Robot Claw

Occasionally SFL asks me about Australian slang, and it occurred to me I’d never done a post about the slang of my home country. I’ll remedy that today with a few specific terms from my youth 🙂

“havin’ a go” – to play an arcade or video game

“I was havin’ a go of Robotron when I realized I’d spent me maccas cash!”

I still use this one today, and only the other day KLS confirmed it was a piece of my vernacular she’d never heard anyone else use (as opposed to ‘playing’). When I was a kid, we didn’t play video games, we had a go at them!

“doubles” – playing a video game multiplayer

“I was havin’ a go at Forgotten Worlds when some hoon joined in and started playing doubles with me!”

Not sure if this one is used any more by anyone but me. I suppose the term ‘multiplayer’ has supplanted it completely.

“clocked” – played a game to or beyond the end

“Yeah mate, I clocked Slap Fight on one man and just walked away!”

In the very old days, most games had 5 or 6 digit scores, so any score above 99990 or 999990 would reset to 0 and continue. This became known as ‘clocking the game’ in Australia (‘roll over’ in the USA) and in time the term also applied to playing games past the end or simply beating the game itself. For instance, when you beat the final boss in the game Slap Fight (shown above) the game would just return to the start and you would play on. Since I was able to beat the game without ever dying, this means in theory I could have played forever!

It was also a badge of pride. There was no better reply to a question like “Have you played Sanxion?” than “Clocked it.”

I very much doubt ‘clocking’ is used any more by the younger generations. I think ‘beating’ or ‘finishing’ has replaced it.

“triple flapper” – using the middle three fingers of your hand to achieve hitherto-unseen rates of button pushing

“He was showing off by using the triple flapper so I destroyed him with my juicy juice bottle!”

The games Track and Field and its sequel, Hyper Olympics required very fast button presses to achieve good scores. Simply pushing the button over and over again using one finger was passable, but ultimately not as successful and using the ‘triple flapper’ technique where the index, middle and fourth fingers were drummed successively onto the button. It took some practice, but if mastered could increase your button pushes by a magnitude of 2 or 3. I mastered it, and frequently amazed neophyte Hyper Olympians with long jumps or javelin throws they had never even dreamed of!

I’m not sure where this term originated, but it was widely used amongst my group of friends. A few of us even resurrected the term in the days of Street Fighter II to describe M Bison’s distinctive scissor kick (since his feet looked like fingers doing the triple flapper).

As an aside, the triple flapper was itself obsoleted by the use of a prop that existed solely to get better Track and Field scores! I speak of the Juicy Juice bottle. Some enterprising arcade wizard discovered you could cut the neck off a bottle, insert two fingers, and swipe it left and right across the button achieving near supernatural scores. I made one myself, and even modified it using some clever cuts and tape, and famously (?) was once ejected from an indoor cricket center by the owner when she saw me using it to ‘cheat’ at Track and Field 🙂

Video games were serious business in those days!

I’m sure I’m forgetting some. Adam and Bernard, remember any others?