Game of the Week: the Banksian thrills of Asteroids

This week I've been re-reading Graeme's wonderful piece on Iain Banks that we published on Tuesday. I've also been thinking about Banks in general, listening to old radio programmes he was on, and wishing that we'd gotten to enjoy his entry on Simon Parkin's podcast, My Perfect Console. That would have been dream broadcasting.

In its place, I realised I had a dim memory of Banks giving an interview to Edge mag about the games he loved, and when I tracked it down I discovered that one of his earliest loves in games was Asteroids. So that's it: Asteroids is our Game of the Week. About time, really. It's a classic. And to keep things topical, play the version on the glorious Atari 50 collection, which is due an end-of-the-year update.

My favourite Banks book is probably Complicity, and one of the things I love about Complicity is that it's the first novel I read where characters talk and think about video games. Umberto Eco has a wonderful section in Foucault's Pendulum about pinball, and Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis would talk about Super Mario and Defender to anyone who would hear them (Amis wrote a weird and lovely non-fiction book about games too, obv). But Complicity is a bit like reading The Great Gatsby and seeing characters in a novel talk about advertising hoardings and movie magazines. It's the moment that literature turns its attention to a new part of the contemporary scene.