When I was a young kid first discovering video games in the early 1980s, I used to go to the huge Wythenshawe library in Greater Manchester, where I could rent Commodore 64 titles for 10p a week. Usually, I went home with piles of fighting games and shoot-'em-ups like Yie Ar Kung Fu, Green Beret and 1942. But one day, when someone had been in before me and grabbed all the popular stuff, I glumly picked up all that was left: a copy of Deus Ex Machina, the bizarre multimedia art game by Mel Croucher about the birth of a living organism within a vast computer. I was 12. I wanted to shoot stuff, I did not want to watch a fetus gestate in a databank while Jon Pertwee narrated a story about a mouse poo. But I played it anyway.
It blew me away.
I had no idea a game could actually be about something, that it could be so weird and philosophical. When I saw an interview with Croucher in Zzap or some other ancient magazine, he mentioned two major influences: the music of Frank Zappa and EM Forster's short story, The Machine Stops. The next week, I went back to the library and rented a copy of Zappa's Hot Rats album on tape, and took out a Forster short story collection. The latter was an absolutely seminal moment in my life as a book reader, the former scared the absolute shit out of me. I never forgot either.
Read more…