Most of you are probably too young to remember this, but video game arcades used to be a lot more Darwinian than they are now.

The amusement megaplexes that we have now are very heaven compared to the noisy, dingy holes-in-the-wall that we had in the nasty nineties.

Back then, if you were:

a. a scrawny kid

b. a newbie

c. both,

there were scores of bigger (less polite, less wealthy) older boys ready to help you out, and guide you through the intricacies of each game from start to (often premature) finish free of charge. If they were particularly friendly, and you were particularly scrawny, you’d get the privilege of watching them play your character “through the difficult bits,” which was pretty much everything from the word Play.

You don’t see that now in places like Timezone and Tom’s World because of the bright lights and tighter security, but the practice is probably alive in lesser malls and darker video game corners.

The bigger, older boys of our generation have also probably outgrown video games, but their kind is still around in every LTO fixer and MMDA traffic cop that you meet.