Today the thing that has achieved such a goal is this:
When I was a child my cousin gave me his old Sega Megadrive. It was chunky and dusty, a dinosaur compared to its modern relatives, but it was my first taste of any sort of computer and so seemed pretty fantastic to me at the time. Along with the console he had given me some games. Sonic the Hedgehog was, of course, one of them. Sega would not have achieved anything at all were it not for its blue furry superhero, who I repeatedly span round loop after loop crushing countless robotic animals along the way. I would play it for hours with my Dad trying to defeat the overweight professor who had somehow taken control of what looked to have been a previously quite happy place. We beat him a couple of times, if I remember rightly, only to be confronted with an image of him running away to pastures new suggesting we hadn't beaten him quite enough. Frustrating.
Another game I got was the one to which the video refers. Two Crude Dudes was an action game, set in a post-apocalyptic New York of the future. You played as one of the said "crude dudes." If you played with a friend you could be both of them, making it much easier to overpower the countless mutated villains that crossed your path. From plain ordinary street thugs, through to sumo wrestlers, face sucking midgets, robots, bull-headed monsters and poison pooing monkeys, all sorts of nasties would try and prevent you from achieving your ultimate aim: ending the reign of the "Big Valley" on New York City and returning freedom to its civilians. It was fantastic fun, as an eight year old, and I imagine it still would be today if I dug it out. However that is not the main reason I thought of it.
It has a lot to be responsible for, this game. I have never really been a big fan of video games or computers, using them mainly for, well, my blog and the occasional dose of BBC iPlayer. But I have always been fascinated by the idea of an apocalypse, of the end of the world and of fear. It seeps it to everything I do, everything I create. Most of my longer writing revolves around this as a base and a lot of my shorter stuff owes thanks to that part of my brain too. What this game did was plant that seed into my still pliable mind. It painted pictures in technicolour (where available) grit that stuck with me over time, as images of a slightly more subtle plight watered that seed until it grew into the fully flowered plant it is today.
I never did win the game. My friend did, once, when he borrowed it, and I will forever feel a tinge of jealousy that he managed that without me.
Still, it won me over. If something I can create can have half the impact on someone's life that this sort of thing has had on me, I know I'll have done well.