Robotron. It's a video game from 1982. The time when a family holiday meant spending ages in an arcade looking for cool graphics and spacey sounds. I'd played all the classics - the first Space Invaders I laid hands on was in my Dad's Working-Man's Club on a Sunday afternoon. My brother and I played together, me moving the base and he hitting fire.
Graphics improved and sounds got better - Asteroids, Galaxians, Gorf, and then a new level was reached with Defender. Complex controls, multiple aliens with their evil agenda. Increasing difficulty level. Explosions like we'd not heard before.
But then came Robotron. No fire buttons - just two joysticks, one for each hand. You could move left and shoot right, or up, or down. Shoot the evil robotrons that were trying to kill the last humans alive. Save the humans. Don't get shot. Each new level brought new types of robotrons with new ways to kill you. It got difficult very quickly.
I had a couple of versions of Robotron for home computers. There was a ZX Spectrum version called Wild West Hero which had a Western theme (you were a cowboy shooting bandits in a field of cacti), and an official Robotron for the C64. On my Atari ST there was Llamatron, a typically ridiculous re-visioning by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft featuring coke cans, cigarette papers, hamburgers, and cutlery.
With the increasing power of home PCs came the ability to simulate arcade machines. The Mame project has developed software that can run as thousands of different games. Robotron is one of these. The first thing I ran when I first installed Mame was not Pacman, but Robotron. Now I had real arcade Robotron in front of me, and it didn't need a supply of 10p pieces.
I installed it on my little Sony Vaio so I could play on the go. And the legends on the control keys wore out pretty quickly. I scored higher than my teenage self ever did on the full-size machines, and pretty soon level 9 was my target. After a while getting past that was easy, and to be expected. I was scoring a few hundred thousand.
Then about a year ago I moved to the School of Health and Medicine and got a shiny new desktop running Ubuntu. So I put Mame and Robotron on it, and it had the speed to play it in full-screen mode. Things got a bit easier, and the legends on the control keys succumbed to the same fate as those on my Vaio. Good job I don't need to see the keys to type these days.
I would play a game or two every night before going home. My rationale for this was that I needed to exercise my rapid reactions after a day of sitting and thinking, and that I also needed some finger exercise with a different set of muscles from those used in a day's typing. But really I did it for fun. Eventually my high scores increased until I was on 500,000s. With the occasional foray even higher. After about a year I had scored in the 900,000s on a few occasions. Hitting the million mark looked possible.
And last night I did it. Level 43. Score 1142900. I took a screen grab. I tweeted the fact. I cycled home and wondered if I ever needed to play it again.
Of course I'm playing again - in fact tonight before I go home I shall have my Friday game and toast the "Vid Kidz" programming team who made it!