In an outrageous tonal gear shift from my last post, I'd like to talk about computers games and football transfers...
I have a strange relationship with computer games. Aged 27, I ought to be the perfect gamer: old enough to remember how monumentally awful graphics and gameplay used to be, yet young enough to hang around the games section of HMV without arousing too much suspicion. Yet I've still never really been a 'gamer'.
Growing up, my brother and I were lucky enough to be given, if always not the newest games console, then at least the 2nd or 3rd newest. Starting with the ZX Spectrum, we were both given Game Boys one (blissful) Christmas, then the Atari ST, NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, a GameGear my Dad somehow procured, Playstation 2 and finally, a couple of years ago a Nintendo Wii.
A list of my favourite games is a fairly predictable list of classics: Paperboy, Tetris, Starwing, Goldeneye, Grand Theft Auto etc, but one game towers above all of these in my affections: Championship Manager (now known as Football Manager after some sort of licensing dispute that I never bothered to find out about). 'Champ Man' as we called it, was and is the defining game of my lifetime. I remember my brother Daniel specifically asking for his Atari ST to be upgraded from a 500k machine (500k!!!!) to a 1Megabyte, just to play the inaugural 'Championship Manager '93'. At first this seemed quite an outlandish request (getting his entire computer taken away and fiddled with, just for one game?!) but it turned out to be a masterstroke.
It says a lot about my relationship with computer games that my fondest memories of lying on the floor in my brothers room, during hours and hours of Champ Man, was not the game itself, but the accompanying music my brother exposed me to. It was during this time (1993-1996) that he'd record songs from the radio, copy tapes from the library and swap them with friends and it seems quite fitting that as we currently witness waves of Britpop nostalgia that I remember my first exposure to some classic albums (Pablo Honey, The Bends, Definitely Maybe, The Holy Bible, Everything Must Go, Dog Man Star, Expecting to Fly etc.) was as they provided soundtracks to our attempts to sign Peter Ndlovu and Julian Joachim.
In essence, it was the atmosphere I enjoyed - the time spent listening to music with my wonderful brother - rather than the game itself.
Indeed, with all computer games, I tend to concentrate on the first couple of levels, but then give up once things get too difficult. Don't get me wrong, this isn't part of some innate snobbery on my part: I'm not one of those people who criticise gaming or see it as 'low art' - on the contrary I think therein lies the future of what we now refer to as 'fiction' and 'narrative'. But something in my DNA just switches off the moment things get tricky. And (confession time) this attitude also applies to Champ Man. If ever left to play the game on my own, I'll simply take control of 4 different clubs, get 3 of these clubs to pay millions of pounds for Nottingham Forest reserve players, quit the 3 dummy teams and steer Forest to glory by flashing this dubiously acquired cash around Europe.
The reason I write this today is that it seems, for the second time, life is imitating art. Around 5 years ago when Chelsea seemed to have an infinite supply of cash, I couldn't wait to buy the papers to read rumours of who their next superstar signing would be. Like my highly corrupt navigation through the Champ Man simulation - Roman Abramovic simply threw lots and lots of money at the biggest names in world football until, eventually, they joined the West Londoners. I'd never been so interested in a football club that I didn't support and I'm pretty sure that my Champ Man habit was to blame for this morbid fascination with greed and inorganic team-building.
Fast forward to this week and I find myself checking the Manchester City website daily, as the financial clout of their owners makes Abramovic look like a poor relation. For some reason I desperately want them to amble into the transfer market like drunk city boys stumbling into an All Bar One. It's gaudy, cheap, nasty and it's exactly how I behaved all those years ago, whilst tapping my foot along to Digsy's Dinner and Animal Nitrate.
So go on, Sparky, do it for me and all the other Champ Man cheats of my generation!
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