accidental challenge

First, a car commercial that is also a tribute to an old video game.

I first encountered Spy Hunter in a computer store. Possibly I was hanging around in the store my dad worked at part-time for employee discount purposes, waiting for him to be done. Possibly I was hanging around in some other store he'd taken me to in order to look at computers whose details didn't quite interest me yet. (That is, I could see that the graphics on the Amiga looked cooler than the graphics on my computer, but that's about as much as I could say about hardware.)

Anyway, this game was set up and running on a computer, and I was absently playing with it, via the joystick. (My computer at home also had a joystick. This seemed obvious. You needed a joystick to play games. I suspect we didn't have mice yet.)

When my dad wasn't working at the computer store, he was a pilot. And I was vaguely aware of little things about flying planes - like that you have to pull the stick 'down' in videogame terms in order to go up. So it didn't seem that strange to me that I was having to push the joystick 'down' to make the car go 'up'. It was a little weird that left and right were also reversed, but I wasn't totally sure if planes did that or not.

It took me quite a while of playing to figure out that I was holding the joystick backwards.