From Quake to Fortnite.
Secondly, he was the first person I met who played games online.
There was a driving game he liked, and I think he dabbled in a few shooters.
It was like alchemy to me.
It was like knowing - and having lunch with - an actual wizard.
Here’s the thing, though: I say Ken liked the games.
In truth he was like one of those writers who doesn’t like writing but likes having written.
Abuse from distant players.
I think I could tell my 10-year-old daughter about Ken and his experiences and she’d be completely baffled.
I got broadband long before she was born.
It’s the story in that, everything has changed, and changed completely.
The internet simultaneously got into everything, effortlessly, and it also got completely out of the way.
No more third-party software just to get you dialled in.
Worms 2 needed proximity, I think.
Played online or - gasp - played solo and it just isn’t as good.
It wasn’t all hotseat, though.
Plenty of games had that beautiful habit of carving the screen into two or four.Mario Kart 64.
It elevates it to an event.
It seems I was missing out on an awful lot.
Nobody’s dead, but there’s still a late-night, early-morning wildness to it all.
People have gone too far and discovered that it’s brilliant.
The chat continued, but it was down in a little window in a corner of the screen.
It’s funny that games like this are often used as a shorthand for isolation.
And our exploration of the weirder, niche moments will be different too.
It felt so weird: I was in Hove, they were on the other side of the planet.
The unseen gap somehow closed for a few minutes.
It was like having a murderously precise pen pal.
What’s changed is the sense of giving yourself thoroughly to the online game.
One last memory: going online on the evening my friend first got XBLA on his console.
First to get broadband, first to get an Xbox, first to bring them all together.
But we didn’t really play.
We just stood on the precipice as it glitched and behaved oddly.
I remember a road with no cars, but something invisible was scattering the traffic cones about.
Inevitably, it was completely brilliant.
