PURPLE PATCH

BONZI BUDDY, the desktop companion who did $1bn of damage

- Phil Iwaniuk

It’s 1999. A young PC enthusiast in a North Yorkshire village is having his little idiot mind blown on a weekly basis now he’s the proud owner of a personal computer. It’s a kaleidoscope of formative experiences: Half-Life. Thief: The Dark Project. PC Gamer magazine and its many in-jokes (beards and tanks were especially in-vogue topics of tomfoolery for then editor Jim Flynn’s band of raconteurs). Doing his homework by pasting passages directly out of the Encarta CDs that came with the aforementioned PC. And then, one day during a maths lesson, comes something entirely different.

“He does all sorts”, my friend Thomas Frame enthuses. “Tells jokes, sings songs. You can type stuff in and he says it. He’s got games, too.” This desktop character he’s describing sounds absolutely brilliant. A purple gorilla who sits on your desktop and serves to entertain your every whim. My13-year-old mind is already racing with the things I’d make him say. Upon Frame’s dictation, I write down the name of the website where he can be downloaded on the inside cover of my DT book. We all do.