Unicorns and video games

It’s strange the things that bring back memories and the coincidences that come about.

I currently play on a dodge ball team called Robot Unicorn Attack, based on an online video game that went viral. Not obviously relevant but funny the coincidences that come about in every day life that remind us of Andrew…. Read on.

I wouldn’t say Andrew was into video games as much a many people I know. Not what you would call a “gamer”, but I know that he did when time permitted enjoy playing video games with others.

Although I wasn’t a part of these epic games, I understand that back in the day Andrew would get pretty into playing Nintendo. In his undergrad at Queen’s he and his housemates would get into and play video games (football and others) to the point that their thumbs would become sore from pushing the ultra stiff and sticky controller, latter to be dubbed Nintendo Thumb. I can only imaging who came up with that more goofy than ingenious name.

When I think of Andrew playing video games, I’m reminded of one of the first video games that he and I played together. When we were growing up, our family had an Apple II computer. It was glorious for the times, per the specs I just checked online, it would have had 1 MB of ram and 40 MB hard drive, but somehow I don’t even think it had that. We loaded 3 ¼ inch floppy discs into the external disk drives every time we wanted to run a program. Once loaded you had to then search the disk for the program you wanted, which was done by typing the word “catalogue” into the prompt. Still to this day I can’t write the word catalogue without thinking about playing games on that computer with my brother.

Our favorite game was based on chess, but instead of automatically taking an opponent’s piece when moving to occupy the same square, you challenged that piece to a battle in an arcade style battleground. For the Star Wars nerds out there, picture when R2D2 and C3PO are playing chess with Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon and the pieces battle each other to capture squares. Just thinking about it today, still makes me laugh at the 8 bit graphics of green figures doing battle on such a basic black playing field. It was the pieces representing the rooks that were Andrews’s favorite. These pieces were particularly fast moving unicorns that fired light beams out of their horn. It was years ago that I played that game with Andrew and I hadn’t thought about it often until my dodge ball team took on the name. Now, as an adult I’m running around a gymnasium as if I was in grade school again and thinking about the video games I used to play with my big brother.

Just like being a kid all over again, when you’d wish that you didn’t have to stop playing on the computer (to eat dinner or do homework), all I want now is to have a few more turns playing video games with my brother.