It was a Phillips CD-i player. Post-Laserdisc, mid-CD-ROM, pre-DVD era. It was large and clunky, probably as expensive, if not more, than any PlayStation or Nintendo device. My father went for it because it seemed to have an educational focus, a lot of point and click learning games, very very very limited 2-D graphics. It was his pace, probably a lot less intimidating and more sensible to introduce to his kids than the flashy, violent fighting games the news was decrying around then.
I have too many memories of this system. One came back to me and I wanted to get it down.
There was a 2-D, forced-perspective shooting gallery game my father got for us. No violence or blood—it was a carnival game…but haunted house themed? You had a limited amount of shots, and a limited amount of time to hit different targets. Arcade style, the longer you played the more difficult it got.
We’d gotten pretty decent at it, and one afternoon my brother, a few friends and I were taking turns playing it in the basement. I was playing and for some reason the game started acting screwy, the avatar that was my gun was firing without me pressing the button, sweeping uncontrollably back and forth not according to any of my controller input.
I started panicking, thinking I’d broken the controller, that a button was stuck. It was a plastic gamepad, similar in design to a Sega Genesis controller, just larger and clunkier. I must have checked the input. PS/2 probably? (Not to be confused with PlayStation 2.) No bent pins, nothing weird.
But I’ll bet that when I turned back to my friends and the basement stairs were in view, that’s when I saw my dad. He was sitting halfway up the stairs, holding the CD-i Player’s wireless controller, which was just a TV-remote-sized RF device, with a thumb-stick towards the front of it where you’d typically see directional buttons.
He was wide-eyed, smiling and silent, looking enthralled, playing a prank, using the wireless remote to override the input of the wired remote we were using.
He was a technophobe, so it was very out of character for him to try messing with an electronic device without knowing exactly what the outcome would be. I’d never seen him take the piss out of us like that before, and I never really saw him do that again. It was the closest he ever came to playing a video game with me.