They didn't present any difficulty at all despite the sick genius of their teenage programmers back in Osaka because I had the moves and the skill and all they had were ones and zeros. I didn't notice the beeper because it's insistent whine sounded a lot like the red ships peeling off from the main Galaxian fleet as they swooped in for their oh-so-predictable attack. And then there was the fact that I was playing Galaxian on my Atari 5200 with the sound on the TV maxed and the curtains pulled for a full dramatic and immersive experience. For a start, I was as high as Skylab, baked on Turkish black cannabis resin that I'd cooked myself and rolled into sweet Virginia tobacco. So you'd think that I would have dashed across the room, grabbed the beeper, and run with a mounting sense of panic to the nearest telephone. There were only five class 1 emergencies and three of them were a Soviet nuclear strike, a Soviet invasion, and what the civil servants who'd written the manual had nonchalantly called 'an extraterrestrial trespass.' This was a general alert being sent to every off duty policeman, police reservist, and soldier in Northern Ireland. It was repeating a shrill C-sharp at 4 second intervals, which meant - for those of us who had bothered to read the manual- that it was a Class 1 emergency. The beeper began to whine at 4.27pm on Wednesday September 25, 1983.
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