By eleven Max was on his bike, heading into town down the Velperweg with the wind against him and the saddle creaking under him.
The bike was a black Gazelle with a back carrier and a bell that didn’t ring.
He was out of breath by the end of the first kilometre, which annoyed him more than it should have.
His legs had plenty of push.
The lungs behind them didn’t.
Every car on the Velperweg was a box with corners.
A bus went past with an advert for Hero jam on the side.
Two boys his age went the other way, both with ghetto blasters strapped to their carriers with elastic, both playing different songs.
“I’ve been thinking,” Otto said.
You don’t sleep, do you.
“I don’t do anything when you’re not using me.
But I’ve been thinking since breakfast.
In your world, by 1990, there were games on that MSX.
Hundreds.
Your YouTube man in Utrecht had a shelf of them.
Here, there’s a household budget and a typing course.”
Maybe nobody in our house was into it.
“Maybe.
Find out.”
At the traffic lights by the Velperplein, a poster had been stapled to a lamppost over an older poster for a circus.
Black and red, photocopied a few times too many.
KICKBOKSEN
Sportschool Tempel, Geitenkamp
Jeugd vanaf 12 jaar: di + do 18.00 uur
fl 25,- per maand
Underneath, a photo of two men in satin shorts, one kicking the other in the thigh.
Max looked at it until the light went green and the woman behind him rang her bell.
In 1990 the kickboxers don’t wrestle, he thought, pushing off.
The judo guys don’t punch.
The wrestlers stay on their mats at the university and the karate people think everyone else is doing it wrong.
“That’s roughly right for your world too,” Otto said.
“The first big tournament where different styles fought each other was in America, in November 1993.”
I’ll be seventeen.
“If it happens here at all.
Everything else in this world is ten years late.”
Max stood on the pedals.
Then maybe somebody gives it a push.
“Twenty-five guilders a month,” Otto said.
“I’m writing it down.”
* * *
The V&D was on the corner where it had always been, and that was the first thing that felt normal.
Revolving doors.
The smell of the cafeteria, coffee and appelgebak, coming up the escalator.
Max rode up to the third floor and walked past the toys, past the kitchenware, to ELEKTRONICA.
Three home computers sat on a table under a sign that said DE COMPUTER VOOR HET HELE GEZIN!
(The computer for the whole family!) A Commodore, a Helder MSX2 and something from Olivetti.
Each one had a printer next to it.
The demo on every screen was the same kind of thing: a spreadsheet with numbers in it, a word processor with Geachte heer, (Dear Sir,) typed at the top and a blinking cursor after it.
A salesman with a name badge that said PETER drifted over.
He had a tie with small yellow ducks on it and the look of a man whose Saturday was going to last forever.
“Looking for something for school?”
“Do these do games?”
Peter looked at him for a second as if he’d asked whether the fridges did games.
“Games,” he said.
“Yeah.
Like, on the screen.
You move a thing around.”
“Oh, you mean telespel.” Peter smiled the way adults smile when a kid says something from before he was born.
“No, no.
That was a fad.
Eighty-two, eighty-three.
Everyone had to have one, and then nobody wanted one, and the shops were stuck with them.
We had a whole wall of them here.
Took us two years to get rid of the stock.”
“What happened?”
“Rubbish, mostly.” He shrugged.
“The games were all the same.
Little blocks bumping into other little blocks.
You’d buy a cassette for forty guilders and it didn’t load.
Kids got bored.
Then the Americans dumped theirs, and Helder pulled out, and that was that.” He knocked on the MSX’s casing like it was a good horse.
“This is what people want now.
You can do your homework on it.
Your mother can do the bookkeeping.”
Max looked at the screen.
Geachte heer, blink, blink.
“Have you got any left?” he said.
“The old ones?”
Peter took him to a metal cage near the escalators marked OPRUIMING (clearance), full of things nobody had bought.
Under a fondue set and a box of Christmas lights was a flat black box with a picture of a happy family on the front.
HELDER VIDEOSPEL G7000.
A sticker on the corner said fl 19,95, and another sticker over it said fl 9,95.
“Been in there since before I started,” Peter said.
“You want it?”
Max had ten guilders in his pocket.
He’d need them for things he didn’t know about yet.
“No,” he said.
“Thanks.
Just looking.”
“Suit yourself.”
When Peter had gone, Max stood there for a while looking at the happy family on the box.
The dad was holding a joystick and laughing with his whole mouth.
Otto.
In my world, when was the crash?
“North America, 1983.
Too many bad games, too much stock, retailers got burned.
Japan carried it from 1983 to 1985 with the Famicom, then the NES brought it back in America.
That’s the short version.”
And here nobody carried it.
“It looks that way.
Every company that tried got hurt, so nobody tried again.
It’s been seven years.
A seven-year-old in this country might never have seen one.”
Max thought about Sanne at the breakfast table, interested, chewing.
What games?
* * *
On the way back he stopped at the speelhal near the station because he had to see it.
It was called LUCKY STAR and the windows were blacked out, with a neon star that worked on two of its five points.
Inside it was dark and smelled of cigarettes and carpet cleaner.
Along one wall were the fruitkasten, gambling machines with spinning cherries and lemons, and old men feeding them guilders without looking at each other.
A sign said TOEGANG VANAF 18 JAAR (admission from age 18).
Max stood in the doorway and nobody came to throw him out.
At the back, in the corner under a broken light, were two cabinets.
One said TAFELTENNIS (table tennis) in chunky orange letters and had two knobs on it.
The other said RUIMTEAANVAL!
with a drawing of a flying saucer on the side, and had a screen full of white blocks marching left and right, slowly coming down.
A kid of about ten was playing the space one.
He had a stack of kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins) on the edge and his tongue out the side of his mouth.
He was concentrating so hard he didn’t notice Max come up behind him.
The blocks marched.
The kid shot.
A block disappeared.
The kid’s hand tightened on the stick.
He died after about two minutes.
He put another kwartje (quarter-guilder coin) in.
“That,” Otto said, “is the only game in this building.”
He’s loving it.
“He’s ten.
He’d love anything that moved.”
No.
Look at him.
The kid was leaning so close to the screen that his nose was nearly touching.
He’d love something better, if anybody bothered to make it.
* * *
The library was closed on Saturday afternoons, so he did the next best thing.
He picked Sanne up from Lotte’s and they walked round to Oma’s.
Oma’s flat was on the second floor, by the shopping centre, and it was always twenty-six degrees inside.
She was at the kitchen table with the Arnhemse Courant spread out and a magnifying glass, doing the crossword in pen.
Sanne went straight to the biscuit tin.
“Oma.
Do you remember telespellen?”
“Course.” Oma didn’t look up.
“Your uncle Wim bought one.
The Helder one.
Played tennis on it for a week, and then he broke the stick and it went in my attic.
It’s still there, if you want it.
I’m not carrying it down.” She filled in a word.
“Helder lost a fortune on those.
Hundreds of millions, it was in the paper.
They sacked a lot of people in Eindhoven.
Mevrouw de Groot’s son was one of them.
He does the sewers for the gemeente (the council) now.”
“Why didn’t anyone try again?”
Now Oma looked up, over the magnifying glass.
“Why would they?
Nobody wanted it.” She looked at Sanne.
“Eén koekje.”
Sanne put two back.
“Did Pap ring you?” Max said.
Oma went back to the crossword.
“No, jongen (lad).”
They walked home at five.
The phone in the hall didn’t ring that evening either.
Max made macaroni with ham and cheese, the only thing Sanne ate without negotiating, and checked her reading homework at the table while she complained that the book was for babies.
While Sanne was in the bath he went up to his room, shut the door and sat on his bed.
Through the window he could see the backs of the houses across the gardens, washing on lines, a man on a ladder cleaning out a gutter.
“Well?” Otto said.
Nobody’s making games.
“Correct.”
Helder got burned so badly they won’t touch it.
The shops think it was a fad.
Everyone’s dad thinks it was a fad.
Kids are playing Space Invaders in a gambling hall because there’s nothing else.
“Also correct.
I’m waiting for the part where you get to the point.”
Max looked at his hands.
They were thick-fingered, with bitten nails and a plaster on the thumb.
But he knew what they could do.
He had eleven years of code in his head, and a dead man’s worth of opinions about what games should be.
“I’m going to build one,” he said out loud.
The room changed.
It was the light first.
A pale blue glow at the edge of his vision, like a monitor left on in a dark room.
Then lines, drawing themselves in the air in front of the wardrobe.
Boxes connected by branches.
A tree, growing upwards and outwards, most of its boxes grey and locked, a few at the bottom lit up.
At the top, in thin clean letters:
SPIRIT OF INVENTION
PROJECT: ???
(unnamed)
You want to build a machine that plays games.
At the bottom, the first lit box:
NODE 1: PICTURE
Make a television show something you chose.
Hint: the signal is a set of timings.
A dot is a moment.
Next to it, two more boxes, lit but dim.
NODE 2: BRAIN (requires: a processor you can talk to)
NODE 3: HANDS (requires: a way for a player to tell the machine what they want)
Max stared at it.
He reached out and put his finger through Node 1.
Nothing happened, except that the box brightened slightly, like it was pleased he’d noticed.
“Otto,” he said slowly.
“Are you seeing this?”
“Yes.” Otto’s voice had changed.
It sounded careful.
“It isn’t me.
I want to be clear about that.
I’m not drawing that.”
Then what is it?
“I don’t know.
But look at the hint.
It doesn’t tell you how.
It tells you what to think about.” A pause.
“It’s a guidebook, not a manual.
Someone wants you to do the work.”
Max read the hint again.
A dot is a moment.
He knew that.
Every pixel on a CRT was just the electron beam being in a certain place at a certain time.
If you could control the time, you controlled the picture.
He felt a grin start somewhere around his ears.
“Before you get excited,” Otto said, “I’ve done the sums.
To get a processor, memory, a video circuit and a case, and assuming you build the video circuit yourself from logic chips instead of buying anything clever, you’re looking at a few hundred guilders.
Minimum.”
Max got up and opened the bottom drawer of his desk, where fourteen-year-old Max had kept his money in a tin that used to hold Danish butter cookies.
He counted it twice.
Sixty-two guilders and thirty-five cents, and a Postbank savings book, which said, on the last line, fl 81,15.
“A hundred and forty-three fifty,” Otto said.
“I’ll put that in the spreadsheet.”
You don’t have a spreadsheet.
“I have a feeling I’m going to need one.”
He went across the landing to his father’s bedroom, which looked out over the street.
The bed had been made for two weeks and nobody had slept in it.
Across from their house, in the last of the evening light, Meneer Bakker from number 14 was walking backwards out of his front door, red in the face, carrying one end of a big wooden-cased television set.
His wife had the other end.
They were heading for the kerb.
Max was already looking for his shoes.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk