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Earlier this month I celebrated the 30th anniversary of my first published article - tips for Atari's Pole Position coin-op that I wrote as a teen for Computer and Video Games magazine. I still remember the impact that game had on me the first time I sat inside its cabinet. Today it looks comically blocky, sounds like an angry hornet, and handles like a series of multiple-choice questions - but in 1983, my imagination anti-aliased its chunky pixels, conjured F1 music from its furious buzzing, and fooled me into believing I really was driving a racing car at 200mph. It made my heart pound and I left the machine almost breathless.Laugh all you like, but that was a magical video gaming moment for me. Something that I believe happens to all of us, when time, space, and game come together to create a memory so special, your subconscious instinctively kicks in and records it in super high definition so you can savour it for the rest of your life.
Over the years I've had other moments like that, such as the first time I encountered Super Mario Bros. and inadvertently disappeared down a pipe and discovered there was a secret world beneath it. The indescribable feeling of my mind blowing will forever be with me. Or when I realised I could - and did - walk all the way to the top of that mountain I could see in the distance of the first MMO I logged into. Once it happened when I wasn't even playing - when I saw Gran Turismo for the first time, realised what I was looking at, and immediately wanted it more than any other game I'd seen before. To me, it's instances like these that define my favourite pastime.
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