Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column, the 17th of its kind. Coming to you from the easternmost part of Canada. Ish. Where moving trucks are literally about to arrive nearly eight weeks after I did, so let’s crack on with the theme tune!
(FOR LISTENERS. OBVS)
THE FREE BIT
This week’s free bit was sparked by last week’s comments section, where we were waxing lyrical about arcade memories after my big memory tickle about how I discovered Frogger in Great Yarmouth.
Paul Graham posted this.
“I love the chat about the Arbroath arcade as I grew up with the Beachfront Amusements in Stonehaven not exactly a million miles away. I bet you had better games, but we did have the full Outrun, tilting sit-in car and all that. And we got a free games day in the Christmas holidays every year! I eventually got banned for putting fags out on the machines. I was a moron.”
What a great tale of an arcade life well lived! I don’t remember O Brien’s having Outrun but by the time that came out, 1986, I had pretty much left Arbroath and was hanging out in Perth and Edinburgh, listening to The Jam and The Smiths and trying to get served underage in pubs. It was the start of my fallow videogame playing years until I went to Bristol University and got hooked on a futuristic American Football game with robots called Cyberball which kept me going until a certain video games TV show came calling when I was 21.
(PIC: This. All the rage in the Bristol Uni Student Union in 88-91)
So maybe O Brien’s did have Outrun? Maybe it was similarly maltreated by smoking youths? And maybe there was an Arbroath version of Paul Graham who also got banned for putting out cigarettes on machines?
Maybe every town had their Paul Graham, and at some point, there is going to be a weird and difficult to understand movie about this phenomenon brought to you by the makers of The Matrix or that wonderful recent one Everywhere And All At Once.
But what I want to know is this: did they all smoke the same brand of cigarettes? And what brand was it?
I was always a Marlboro Lights man, and this brings me to the topic of cigarettes and video games. Was that not the biggest waste of cigarettes ever? Unless you actually had the cigarette in your mouth while you played, which is pretty hardcore. Even those classic rock guitarists who smoked while playing: Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison to name but four, they stuck the cigarette into the neck of their guitar under the strings while actually playing. Otherwise, you would put the cigarette down in an ashtray or, in Paul’s case, on the side of the lovely new Outrun machine in Beachfront Amusements in Stonehaven. Which would also have been a challenge, seeing as it was one of the tilting ones. And by the time you reached a smokeable break in the game? Most of the cigarette would have gone.
I reckon, and I haven’t seen the official statistics, the average number of draws on a cigarette while playing videogames was two. One when you lit it up before playing and one when you looked down and went, “Oh shit, my fag’s nearly done!” And you took a last draw that was mostly filter.
That’s if you even got there in time. I remember smoking a lot of cigarettes while playing videogames in the early nineties, in my one bedroom basement flat in Notting Hill. Sitting for hours playing Sensible Soccer with my mate Sad Andy, and completely forgetting about the cigarette, leaving the butt itself to catch fire, which led to what was always an overfull ashtray starting to smoulder like a funeral pyre. I can still smell that acrid odour now and it makes me want to puke.
(PIC Don’t smoke and play)
Do YOU have any tales of cigarettes and videogames back in the day? Let me know in the comments section. Which is sadly open only to paying subscribers. You can become one at any time by clicking the link in the substack page which will grant you access to the rest of this column podcast thing, which is approx FIVE TIMES the length of this. Otherwise, that is it for this week’s free part. Keep it little, keep it old, keep it purple.
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #17 FREE