My Gaming History: Part 5 - Becoming an Adult

The prospect of leaving home to go to university was both exciting and terrifying to me.

Sure, there were aspects of living at home with my parents that I'd found somewhat frustrating, but on the whole I'd had a good life and been well taken care of. What stood ahead of me was a big challenge to my self-confidence… but a challenge I knew I'd have to take on sooner or later.

I had a certain amount of time to adjust to my new environment. Since I'm a musician, I'd signed up for the pre-term orchestral course, which involved staying in one of the university's halls of residence for a week, some hardcore orchestra rehearsal, concluding with a performance of two symphonies: Shostakovich's 5th and Beethoven's 7th.

I say I had time to adjust because this somewhat more "controlled" environment meant that I came into contact with people with whom I had at least something in common, even if that thing was music rather than gaming. I particularly hit it off with a young woman named Cat, who I got to know in the lift up to our respective rooms after deciding to myself that I was finally going to get over this perpetual anxiety and just talk to someone new. (I didn't get over it. But I still talked to her.)

Following the orchestra course, it transpired that Cat was living in the halls of residence one building over from where I eventually ended up, so we saw a fair amount of one another. She'd come and hang out in my room and was quite happy to watch me play PlayStation titles such as Final Fantasy VIII and Point Blank, and Dreamcast games like Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi.

Throughout the first week of our time at university, we all got to know a few people. Besides Cat, I established that the two other boys Chris and Sam in my mixed flat were also into games to varying degrees, as was the guy named Tim who lived in the flat underneath us. Tim spent a lot of time hanging out with us because the remainder of his flat was made up of foreign students who didn't talk to him. None of us were quite sure what to make of him to begin with — this "invader" in what had quickly become a private space we all felt rather protective of — and I found myself even more confused after determining I had feelings for Cat, only to witness her getting together with Tim at the Fresher's Ball at the conclusion of our first week.

Anyway, despite my initial difficulty in dealing with aspects of the situation — which I acknowledge was entirely my own fault for being too scared to do anything — both Cat and Tim became great, close friends of mine, and once we all moved out of halls in our second year and into shared houses instead, I spent a lot of time at their house — where, as it transpired, my flatmate Chris also ended up living.

Tim, like me, had a Nintendo 64, so it was a pretty regular occurrence for a number of us to bundle around to his place and play some multiplayer games. We spent a great deal of time playing Mario Kart 64 (which has always been my least favourite in the series, so I enjoyed this by far the least out of all the possibilities we had on offer), GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Diddy Kong Racing and Duke Nukem 64. And we always, always had a great time, particularly if alcohol was involved. Which it frequently was. I have especially fond memories of a four-player Perfect Dark deathmatch with the maximum number of "FistSims" bumping up the player count, causing pretty much the entire match to unfold with blurred vision thanks to that game's pathetic melee attacks.

My former flatmate Sam had opted to live with some people from his course — Geography Becky and a few others — but spent a fair amount of time round at my house playing games. Rather than the multiplayer affairs we indulged in at Tim's house — which Sam was often a part of — when it was just the two of us we tended to play single-player titles with which it was easy to mess around. Grand Theft Auto III was a particular favourite at the time, as this was an absolutely ideal game to fire up after a boozy night at the student union, since there was just something magical about the experience of creating freeform carnage.

The drunkenness that preceded these sessions wasn't entirely without consequence, of course, and our love of Grand Theft Auto actually had a bit of an impact on our behaviour. It didn't make us violent or anything like that, I hasten to add, before you start raising your eyebrows; rather, being drunk often encouraged us to behave like the silent protagonist in that game just doing his basic actions — running with that slightly wooden PS2-era animation; awkwardly jumping without really getting any height; falling off things and rolling around on the floor.

On one particular occasion, Sam made a heroic leap onto my neighbour's fence as we approached my house, and unfortunately my neighbour was apparently looking out of the window at the time.

"Oi!" came the working-class council house voice from an upstairs window somewhere. "Geddown from there! I'll call th' police on you!" Sam got down, and we went inside laughing at the ridiculous situation as obnoxiously drunk students are wont to do.

"I'll call th' police on you" became a standard response to disagreements after this. On one particularly memorable occasion, I sent a drunken message to Sam, only I messed it up without realising it before I sent it. This was the pre-smartphone era, so it was all typed out using a keypad and thus easy to make such errors with. The eventual message read "THIS IS  POLICE. YOU ARE ARRESTED. TH" Evidently I had attempted to write "This is the police" but somehow had advanced the cursor to the end of the sentence while attempting to type "the" and consequently fucked up the rest of the message.

As you might expect, "YOU ARE ARRESTED" also became a private joke, and was often a standard response to, say, getting beaten in Mario Kart or suchlike.

My student days were probably the best opportunity I had to take part in some real "social" gaming with local multiplayer and shared experiences in single player games. I'm glad I had the chance to… and I'm a little sad that this sort of thing isn't a part of my life any more. But life moves on, I guess.