Re:Retro

Commercial Break Monday Says: Do It Like This YOU FOOL

by alewing on April 30th, 2007

In today’s COMMERCIAL BREAK MONDAY, we head back to the murky world of 1983, when playing games was a serious and apparently deadly business. Thanks to www.textfiles.com for this one.

“Which is the best way to inflate your score? Better find out.” intones this advert, sinsiterly. Better find out… before you die.

Why had you better find out? Well, this advert came during a time when games struggled for legitimacy in the only way they knew how - by fetishising the score. This was the day of Pac-Man Fever, when people could and would play it for hours on end, scoring million after million, playing in shifts and not allowing a small thing like the game never ending to get in the way of standing there like a drooling Pavlovian rat endlessly eating cocaine until it died. This was the day of serious books - I had one which I bought at a jumble sale - about how to win at the most famous arcade games and even the emerging ‘home systems’ of the time, with things like the difference between arcade Missile Command and home Missile Command gone into in painstaking, laborious detail, in the same way that high-level chess players write books on the various gambits and openings to educate their fellow men. (Less defenses and more chance of civilisation being fried by nuclear blasts in the home system - a sobering thought, probably.)

People were starting to realise that video games had no point as such, and there are only two ways out of that - one is to start making better games (I haven’t forgotten you David Braben and Ian Bell) but the other was evidently to treat video games as a useless hobby similar to train spotting or stamp collecting, and treat everything about them with undeserved reverence. Hence the idea that a true player knows about the horizontal inflation method and the hidden vegetables, and the copywriters are experts passing down these golden secrets to the unwashed masses. The advert is very big on Dig Dug being “just like the arcade” - shades of the chess secrets that will let you play just like Kasparov - but at no point does it say “Dig Dug is a fun game to play.” Short of inflating things and dropping boulders, I still have no idea what it’s about or how to play it. But that isn’t important. What’s important isn’t that I know what the game is, or that I know it’s a riot of fun, frolic and vegetables - what’s important is that I treat it with the respect it deserves, and if I’m not interested in getting the highest score possible in the shortest time - well, I can just die. Dig Dug doesn’t need timewasters. Dig Dug needs winners.

It’s probably this idea that you needed to ‘win’ the game somehow that led to games being invented that you could win, or at the very least get lost in to the extent that ‘winning’ or ‘beating’ the game by electronically masturbating your way to a zillion points no longer mattered.

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POSTED IN: Atari, Atari 2600, Commercial Break Monday, General