By the sea and sand, where it all began

Punta Spin camping, as seen by GoogleMaps

Look at the map.

This is where I started becoming addict to videogames. It looks like a small village, but it's a camping, in fact. The Punta Spin Camping near Grado, near Gorizia, near Trieste, Italy. Nowadays it's more a "residence", or a "resort". But in 1984 it was slightly wilder: less bungalows, more tents. It was summer. I was 10 and I had 2 parents, 1 shabby roulotte, 1 shabbier bike and the golden permission to freely roam anywhere in the camping. The typical problem with free roaming is that, given a non-linear chance, you almost always go the same places. For me, there was only the sea, the bar and the arcade. The bar had 3 coin-ops, the arcade had 7, the sea had none but it was very funny nonetheless, you know, splashing, swimming etcetera. What surprised me back then was that there were a grand total of 10 coin-ops in a relatively wild camping, plunged into a pinewood. The contrast between technology and nature seemed to me like a kind of magic. I never really saw it like a real "contrast", that is. This vision deeply affected my tastes, my poetics about gaming. But way before knowing the meaning of "poetics" (and way before Pokémon), I had a huge pinewood full of elf-children like me, a beach, a bike and all the videogames I could want. That used to be my playground. Summer was mine.