The Hand of Destiny

One warm spring day in 1979, I was doing what every seventh-grade kid was doing on a warm spring day in America: pumping quarters into games at the video arcade.

My game was Space Invaders. I had a love/hate relationship with that game. It was intense like no other, and its challenges were as relentless as the swarm of aliens that marched steadily down from above. Space Invaders transformed me into a game nut — so much so that for many years I believed I would achieve fame and fortune as a game designer.

Anyway, on the aforementioned warm spring day, I was kicking alien ass like I’d never kicked it before. I was up to 150,000 points and had plenty of lives to go. I danced through the barrage of invaders’ bombs like a hummingbird negotiating a hailstorm. I went from level to level with seeming ease, and several kids were gathered around, watching me sail through game levels they’d never seen before.

I was a hero. A demigod. Adrenaline surged in my veins. I played the controls like a concert pianist working over a well-worn Steinway. I soared on a video-game high, like a Vegas gambler on a 30-hour winning streak.

Then a strange object appeared before my face. I brushed it away, annoyed by the distraction, and went on killing aliens. Then it appeared again. This time I recognized the object as a hand. Two fingers were making a “snip, snip” motion in my face.

My brain, wired up on electronic aggression, assumed the hand belonged to Eugene Spilman. Gene was a smart-ass little punk who had been taunting me at school. He called me “Pink Flamingoes” because I sometimes wore a Pink Floyd T-shirt.

Clearly he was an idiot. But he irritated me, and here he was, interrupting a high point in my young life with some idiotic “snip, snip” crap. So when the hand reappeared, I lashed out with my left fist and smacked him, hard, while shouting, “Get the hell out of here, you son of a bitch!”

Only then did I realize the hand was attached, not to Gene Spilman, but to my mother. She had come into the arcade to tell me it was time to go home. She was making a “snip, snip” motion as if to say, “cut it off.”

Needless to say, my epic game of Space Invaders ended prematurely. A few days later, I tried to convince my mother to allow me to return to the arcade.

Video games are educational, I reasoned. When I was playing games, I explained, I was in training — training to deal with the complexities of a dynamic world and, perhaps most importantly, training for a lucrative career as a game designer. Thus interrupting me while I’m immersed in an intense game of Space Invaders is as unwise as startling a rabbi while he is performing a bris.

Mom was not convinced. The idea that video games could be useful in any way struck her as ludicrous. And if they caused her son to use abusive language, whether that language was aimed at her or not, games were a Bad Thing.

The whole episode explains why, year after year, an Atari game console remained absent from underneath my family’s Christmas tree. As a result, my video game experiences were sorely limited, and I never became the game designer I was fated to be.

In short, I missed my shot at fame and fortune. The game industry exploded and keeps on exploding. The future promises ever-more compelling gaming experiences, and online multiplayer games are creating a whole new category of service provider [see cover story, page 40]. The opportunities are staggering, and I missed out. I’d like to blame it on Gene Spilman, but ultimately I have no one to blame but myself.

It just proves the importance of recognizing destiny’s hand — and taking the correct action when it appears before your eyes.