I was reading through some old computer game magazines from the 80's recently, and happened upon a review of my childhood favourite, Dynamite Dan. When I was 6, this was the most awesome thing on the planet – even better than Alphabites, which also entered my world around that time.
Way before the battle between Xbox One and PS4, in a distant past predating even the SNES/SEGA conflict of the early 90s, there was the epic ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 head-to-head. This was the great conflict of 1982 – provided you neglect The Falklands and the Ethiopian-Somali border war, which I think we all should at this stage.
Dynamite Dan involved a bloke called Dan cavorting round a mansion looking for flashing sticks of dynamite. Your job was to help him break into this house and look for stuff to blow it up. It's hardly the plot from Far Cry 5, but it made aiding and abetting look fun to a 6-year-old, so #gains.
I have never really worked out why Danny boy was in this house that wasn't his, or why collecting explosives would be a good thing to do, or how someone so obviously going through a nervous breakdown could possibly afford to arrive by airship: I never got far enough in to unfurl these mysteries because, as with most games from the 80s, they were almost totally impossible – made as they were by reclusive geniuses who, having being badly bullied as children, created their art out of spite rather than love.
Owing to the wonders of social media, you can now watch an entire run-through of the game on Youtube if you a) don't have a day job, or b) have a day job where you are actively seeking the sack. And watching it now, it's ghastly! If you left a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters for a thousand years, they still wouldn't come up with this because it's rubbish!
So why am I telling you this? Well, in the review of the time, the writer said he believed that the game 'couldn't be bettered', that it had 'taken computer games as far as they can go'. All that grainy, garish, plot-free nonsense?! The most you can get from a computer game?! You fool!
Actually, the bloke wasn't a fool at all. He was merely talking from his current perspective, making a judgment from the information he had to hand. More than that, at the time I would have agreed with him wholeheartedly. Something that now seems so insipid and flavourless appeared all those years ago like a shining beacon of awesomeness. Dynamite Dan had class written all over it (and I mean that literally – Alphabites were malleable beyond just being tasty carbs).
The moral applies to life more broadly, I think. It's quite possible to feel that 'this is it', that life is somehow most lifelike in us. Chronological snobbery (the idea that we, here, now, have somehow arrived) is a perfectly understandable trait. We want to feel that what we have worked out about the world is surely true. We are the most enlightened, the most advanced, the most moral. We are superlative.
But what if it's better than that? What if the best is something you've yet to experience? What if you're not alone in the universe? What if you're no longer a slave but a son? What if nothing can separate you from the love of God?
We all think what we believe is true – otherwise, why would we believe it? But when something better does come along - something richer and more exciting, that blows our mind with dynamite and airships us to new heights – we are left with little choice but to admit we were wrong, and glad to have been.
My reviewer friend was content with Dynamite Dan. He didn't need to look any further. It wasn't his fault that he hadn't witnessed the better storylines of Sonic, of Final Fantasy, of GTA. What would he say now though, I wonder? What if there's a better story?
Andy Kind is a comedian, preacher and writer. You can abuse him on Twitter @andykindcomedy. Or even better, book him to come to your town so others can abuse him in person. His book, 'The Unfortunate Adventures of Tom Hillingthwaite', is available here.
