It wasn’t just Frankie that invited me to live an 8-bit life. Then, I discovered Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the magnificently bizarre collaboration between Futurist record label ZTT and coders Denton Designs, where you had to help ‘Frankie’ develop a personality by solving puzzles and mastering various sub-games before he could escape Mundanesville and enter the Pleasuredome. I tried to get into the mysterious world of Hacker, in which you had to break into a mainframe computer: it came without instructions and opened with a stark ‘Logon Please’, crashing if you failed to guess the password before letting you in via another route. I was intrigued by, but too young to understand space trading epic Elite or the surreal 3D world of The Sentinel, but engaged with some interesting ideas elsewhere. The ones I preferred, besides shoot-’em-ups, football and platform games, were those with an unusual concept. (This would not have been wasteful.) I spent most of mine, as a deeply depressed boy in a small Surrey town, in my bedroom, watching football, writing lyrics for terrible punk bands, furtively cross-dressing whilst suppressing my wish that I’d been born female, and playing computer games, mainly on my Commodore 64.
Not drinking, smoking, doing drugs and having sex.
I knew at the time that I was wasting my teens.
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