Space War, he says. The first computer game ever invented. The platform is a PDP-1. It was made in 1962 and influenced the first commercial arcade video games.
He’s animated, speaks with excitement. Loves his videos and facts.
I like this room best, I say.
Thanks.
You’re obviously doing really well to have a place like this. To employ all of these people.
I did do well. But we’ve only just begun. We’re developing our own games but we’re at the early stages.
That’s exciting, I say.
Yeah … I needed to grow the business. I’ve always had ideas about games, I saved them up over time. Think I got as high as I could go as a YouTuber. It’s a competitive arena. Feels like now’s the perfect time to move into my own business. Uncle Tony was the business brains, saw me playing on YouTube all the time and saw the possibilities before anyone else did. He got me the endorsements, sponsorship, merchandise, all that stuff. Got me from just being a kid who liked playing games to … well … He throws his arms up to display his surroundings.
To an older kid who likes playing games, I say.
He laughs. Yeah, maybe. An older kid who likes developing games. Hopefully successful games. Tony thinks I should have kept going as I was, you know, Rooster on YouTube, just playing other people’s games, but I had to give it a go. I took the risk. It needs to work now.
Suddenly the business classes and inspirational quotes make sense to me.
How’s it going, I ask.
Honestly, slowly. I was hoping to have launched the first game by now. It’s not moving as fast as I’d like.
I wonder why, I say.
He misses my sarcasm. That’s the reality of business I guess, he says.
Hard to move fast when your staff are busy playing a Pac-Man tournament I suppose.
Oh that. Well, he shrugs, then lights up. Want to see some of my sample games, he asks, excited. He goes through his stuff like a little boy showing me his toys in his bedroom, talking fast and quickly about ideas and how they’re not right but they’re almost there and please give your honest opinion but the blood and guts in this one needs to be better and I was thinking of literally being able to blow heads off but being more Tarantino about it and make it animated instead of real because the age is, well I don’t know, we’re debating that. This character literally got his sound from a food waste disposal in a sink, this guy is based on my physics teacher who was a monster.
And on he goes. Flicking through USBs and CDs and opening and closing contraptions, flicking through settings with one remote control and then another.
I should be getting back to work now but I really don’t want to. Even the van with the hazards on isn’t tempting me. I put my head back on the soft leather couch and close my eyes as he sits down beside me and plays, saying things like, it won’t be as bad as this, and this guy is going to be more muscular, have a thicker neck, I think he should be bald, maybe a tattoo on his head. A web or a spider or something – I don’t know yet. And this will have different music and this guy is going to be a girl and that car is going to be a helicopter with an option to turn it into a boat, and here you’ll have your inventory and there you’ll get the bomb but it won’t have this it’ll be more like that.
I could sit here all day. It reminds me of the Rooster videos I watched on the train from Kerry; he’s right here, live and in person, speaking in the same excited breathless way. So many words, not enough time to say them in. More grown-up but not really. A deeper voice. Still with the same child-like enthusiasm. Suddenly he goes quiet and I open my eyes. He’s looking at me.
Boring you, he asks softly.
Not at all. Hungover.
He smiles. I’d really like to know what you got up to last night.
I think of the fella I went home with. I can’t picture his face. But I can picture other parts of him. I feel sick.
No, I say, you really wouldn’t.
He was that bad, he guesses. Will you see him again.
I look at him, study him. What would he think of me if I told him I’d slept with a stranger, a fella I don’t know and whose name I can’t remember. That it was far from the first time I’d done that. What would he think if I told him I pose nude for money. Would he think I am disgusting, would I shatter his innocent little gaming world. Peter Pan playing with his lost boys. But there’s something a bit lost about him. I feel right at home with him.
What, he says.
Our faces are so close I can feel his breath on my skin. It’s warm. I smell coffee.
I was just thinking of you as this Peter Pan figure who’s trying to grow up, but it’s like a double-edged sword. You have to keep some part of your childhood, your imagination, in order to do all of this gaming stuff, but then you have to grow up or you’ll end up giving away the best view to everyone else around you.