Martin Amis discovered Space Invaders at a bar near the railway station in Toulon. It was 1979. The console had been installed in the corner and resembled a fridge, and as soon as Amis slotted in his first coin he fell head over heels. ‘I knew instantly that this was something different, something special,’ he explains. ‘The bar closed at 11 o’clock that night. I was the last to leave.’
Amis is recounting this three years later, in the Observer Magazine’s 19 September 1982 cover story. He’s 33 now, a three-book novelist, though a few years off publishing Money. He might have written it sooner had he not found the arcades so enticing. ‘I was very good yesterday, and hardly played at all,’ he writes, describing, like a 10-year-old Fortnite fanatic, the early anguish of addiction. ‘So I had a long session this morning.’
Space Invaders was released in 1978 by the Japanese manufacturer Taito and announced a golden age in the video game industry. Before long, machines besieged shopping centres and restaurants. Schoolboys and at least one British novelist queued restlessly to play Pac-Man and Asteroids; in extreme cases, players stole money to feed their habit. ‘What we are dealing with here is a global addiction,’ Amis writes. (He uses the language of addiction throughout the piece: fixes, withdrawals, crack-ups.) ‘I mean, this might all turn out to be a bit of a problem.’
In a way, he was right. Earlier this year, the World Health Organisation defined excessive video game playing as a disorder. Kids are gaming too much, experts suggest, to the extent that their social functions are being impaired. The WHO’s definition refers to digital games, not the arcade classics our writer played – Call of Duty rather than Donkey Kong. But still, Amis called it. ‘There appears to be no doubt about it,’ he writes. ‘The Space Invaders have invaded.’
