Games were suddenly
being reported about in
the mainstream news
reported about in the mainstream news, and getting
coverage in magazines that weren’t dedicated
entirely to games. It was exciting, to be sure, but
in that I also felt I’d lost something. That was the
tipping point at which I became as much a retro
gamer as a gamer.
When gaming went corporate and global, it lost
part of the grubby, cottage industry, charm that I’d
fallen in love with, and the only way to still have
access to that was to look back.
I remember when my daughter was little, and
she had this revolting security blanket which she
took to bed with her every night. It was filthy, and
absolutely stunk, and one day it got put in the wash.
She was devastated; what she loved wasn’t the
blanket herself, but all the stink on it, and without
the stink it wasn’t the same. So, I guess everybody
has their security blanket. Turns out that mine, for a
large part of my life, has been old videogames.
Mmm. Gotta love that old game stink!I think it happened relatively early for me, in
my early twenties, around the time that Sega and
Nintendo started duking it out across the globe.
I doubt I’m unusual in looking back during early
adulthood – when suddenly being grown-up
may make you want to cling onto familiar, safe,
memories – but it was around then that gaming
suddenly began feeling as if it was no longer mine.
That might sound weird – though I’m well aware
that the British games industry of the Eighties
wasn’t exactly making games solely for me, nice as
that would’ve been. But gaming went from being
something that seemed parochial and niche, and
made me feel like I was part of a select little club, to
being something that affected the globe.
With the launch of Sonic The Hedgehog 2,
games weren’t just snuck out into shops as a sort
of afterthought, but released in every country
simultaneously, with huge launch events, and days
named after them. Games were suddenly beingB
ack in the early-to-mid-Eighties, when
games first got lodged in my heart,
like a coronary blockage, I sort of saw
them as semi-disposable. I was always
easily distracted by the next sparkly new thing.
There was little, if no, looking back in those
early days. Atic Atac would be superseded by
Underwurlde, which would be replaced in my
affections by Knight Lore, and then I got an Atari ST
and for a while it was all about Indiana Jones And
The Last Crusade, until I fell in love with my Mega
Drive. The next big thing was always on the horizon.
The thrill of the new was in many ways more
palpable and powerful than the thrill of the now.
Of course, I’m sure that still applies, to a point, for
the generation of gamers who are the age now that
I was in 1984. And yet eventually that ceaseless
march forwards started to slow for me, and games
which I once cast aside through the sheer weight of
my onward momentum, suddenly mattered again.Going mainstream
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