we played it for hours. ‘What about the red button?’ I can hear your excited shouts. 

The red button was the magic boost. After you bounced the ball (square) back to your opponent you pressed the Reb button, and the ball would blip across the screen blitzing past your opponent. Each time you scored a point there would be a rattling of ball bearings, and victory would be one pong closer. 

There were times when the whole family would gather around and have a boxing tournament on the Intellivision, or they’d watch me torment the cat with a game of clowns and balloons,

Most of my playtime was still taken up with fishing, cycling, shoplifting, building camps, and making a nuisance of myself. Summers were long and the winters dark. After homework and kids’ tv, in the space between the early evening news and bedtime, I’d sneak a go, a quick practice playing both sides – I was that good!

From then on we tried all sorts of consoles and computers: the Acetronic MPU1000, Matel’s Intellivision, Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum 16k with wobbly ram pack, Atari 400 with 5 1/4 floppy disk, Atari ST, Atari VCS, Atari Lynx, Megadrive, PC Engine, Atari Jaguar, Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox Series S & X, SNES, N64, Wii, Gameboy, 3DS, Switch, plus a Mac or five and umpteen PC’s and laptops. 

The keen-eyed among you will notice the absence of PlayStation, and that’s because the controllers gave me cramps in the thumbs, otherwise, they’d be on the list too.

There were times when the whole family would gather around and have a boxing tournament on the Intellivision, or they’d watch me torment the cat with a game of clowns and balloons, the poor sod could not resist the see-sawing clown as it slid to and fro on the screen.

Video games have many uses, the foremost is entertainment. I find TV tedious, I can’t sit and watch program after program just for the sake of it. I do watch streaming services though, but I am selective. Nothing beats games for vegging out.

Friday night is co-op night. I get online with a friend and have a blast while exchanging childish insults and innuendos as we have done for the past twenty years. On a rare occasion, I’ll jump into some multiplayer mayhem, a fantasy MMO. I love dark, brooding worlds like Shadow of War, Hogwarts Legacy, or Skyrim. Anything I can wander around exploring every corner and marveling at the labour of love the designers and programmers have woven into their creations. Dark forests, and swamps infested with monsters I can twat with an axe. It’s therapy in many ways, satisfying like woodturning and writing.

Having witnessed the development of video games from the boop of pong some 40-plus years ago, to the orchestral-scored open worlds of today’s graphical masterpieces, I still look forward to the next innovation. Of all the different formats my least favourite is mobile games. With very few exceptions.

I confess to keeping a copy of mahjong on my phone and a colour by numbers app. Nothing comes close to the immersive audio delivered right into your ears with Dolby Atmos, together with pin-sharp UHD 4K images. Snugged into the corner of a sofa with bags of snacks and a couple of beers will always be my go-to refuge.