Here is the view from my window at work, the ongoing seismic retrofit project over at Jungerman Hall, UC Davis. That’s where the Crocker Nuclear Lab is based, with its large cyclotron, whatever that is. I enjoy a bit of construction on campus (I heard someone say that ‘UCD’ stands for ‘Under Construction Daily’) but it gives me something interesting to draw and document. The zig-zagged scaffolding reminded me of Donkey Kong, which I used to play with my brother and uncle when I was a kid, making Mario run up the girders jumping over barrels to reach the Princess held captive by Donkey Kong. A simple game, but my older brother would play it for hours and hours, long after I had gotten bored, trying to ‘clock’ it, that is get so high a score that the counter went back to zero. He would sit at the end of my bed playing it until about 3am, sometimes with his mate and my uncle. We had Donkey Kong Jr too, which was similar but involved a little gorilla dude climbing up vines and getting cherries and bananas and avoiding scorpions or something. These were very basic days, computer games have come a long way. We played it on my ColecoVision, which was an unusual game system but for the few games I had it was quite brilliant. Not many people round our way had computer game systems at the time, though the main one was the Atari. I had previously had an Atari-like system called the Philips, which had some good games and extremely simplistic graphics that nonetheless excited my imagination, especially the one where you had to pilot a little spaceship through a field of colourful pixels that represented asteroids (I think it was called Asteroids). It was no Atari though, and everyone wanted an Atari. My neighbours had an Atari, and we loved the game Pitfall. Then I got the ColecoVision, which nobody else had at all. I got it for Christmas, I don’t know who my dad got it from, but no kid I knew ever heard of it, and they used to laugh at me when I would tell them about it. The thing is, the games on it were a clear upgrade from the Atari, especially Turbo, a racing game which had a special steering wheel and brake pedal that you would plug in. It was brilliant. There was no big joystick or modern games controller, rather there was this keypad that looked like a huge phone with a toggle on the top, plugged neatly into the system. Games came in these robust plastic cartridges filled with technology (if the game would not load properly, you just blew inside them and they magically worked), a bit like the later Nintendo and SNES games. Coleco games were not easy to come by though, you would not see them in the shops. Maybe in a second hand shop you might find one, but it was hit or miss if it worked. But we had Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr, and basic as they were, no Atari game came close to those. Those games were played to death in our house. I don’t know what happened to our ColecoVision in the end. There was only so much fun you could extract from the four games we had that worked (the other was I think was a Smurfs game that was truly terrible and impossible to play). It might be still in the loft, or maybe we sold it at a car-boot sale. When my little sister got the Nintendo Entertainment System one Christmas, and Super Mario Bros came along, well that was that. My brother and I would have to wait until she was asleep and sneak in to play it silently on her little TV late at night so not to wake her up. The NES killed the ColecoVision, Mario killed Donkey Kong, and when the SNES came along with Mario Kart, that was it for poor old Turbo. The old days eh.