One Sunday, when I was about 13 or 14, I spent five and a half hours playing a single game of this, on the way to my personal high score of over 9 million.
Five and a half hours. I seem to recall my Sunday lunch getting cold because, you know, high scores... and my parents understood (on that occasion, at least). There were no warnings about too much screen time in the 80s, beyond a half-hearted "you'll get square eyes"...
Aside from a few drunken goes on the Space Invader machines that began to appear in pubs at the very start of the 1980s, I've never played a single computer game in my life. I was always scared that if I really got into it, gaming would suck away too much of my music listening time. Consequently it's a whole cultural phenomenon that has passed me by. 5½ hours? Wow! You could've played Nick Drake's entire recorded output in that time - twice!
ReplyDeleteYou're right, such games had the capacity to eat time in the same way that smartphones and social media do these days. And yes, 5½ hours, because there was a magazine for my computer of choice (TI-99/4a) that published high scores in its back pages, and I was desperately trying to beat some guy from Holland. But he had 11 million or so, I seem to recall.
DeleteDamn him.
Five and a half hours, that's quite something...
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I can happily kill a couple of hours, usually after a stressful day when I just don't want to have to think too much, playing Candy Crush. Only for myself - nothing competitive - just a bit of mindless distraction. And I like the visuals.
I know what you mean. The trouble is, I struggle to not get competitive about such games.
DeleteI spent a fair amount of my youth on various computer consoles. As I approached my late teens, I started to realise how much time they sucked out of my life. There was so much else I wanted to spend that time on (primarily writing) so I went cold turkey. I'm glad I did.
ReplyDeleteI had enforced cold turkey, by the obsolescence of my computer...
Delete