Ferry came to ‘t Hoekje on Wednesday afternoon, in his Vitesse scarf and his gold chain, and stood at the back of the queue for twenty minutes without saying anything.
He watched.
He watched the kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins) on the edge of the cabinet.
He watched Tim clear HET KASTEEL (The Castle) and the four ghosts do their chase across the screen.
He watched Hennie, who’d come in at the end of his shift, stand behind Tim with his arms folded and his broodje kroket (croquette) and make small noises of disapproval every time Tim went near the red ghost.
He watched Joop at the fryer, frying faster than any snackbar man had any right to on a Wednesday.
Then he came over to the table by the wall, where Max was sitting with his schrift (exercise book), and sat down opposite him without asking.
“The big kid from Rheden,” Ferry said.
“Comes to me every Saturday.
Spends five guilders.
Last two Saturdays, he’s spent one and gone.
I asked him where he’s going.
He said, a snackbar in Presikhaaf.
With a game nobody’s got.”
He looked at the cabinet.
“I said, bring it to me first.
You remember?”
“I remember.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.”
Ferry rubbed his moustache.
Max waited for him to be angry.
He didn’t seem angry.
He seemed like a man who had just done a sum in his head and didn’t like the answer, but respected it.
“Joop,” Ferry said, “has had a fruit machine in that corner for eleven years.
Never once did I think, there’s competition.” He shook his head slowly.
“I want one.”
“A Pac-Man?”
“No.
Not a Pac-Man.
If I get a Pac-Man, the kids come to me for a Pac-Man and they stop coming here, and Joop sends his mother round.” He leaned forward.
“A different one.
Your own.
A game nobody’s got, at Lucky Star.”
Donkey Kong, Max thought.
“Donkey Kong,” said Otto, at the same moment.
* * *
Ferry had something he hadn’t had before.
He had a dead cabinet.
It was in the back of Lucky Star, behind the plastic-strip curtain, among the boxes of kwartje (quarter-guilder coin) rolls and a broken flipperkast with its glass cracked.
A racing game from the importer in Rotterdam, GRAND PRIX 80, upright, in a cabinet painted to look like a chequered flag.
The game board had died in the summer.
Ferry had been told a new one would cost him two and a half thousand guilders.
“The board’s dead,” Ferry said.
“The screen’s not.
The screen’s good.
Colour.”
Max looked at the screen.
It was an arcade monitor, not a television.
No tuner, no aerial socket, no sound.
Just a tube and a chassis and a plug on the back with five wires coming out of it.
Red, green, blue, sync and ground, he thought.
“Which means,” said Otto, with something like delight, “it doesn’t need a PAL signal at all.
You don’t have to encode the colour.
You just tell it how much red, how much green and how much blue, on three wires, and it shows you.”
That’s easier than black and white.
“That’s much easier than black and white.
You were doing it the hard way.
You’ve been doing it the hard way since August.”
I chose the hard way.
“You did,” said Otto.
“And now you know exactly how a picture works, which is why this will take you a week instead of six.”
Ferry was watching his face.
“Well?”
“Same deal as Joop,” Max said.
“Fifty-fifty.
You supply the cabinet and the screen.
I build the game and the board.
If anything breaks, I fix it.”
“Fifty-fifty,” said Ferry, “is what the importer gives me.
And the importer doesn’t fix anything.” He held out his hand across the table.
It had a heavy gold ring on the little finger.
“Done.”
“Parts,” said Otto, on the bus home.
“A second Z80, four EPROMs, RAM, the palette chip, another AY, resistors, sockets, veroboard.
A hundred and eighteen guilders, at Ruiter’s prices.
It’s in the kasboek (cash book).
I’d like you to know that I wrote it in the kasboek.”
I know you did.
“I just like saying kasboek.”
* * *
The tree came up that night, in the shed, while Max was drawing the colour circuit on squared paper.
It hadn’t shown him anything new since the Blue Band tub.
Now a fourth node opened on the side of Node 1, small, blue, like a leaf on a branch.
1d: COLOUR
Three wires.
How much of each.
Count it, don’t guess it.
“That’s quite a good hint,” Otto said.
“For once.”
It’s always a good hint.
“Usually it’s vague.
This one is very nearly a sentence.”
He did the colour with resistors.
Three bits for red, three for green, two for blue, because the human eye was worse at blue.
That was eight bits per dot, two hundred and fifty-six colours, and each colour came out of a small chip that held a table, a palette.
A tile said I want colour 4, and the palette said colour 4 is this much red and this much green and this much blue.
The resistors turned that into three voltages on three wires.
The monitor did the rest.
Sanne came out and watched the first test.
It was a box, red, on a black screen.
Then a green one.
Then a blue one.
“It’s colour,” she said.
“It’s colour.”
“Puntje’s in colour.”
“Puntje’s in colour.”
She went inside and came back out with Oma, who stood in the doorway of the shed in her coat and looked at the three boxes on the Grand Prix monitor and said, “Very nice,” and then, after a second, “Is it supposed to smell like that?”
It was supposed to smell like that.
It was the flux.
* * *
The game was harder than Pac-Man.
Much harder.
Pac-Man was one screen, and one maze, and things that moved along corridors.
Donkey Kong was four screens, and each was its own world.
Girders that sloped, so that barrels rolled down them and you had to jump them.
Ladders, some of them broken.
A big ape at the top, throwing things.
A girl at the very top, waiting.
Then the conveyor stage, which the home versions in his old life had always left out because their machines couldn’t do it: belts that moved, carrying pies, and fire that walked.
Then the elevators.
Then the stage with the rivets, where you had to pull out every one until the whole structure fell and the ape fell with it.
The jump was the hardest thing.
In the original, the jump was stiff.
You committed and that was it.
Max made it a little softer.
The same arc, but you could nudge it slightly in the air, one dot a frame.
You still had to be good.
But you didn’t have to be a robot.
He made the ladders less fiddly too.
In the original you had to be exactly lined up with a ladder to climb it, and if you were one dot off, nothing happened and a barrel hit you.
Max gave it two dots either way.
“That’ll make the ladders feel kind,” said Otto.
They should feel kind.
The ape’s not kind.
The ladders should be.
“You’ve thought about this before.”
For twenty years.
Femke came on Saturday afternoon, with her bag of paint tubes and a sketchbook, and sat on the floor of the shed and watched him play the first stage for ten minutes without saying anything.
“Why’s it called Donkey Kong?”
“Because the ape’s stubborn,” Max said.
“Like a donkey.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s a bit stupid.”
“I like it,” said Femke.
She opened her sketchbook.
“What does the little man look like?”
“Small.
Red cap, blue overalls. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
A moustache.”
“Why a moustache?”
“Because there aren’t enough dots for a mouth.”
Femke stopped with her pencil above the page and looked at him.
“That’s actually clever,” she said, after a moment, as if it had cost her something.
She drew him in forty minutes.
Then the ape, which took her two hours, because she said the ape had to look angry but not evil, like somebody’s grumpy uncle.
Then the girl at the top.
Then she painted all three on the side of the Grand Prix cabinet over the chequered flag, the ape huge, beating his chest, the girders running diagonally from corner to corner across the panel, and the little man halfway up a ladder with his arms out and his cap falling off.
Down in the bottom corner, small, the size of a guilder, a single white dot.
“For luck,” said Femke, before he could ask.
* * *
Henk came out on Thursday night.
He didn’t say anything when he came in.
He stood in the doorway in his shirt sleeves for a while and looked at the Grand Prix cabinet with its back off, and the new board on the bench, and the monitor chassis with its tube.
Then he came over and looked at the chassis.
“Don’t touch the flyback,” he said.
“I know.”
“I know you know.
I’m saying it.”
He sounds like you, Max thought.
“I’m flattered,” said Otto.
“I think.”
Henk pulled the crate out from under the bench and sat on it, and picked up the multimeter, and checked the five wires on the monitor plug, one after the other, with his big hands very steady.
He didn’t ask what they were for.
He looked at the readings and nodded and gave the multimeter back.
“Sync’s fine,” he said.
He sat there for another hour, saying nothing at all, while Max worked on the barrels.
He watched.
When Max got the first barrel to roll down the first girder and fall off the end and bounce, Henk made a noise, one short huff through his nose.
It might have been a laugh.
At ten he got up and put the crate back.
“Bed,” he said, and went in.
* * *
They took it into town on Saturday the seventeenth in the back of the Opel, with the seats folded down and the cabinet lying on its back on a blanket, its legs out of the open boot, tied in with washing line.
Henk drove at forty all the way.
Ferry came out of Lucky Star to meet them and carried one end, and Henk carried the other, and Max walked behind with the board in a Hema bag.
They put it by the door, where RUIMTEAANVAL!
used to be.
RUIMTEAANVAL!
went further back.
Max plugged in the board.
The monitor lit up.
It was the first time he’d seen it in the dark of a speelhal, with the smoke and the other screens and the stripes of light from the window.
The colours were so bright they almost hurt.
Red girders on black.
A brown ape.
A little man in a red cap and blue overalls, standing at the bottom of the screen, very small, looking up.
A tune played, low and heavy, like something stamping.
The ape climbed a ladder at the top of the screen, carrying the girl.
At the top he stamped, and the girders bent under his weight into slopes.
HOE HOOG KUN JE KOMEN?
(How high can you get?) it said, across the middle of the screen.
The big kid from Rheden was the first one in the queue.
Tim was the second.
Ferry stood at the change counter with his arms folded and watched a crowd form round his front door that he hadn’t seen since 1982.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then he came over to Max, who was standing out of the way by the cracked flipperkast.
“The importer’s man was in this morning,” Ferry said, quietly, with his eyes on the crowd.
“The one from Rotterdam.
Early.
Before you came.
He was supposed to look at RUIMTEAANVAL!.
I told him it’s fixed.
He looked at it, and then he looked at me, and he asked who fixed it.”
“What did you say?”
“I said a friend,” said Ferry.
“He wanted to know which friend.
He wrote something in a little book.” He looked at Max sideways.
“He’ll be back.
They don’t like it when people fix things.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk