What's Your Gaming Gateway Drug?

Gamer's don't tend to be overly sentimental types. In fact, I think that it is easiest to stereotype gamers as your more superficial type of individuals. If you think about it, and you probably haven't, gamers are always looking for games that are better looking than the previous generation. Often, as it is with todays gaming business model, there tends to be less time spent on making gaming a cerebral experience and more time spent making them look better. Surely, this qualifies the gaming industry as being focussed on those more superficial aspects of life, because ugly lefties are continually telling us that beauty is only skin deep.

Having been a superficial gamer for a while and keeping the recent Kotaku news item in mind about the PSP I played that game which I consider to be my gateway gaming drug ... Elevator Action.

Elevator Action wasn't the first game that I played. If my memory is correct we had an Atari 2600 for quite some time before I played Elevator Action. We had a lot of games on the Atari including Pitfall, the unfortunate ET game and the sadly addictive Miner 2049er. After the Atari we were told that the Commodore C16 was replacing the Commodore 64 by a dodgy salesperson in Myers. This meant that we were stuck with an inferior gaming system for some time before we could afford the legendary C64. Somewhere in between I played the arcade game Elevator Action.

Elevator Action is a very simple platform game. You start at the top of the building equipped with a pistol and devestating jump. You have to descend all the way to the bottom of the building and as you go you have to unlock specially marked doors to advance to the next building. As you opened more buildings the levels became more difficult. An extremely simple concept. There wasn't a complicated back story to the game. There was not a distressed princess being held captive by an oversized gorilla. The world wasn't going to end if you didn't achieve your goal. The only place where I knew the game existed was at roller skating joint in the town near us. I didn't particularly spend any time going on arcade crawls as we weren't allowed as kids to go to these "seedy" places which were arcades. Generally noted for being good places to score drugs at the time. This didn't really change where I lived until Timezone was opened locally and presented a "family focussed" arcade. The other more dingy places still ran for many years afterwards but never managed to clean up their images. Because I knew the game was located at the roller skating place and this was a family sanctioned establishment I was always asking if I could go roller skating.

This was really the start of a minor obsession with video games. During this entire time my love of Elevator Action has not faded. I would never say that I was an expert or master of the game. Far from it. I purchased Taito Legends on the PC just because it contained Elevator Action. A small bonus is that this collection also includes the original Space Invaders. I always install Taito Legends on a new notebook when I get it and Elevator Action is the game that I turn to when I just want to have some fun playing a game.

Gamers talk a lot about 'replayability' adding value to the purchase price of a game but I don't necessarily agree. Of all the many games that I have played and finished during my lifetime there are not many that I have gone back to and replayed. Fallout 2, Diablo 2, Titan Quest, Halo (the original), are just a few. How many gamers actually go back and replay games?

There is no denying that we often sugar coat our childhood. Those things which we loved as children seem to have been better than they actually were. As though childhood itself provided the necessary rose coloured glasses to make life seem that little bit better than it actually was. However, I still enjoy playing Elevator Action. There is no pretension to what the game actually is. For me this is the game which started the addiction many years ago. Like many junkies it is difficult to get the same sort of hit from gaming. The high is not as high and you feel as though you play the games just to bring some normality back to your life. The technology used to create your drug of choice has become better but somehow the effects don't last as long.