![]() ![]() The player-piano was powered by the kind of foot-treadles beloved by sewing machine operators and torturers, linked up to an air pump, a revolving drum, the dead macaroni rubber pipes and the hammers and strings of the piano. This released a tiny hammer onto the associated piano strings and played a pitch-perfect note. If I did want a note to play, then I punched a hole in the right place at the right time, ready for a dead macaroni rubber pipe to fart a jet of air through it. If I didn’t want a note to play then I did nothing at all. I got a roll of wallpaper and drew up a linear grid of eighty-eight squares times infinity, one square for each note on the piano keyboard and infinity representing time. So I spent it in hiding, humiliating the pianola and forcing it to perform lewd acts of a musical nature. That summer I had a square-ended metal hole-punch nicked from the Dockyard by my Dad, and acne. The grand old pianola was, of course, my first properly programmable computer. It was stored as holes punched into rolls of paper that tore and decomposed in sync with the British Empire. But the software that called the tunes was great. This was because the firmware that powered the keys was a matrix of rubber tubes which time had hardened and fractured like dead macaroni, so it wheezed like my Dad in the mornings. In fact they were so unpopular that most of them had rotted. By the time I tackled this ancient Aeolian upright grand model, the world was listening to music on the wireless, and pianolas were very unpopular indeed. Pianolas were a sort of giant mechanical iPod for Victorians who didn’t have the talent to play regular pianos, and they were very popular in the nineteenth century. The story begins again a few years later, with a pianola that lived behind the kitchen in a little two-up, two-down terrace house, with an outdoor thunderbox and no bathroom. And although it was programming of a sort, I gave up computing in favour of the yo-yo well before my next birthday. The result sounded like crappy little tin strips hit with a stick in random order, which is exactly what is was. So, slowly and methodically, I reordered the colour-coded xylophone keys into more interesting combinations, and wrote my own sequences of coded coloured dots. Maybe I could even improve things somehow by simple experimentation. Then, for the first time, I can remember thinking maybe I could change things. The songs were child-safe and really banal, and those preprogrammed sequences soon began to bore me. Obviously the manufacturers expected all young Mozarts to wheedle their parents for a Sooty glove puppet to go with the xylophone, because they only supplied a single bashing stick, and glove puppets can only handle one stick at a time. This was supposed to result in instant musical genius, a bit like the young Mozart, but adapted for a sociopathic glove puppet. Instead of music, the Sooty Xylophone was supplied with little cards that displayed rows of coloured dots, and the idea was to bash one colour-coded key at a time in the order each dot appeared. My Mum and Dad had bought me a Sooty-the-puppet Xylophone. It had a keyboard colour-coded in toxic lead paint, designed to stunt the growth of us post-war baby boomers. My first games machine was a dangerous little metal sequencer. Up until then, the whole world had been in monochrome, but I can remember my seventh birthday in flickering, muted colour. But the story of The Best Game You Never Played In Your Life begins on the morning of my seventh birthday, when there was coal in the scuttle, when Winston Churchill was still running the country through a haze of alcohol and dementia, and when I programmed my first games machine. They fell in love, got married and had sex, although probably not in that order. I began in the 1940s when a clever refugee from Nazi Germany met a hard-working dockyard worker with a bicycle and tuberculosis in the teeming city of Portsmouth, the home port of the British navy, and bombed to bits by the time I arrived. ![]() So if this is the story of Deus Ex Machina, then it is essentially the story of computerised bunkum on a grand scale. Then some bright spark figured out that as well as little blobs of light, you could add tricks, and so bunkum was introduced. The world’s first commercial video games were mostly based on ping-pong, but it wasn’t long before glowing rectangular ping-pong balls were replaced by little green space invaders, based on a mixture of ping-pong, chess and dice. And I declare that I kicked off the British video games industry at zero cost, with zero investment, zero equipment, zero experience and zero planning. It’s bigger than music, movies, books and magazines. ![]() And the British video games industry is worth billions. That’s apart from gambling, drugs and pornography, of course. The video games industry is the biggest money-making entertainment sector in the world.
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