Despite the derivative nature of their games, they were a bunch with good moral principles. Games like this were the strong suit of Ambrosia Software, a now-defunct software house specialized in “enhanced remakes”. My beloved Bubble Trouble, a game about pushing the walls of a labyrinth to squash enemies, is just an unlicensed reworking of classic arcade game Pengo. Even games I was sure I hadn’t seen anywhere else turned out to be clones. Apeiron is not just a Centipede-like, but an exact replica of the game with a psychedelic coat of paint Maelstrom is just a prettier version of Asteroids. Looking back, I realize my gaming history is a bizarro world of other children’s memories, full of distorted versions of the games everyone knows. I asked my dad and his official answer was: “Well, you seemed to really like it!” A+ parenting skills, dad. Don’t ask me why my child self was allowed to play a game about running over cyclists, crashing against cars and avoiding the cops. The metallic sound of cars hitting other cars in racing game Burning Rubber. The “PEW PEW” of my spaceship shooting asteroids in Maelstrom. I remember the “YEAAAAAH!” that greeted me every time I booted up the Centipede-like Apeiron. And yet, the sound effects ring in my mind with crystalline clarity. Most of those early games are fuzzy memories. Part of his work also consisted of taking care of a hyperactive daughter, and he brilliantly solved the task by putting baby Giada in front of his Mac and letting her mash the keyboard. I grew up with a Mac because my dad is an engineering professor, and most specialist software he needed didn’t run on Windows. The name of this flight sim evaded me for so long because I grew up with a Mac, and no one ever talks about the few scrappy games that were available to us, the children of the nineties who, for one reason or another, got stuck with the uncool operating system.
I learned this only twenty years later, when I recognised it in a video compilation of old games. Unable to control my plane, I could only watch it spiral and crash. I remember a blue sky and green land and some yellow rectangle where I was supposed to land, but couldn’t, because I was three or four years old and videogames were new and confusing. My first videogame memory is about falling.
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