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Although Deus Ex Machina was a fascinating experiment, I much preferred Alter Ego, published by Activision in 1986. Here, you controlled the progress of an ‘accident’ born inside the ‘machine’, trying to keep it away from the Defect Police (voiced by Frankie Howerd) who want to terminate it. I explored Deus Ex Machina, which came with an audio tape to be played alongside it, narrated by Ian Dury, actor Donna Bailey, E P Thompson and others. 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.

Alter ego game family