Luke Alexander's blog

I hope we don’t lose the icons of the early days of video gaming.

Once I assumed that these were safely sheltered in the balmy lands of retro, there to live out a gentle and dignified existence on the front of t-shirts.  But the generations of men are like the gently-falling waves of alien invaders, and before too long I think those who think kindly upon Pong, upon Mario, upon the ascii world of Rogue, will have dwindled.

Or perhaps they belong in the past, slightly legendary.  They are good candidates for a new mythology – a digital mythology to populate the distant mist of a digital age.

The punishments set in motion by the Olympian gods of Greece and Rome are nothing, for example, next to the many tasks of Pacman.  Haunted by the ghostly sherbet Eumenides, and consumed by a limitless and ravaging hunger, he can fail to invoke pity in no onlooker.  Like Tantalus, surrounded by sweet water and overhung with succulent fruits which he can never consume, cherries flicker before our semi-circular hero but he is never sated; like Sisyphus his tasks are never complete, but reset as he nears the summit.

I like the bleakness of these myths – they seem to tally with what a myth should be.  And such powerful imagery!  The lone man defending blank nothingness against alien invaders; the futile destruction of ever increasing meteors.