Friday the 13th
A word on one of the more thoroughly ingrained idiosyncrasies of the Scots language: the selective substitution of the word “why” by the word “how”. Selective, I say, because the use of “how” instead of “why” seems generally to occur when the question being thusly phrased airs a passive-aggressive grievance or unsettling suspicion on the part of the interrogator. Awkward, y’see, because a simple “How are you going home?” can mean either:
A) “By what locomotive means do you purpose to return thither? Are you in need of any assistance regarding provision of such?”
B) “Why are you leaving already!? What am I supposed to have done NOW?!”
Fabulous! Suddenly the entire fragile fabric of one’s public reputation, and the intricate lace of social networks spun delicately thereon, rests exclusively upon one’s response to an essentially insoluble riddle, like some infernal variety of Choose Your Own Adventure game, like having tea with the Sphinx of Sophocles. But why? But how?
I have a personal theory regarding the otherwise arbitrary decision to use “how” as a replacement for “why”. It is the equivalent of choosing a bludgeon over a stiletto. Just say them out loud. “Why” is lithesome, silky, insiduous, the weapon of choice for the subtle, the sadistic, the inflictor of death by a thousand tiny cuts. “Why” slinks and swirls, curls round corners like sinister mist, seeps in at the pores of one’s very soul: it is the unspoken question in the tear-rimmed eyes of dumped spouses and kicked cats, the vorpal scissors slicing through all our arguments of rock and paper. But some people are so numb they do not even know when they are being sliced up. And for them the dull, barked blackjack of “How?”
Because the point of “How” is not so much the infliction of damage but the nice, weighty feeling of having thumped someone, and of them knowing that they’ve been thumped. What is the mortal pinprick in someone’s side compared to clobbering them over the head with a fucking bucket? Why blowdart someone’s heart when you can boot them in the balls? Salient questions, inexpertly answered by Domark’s “Friday the 13th”. £2.99 worth of it, to be exact.
The premise of the game was simple; you are one of 8 campers enjoying a little trip to Camp Nowheresville, Tennessee, when an unidentified assailant suddenly appears out of broad daylight (Well, you wouldn’t have been able to see the screen if it was dark! Are you STUPID?!?) and starts killing everyone. It’s up to YOU, sir/madam, (You’re allowed to choose what gender you are! Just like real life!) to quash this camper-killer uprising at the
root; wandering aimlessly around the 16 or so screens which composed the camp, protecting your hapless fellows from an unconvincingly animated death, and looking to inflict society’s ultimate revenge on the rotter responsible with one of the assorted pointy things scattered around the grounds. (Just in case he’d forgotten to bring his own butchering implement.) It’s all going to be terribly atmospheric, with a denouement as grisly and violent as it is ironic!
What’s this? Well, it looks like some badly drawn attempt at the interior of a barn: a fact which can only be ascertained by the equally poor rendering of “Old McDonald Had a Farm” playing in the background. The squidge in the middle of the screen is, one assumes, your Instrument of Divine Justice; the squidge slightly to the left looks like some sort of sword: a fitting Accessory to the Instrument of Divine Justice! But wait! That squidge to the right is moving backwards and forwards in a curiously conceived manner! Grab your newly-appointed Scourge of God! HIT IT! HIT IT! Well, that was easy.
A few minutes later, slowly dawning realisation of the possible connection between the absence of congratulatory end-game messages and the replacement of one of the wee Camper icons at the bottom of the screen with a gravestone leads you to venture outside. The quaint pastoral setting is utterly unredeemed by any signs of impending doom, and the only change to the atmosphere is that precipitated by the introduction of “Wachet 
Auf” to the background, giving the scene an expositionally Disney-esque feel, as opposed to the comfortably self-sufficient Walton-based whimsy of the barn’s interior. Another icon fades into a gravestone with a curiously static-distorted death-rattle, as if the murder weapon had been a half-full bathtub and an electric microphone. Well. Now you have a firm grasp of that Jason Voorhees’s modus operandi, you’d do well to get around to killing him, hadn’t you? Oh, look, I expect he’s that character who looks vaguely like Largo LaGrande in an undersized ninja jumpsuit.
Now for the moment of grim realisation. Pressing the attack button makes you half-heartedly prod your weapon to the right. But Jason always appears to your left. Was that too fast for you? Let me recapitulate the main points:
1) Weapon right.
2) Killer left.
Desperately trying to work out how to attack to the left, you watch in morbidly suspended disbelief as an axe whirls around the static murderer in a manner which you charitably assume to mean it is being swung by him. What little charity you have left after this immense exercise of imagination you employ in construing the horizontal line of black where your Instrument of Divine Justice formerly stood to be a corpse. By now you don’t have enough charity left to reconstruct the causal connection between the two events, so curiously left open-ended by the animation sequence, and you press “reset”: or, if you were anything like me, you played again and again, this time trying to kill all the Campers yourself before Jason got to them, twin tsunamis of spite and fury crashing together into the single, tiny window of frightening clarity that this was exactly the sort of thing that drove people to become serial killers in the first place.
In the most grisly and ironic denouement of all, “Friday the 13th” actually had turned out to be rather scary: £2.99 was a lot of money to me back then.