Way back in the day (think late 1970s-early 1980s), I was wrapping up a videogaming session in some arcade, and was pretty pleased with myself, because I’d racked up enough points to get onto the list of high scores on some game or other.

I got to the screen for inputting my name, and maneuvered the joystick/fire button combo for the first letter: “C”.

Next letter up would have been “T”. Which would be followed by a blank for the third and final character slot (very limited field of public digital self-expression back then), giving me “CT”, which, being my initials, made perfect sense for signifying my name in pixels.

But that “T” never got placed, because I overshot the alphabetical sequencing, and ending up hitting the fire button on “U” instead. (Maybe I was suffering from a mild case of Space Invaders wrist!) Leaving me with “CU”, with one letter and several seconds to go.

I complained to a nearby friend, who told me to just put something in for the last letter, before time ran out! Recovering quickly, I tapped the joystick once, landed on “B”, liked what I saw, and hit Fire one last time.

“CUB?” my friend asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

It meant making lemonade out of lemons, at that moment. It also meant that I hung onto that oldschool videogame handle from then on. Even when gaming technology advanced to the point where you could input your whole name, I retained CUB, just because I liked the way it came about. Today, all the vintage game discs for my Xbox are loaded with high scores achieved by the C-U-B.

So if you happen upon an oldstyle coin-op game, and see CUB among the high scores, there’s a chance that that’s me. Particularly if you see it in a place like, say, Barcade.