From the edge of the window in my room till the low dirty line of horizon, the compact world of my childhood has been crowded with tall concrete apartment blocks and squat brick shacks altogether compressed into tightly woven streets – like an island in the middle of nowhere with one narrow potholed road leading outside. We were abandoned there, under dust of summer and winter snow, but up here, on the 8th floor, in my room, I was safe.
Underneath, the streets led to a school, a shop, the bus stop – each a place ripe with anxiety. Sometimes, we would make awful trips across the massive city, weaving endlessly, as if trying to get entangled and lost on purpose in a district even more grim and desolate. On arrival, after passing through a musky corridor with just one dim and blinking yellow lightbulb, the door would open and hand crushing handshakes from adults would follow, along with the smells of cabbage, potatoes, tobacco creating a lump in my throat. Soon, I knew this food will have to be swallowed, but the 8 year old body rebelled nearly twisting the stomach into a knot of rejection. I would try my best to spread the food in a thin layer along the plate, swinging my feet on a tall chair in the hope of not being noticed. When a pause at the table would occur I asked to go to toilet and slip away, somewhere into the depth of a labyrinth of apartment filled with heavy lacquered furniture and hand knit curtains hiding the already pale and gray world outside like translucent cobwebs. The apartment was on the ground floor, and the courtyard, the people in it seemed incredibly close, almost peering into the window making the room seem more cramped.
Hidden in the depths of the labyrinth, on a pedestal of a heavy computer desk, adorned with a few small cactuses believed to consume electromagnetic radiation, stood a gray monitor. There, beyond the surface of a thick bowled glass, past the black and white startup screens with blinking cursors, inside folders whose structures and paths I would repeat almost aloud, with a whisper – lay the magic and foreign, amazing alien worlds – games. Their rules unclear to me, all described in latin letters, every executable file holding infinite possibilities, endless new screens and crude sounds piled up into outlandish music pieces.
Somewhere, in a different apartment an older boy has shown me an even more bewildering magic which I have never been allowed to touch. He would use an audio cassette, put the tape into a player, plug it into a keyboard and that one into TV, then press play. Planets, stars, spaceships and images would appear on the screen. An entire galaxy was stored inside the magnetic tape normally fit for an hour of music. Tape, often jammed in the player, bunched up in knots and required rewinding manually. How was it possible to have a whole virtual world on an audio casette? It was called Spectrum.
Most of the images in games were very simple, many looked like children’s drawings. But there were “graphic adventures” – beautifully looking games with many well drawn screens and a great deal of sounds. Their goal was to click on everything and get reactions, but in an order which was forever concealed from the player, so I had to make my own story instead. Some time later there were magazines and thick soft-cover books, read over and over until their corners would dissolve, spines broken completely. These would give “solutions” and at times would translate the entire game, rules, story, all buttons, each line of dialogue.
It was all worthwhile. But the adventure did not begin with the game, in fact it was finding the means to buy one of the Best 500 Games 199something CDs. Each went for a price of three chocolate bars, each found either in a shop which was a glass vitrine-kiosk, walls lined with packages, pressed to the glass with ingenious contraptions of rubbers and paper clips. The downside was the limit of the stock, as every cover has been studied over and over. On weekends, sometimes, there was the market somewhere far. It was a cave of wonders – a large hall filled with tables, all covered with CD jewel cases. And once, I’ve been to a basement, a shop which had a tall shelf, on very top of which a few boxes of licensed games stood – Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight 2, but I’m not sure if it really happened or was simply a dream. It’s just as well, since the games would cost an average of monthly salary of both parents. Then came the task of launching the game. Most of the 500 Best CD’s were full of Rips – games pirated and cut down to a smaller size, with neither music, nor video or sound. Needless to say not everything could work, but figuring out what can was an exciting game in itself.
Time passed, Windows came, then updated. My knowledge of English language improved, games became larger and took many discs. Prices rose, for everything, salaries fell. On TV they’ve shown war. Fallout came out, a pirated edition with a full voice over and translation. A chocolate bar now cost four times more. There were magazines, to aid with choices and from a multitude of those we exchanged among each other, Game.Exe stood out. The writers in it would be responsible for different genres, but each one would inevitably be in character. Action games were illustrated by KMFDM album covers and appropriate language. Not everyone could afford a Pentium MMX and Voodoo cards were a myth. So the 500 Best of discs did not loose their value. And on one of those, I found something.
I prepared for days to arrange this: skipped school, drew the curtains against the now burning sun, locked the door against surprise visits, cracked my fingers and in the emerald blue glow of Norton Commander gathered the files from a bunch of games I never managed to launch. Their unexplored worlds seemed infinitely vast and full of untapped potential. I was perhaps 11 years old. I’ve taken sounds from one game – SFX folder, Music from another – MIDI, some graphics and map-level-sounding files from a dozen others. I crowned it all with an executable file from a pinball game which always worked yet failed to entertain. And I renamed it – game.exe. Then, I put the blinking cursor on it and pressed enter.
By Alexey Vanushkin