Fucked-up Kid

My father was a "let's player" long before they invented Youtube or anyone ever used the internet. Back in the mid '80s my parents would use the VCR as their babysitter. And if they didn't have any new cartoons for me to watch, my old man would record random gameplay from his Atari 2600. That's right - my dad would go to work, my mother would go out to do some shopping and my three year old ass was on the couch, while I watched recorded footage of my dad playing some pixellated Atari Tennis or whatever. Great parenting!

I have loved videogames for as long as I can remember. But you can only watch so many hours of 80s videogame footage before your brain starts to melt. So when I was a kid, I'd constantly disappear and my parents never knew where I was. I hung out with the friendly old lady next door, who would feed me potatoes. She boiled a potato, slapped some butter on it and handed me the salt shaker. I explored the neighbourhood and got robbed by the bigger kids, who were all too happy to run off with my Transformers. Genuine 80s Optimus Prime. Bet he's on eBay right now! I'd explore the other side of the neighbourhood and get my tricycle stolen.

No matter whether I came home without my toys or just full of potatoes, my parents would always freak out. Where did you go, why did you run off without telling anybody, don't do this again, blah, blah, blah. I was three and all by myself. Not sure what they expected. In the end they asked the kid next door to stay at our place and watch me when they had to go out. That kid was about ten years old and played with our Atari console all day, so I'd still run off and nobody would even notice.

My parents weren't exactly what you'd call role models. My mother was a recovering alcoholic and my dad would make sure that everbody knew, including her own kids. They fought a lot. And when I say 'fought', I'm not talking about harsh words and forcing each other to sleep on the couch. I mean straight up domestic martial arts! But while they hated each other, they both cared about me in their own fucked up way. When I was about a year old, my mother abducted me. Just disappeared with me one day to live somewhere else for a while. My father said that when my mother finally came back, I walked, talked and he barely even recognized me anymore.

My dad showed his affection by buying me stuff. I had the world's biggest train set. A working phone. All the brand name action figures you could sell for hilarious amounts of money today. What I didn't have was an actual father. Looking back, I believe he tried to bond, but simply didn't know how. When I was five years old he showed me his favourite scene from Nightmare on Elm Street. Some chick was in the bathroom, the sink sprouted a pair of skeletal hands and I think she might have seen Freddy in the mirror or something? Let's just say I didn't sleep for a while and I'm still showering with the curtain open until this day.

Hey son, wanna see something really awesome?

I didn't refer to my parents as mom and dad. I called them by their names. Apparently my mother wanted it that way. She also didn't want me to go to kindergarten, so I was this creepy-ass kid who stayed at home all day, watched videos and escaped twice a week out of sheer boredom. Picture a brat showing up on your doorstep asking for potatoes. My uncle would always say, "I can't believe you turned out so normal despite your parents." Last time I heard him say that was at my dad's funeral a couple years ago. And he's right! If feeling depressed, suffering from crippling social anxiety and insomnia are normal, then I'm the very definition of normal!

From a very early age I would randomly feel this overwhelming sadness, completely out of nowhere. One day I just sat in the middle of the room and cried for no reason. My dad asked what's going on and I made up some bullshit excuse. I think I told him I was scared of the people on our money or something. Have you ever seen old-timey German money? That shit is scary!

I may have lied, but my explanation was fucking plausible!

Truth is, I had no idea why I was crying. I felt sad for no reason. And because life wasn't interesting enough already, I also heard 'ghosts' for a while. Completely out of nowhere, I'd suddenly hear what sounded like a split second of a random conversation. Voice fragments. Like somebody was loudly talking nearby, but you only catch a second of it, so you don't know who they are or what they are talking about. I'd ask my parents if they heard anything, but they never did. Completely normal!

Videogames were really primitive back then. Most of our games were wanking simulators, dressed up as sports games. Basically, you had to vigorously slam the joystick back and forth in order to get the guy on the screen to run. Sometimes you also had to press a button to jump over a hurdle or throw a disc. Things got considerably more fun the day my old man brought home a Sega Master System.

My mother was not amused.

These new games looked so realistic in comparison to what I was used to, I was too scared to even play them. This may sound ridiculous to you now, but I basically moved from this

Aaaand now the Moon Patrol tune is stuck in my head.

to this

The better Adventure Island.

What my dad and my brother saw was an exciting new videogame. I saw a cartoon character, who would freaking die if I made the wrong move, walked into a monster, failed to collect enough fruit in time or jumped into a pit. I was terrified! I was only five years old and there was no way I was ready to take on so much responsibility! I couldn't be in charge of somebody else's life!

But the harsh reality of life made me realize that videogames are one hell of a drug. You see, I eventually turned six and had to go to school. And school was awful! The teacher would constantly call me out for my shitty handwriting. The kids who used to be my playground friends would gang up on me and beat me up. Because you either follow the bully around or you become his victim. My time in school wasn't any better or worse than the school days of millions of other kids my age. But to me it was the scariest shit I had known at that point in my life. I didn't know how to socialize, I didn't get along with the teachers or the other kids, I didn't like having to practice how to write a cursive V that didn't look like total ass. Thank god our Master System was waiting for me at home. Sweet escapism!

I took on the evil Noza empire in Zillion, my version of Zelda and Metroid in a house that didn't believe in Nintendo. Zillion was a huge sales platform for Sega, they even based a whole Anime on it and modeled their light phaser gun peripheral thingie after the zillion gun.

You had Simon Belmont and Samus Aran. I had J.J., Apple and Champ.

I ran insane lap times on Enduro Racer, beat all the bosses in Kung-Fu Kid and saved pixellated 8bit space in Astro Warrior. For the first time in my life I was seriously good at something!

Games didn't just give me an ego boost. They also made it a lot easier to get along with other people. My brother and I used to hate each other when we were little. I told my mother to take him back to the hospital after her pregnancy. But we were one hell of a team on Double Dragon. We finally had something in common! Cousins, uncles, the neighbour's kids - everyone would hang out and play, because we had the only Master System around. I didn't have any friends in school, but back at home I was popular. I knew how to beat all the games and it was simply a lot of fun to sit back with a controller and shoot some aliens together. Videogames bring people together.