Game Saved: World of Warcraft

The World of Warcraft. Talk about your digital crack.

No, let’s not talk about digital crack. If WoW were digital crack I’d have lapsed by now. I’d have broken, screaming through jitters, jonesing for more, and after downloading the client buried my face in a great snowy pile of it. Smoke it, toke it, huff it, snort it. Tie off a vein and smack my bitch up. Class A games, uncontrolled; as addictive and dangerous as every Fox News editorial has always claimed.

I played for two months, coasting on in-box credit. Paid pennies for base game and Burning Crusade and got my money’s worth. Two months of grinding and questing and hiding from Alliance scum as they happened past. Two months of red names and nonsense text as they taunted me, too near to my hiding place, going thicket to thicket searching for an easy kill.

WoW has a reputation that’s entirely undeserved. Between all the stories about mothers abandoning children to raid Zul’Aman nobody thinks to mention that WoW is only a game, and a good one at that. Entering for the first time, The Valley of Trials was filled with leaping initiates clothed in rags, careening about the zone like a swarm in search of honey. They camped at spawn points offing scorpions by the hundred and crowded caves in confused knots, the drops they were looking for stolen from under their noses. At their back, unable to see over the myriad bald green heads I became part of a recursive queue. Players joined behind me, and more players behind them, and somehow the line looped around so we paraded in a conga circle through the cave system with no one player knowing what was going on.

It was confusing. Quest givers and tutorial tips told me how to play but there was more to WoW than inventories and fetch quests. When approaching the steely doors of Orgrimmar advanced players duelled like gods on the road which led to the city. I stepped around them, me, a lowly messenger, wanting to watch but too afraid to do so. A troll shaman planted a totem and my screen filled with mystic symbols. A warrior wearing a mine’s worth of bejewelled and jagged armour swung a sword the approximate size of a double decker bus. Meanwhile, sunning itself on a rock nearby, watching the whole affair, a big cat swayed back and forth, snapping its claws to a rhythm only it could hear.

Orgrimmar was a tank filled with tropical fish. Gaudy-armoured players ran errands, gossiped in groups, broke out MC Hammer moves on postboxes, sat cross-legged around a Tauren asking questions on gaming trivia. An orc fell from the sky; he’d run across roofs I hadn’t dared tread on in case whoever lived inside complained. There was clearly some kind of caste system at work--level 10s bowed and scraped whenever level 60s strode by--but it was one I couldn’t fathom, not least because I found it hard to distinguish between players and NPC shopkeepers, who bartered spider-silk for cloth the same way AI bots advertised illicit gold exchanges.

That was day one; or possibly day two. Days passed in-game with the turning of our real life globe. When I stayed up through the night--as I did all too often, spurred in hope of completing one more quest or reaching the next level--I welcomed dawnlight like a hippy straddling Stonehenge. The moon and newly risen sun offered the most cinematic angles on the gameworld, those big-sky screenshot opportunities that litter WoW fansites. Riding a bat below unfamiliar stars, the sky lightene. Far beneath Azeroth blurred by, and white ruins like bones erupted from the sands of a beach held in place by tides, by programming, by in-game history. I sought fossils there, and when three low-level Alliance players dared to track their stench across the crabgrass I offered them a friendly wave.

They huddled, clearly debating whether or not the three of them could take this lone Hordesman before deciding no, they could not, and waved back. They went about their business at the other end of the beach and when an enraged mob several levels too high charged their party I killed it with an off-hand spell. In words rendered incomprehensible by WoW’s translation subroutine they thanked me.

At least, I assume they did.

If not living, if not breathing, the World of Warcraft at least bears the semblance of life. Like a Frankensteinian golem it shambles on, the push and pull of interminable warfare raising breath in its lungs. The Barrens Crossroads are lost and retaken. High-level Alliance lay waste to Grom’Gol, then, bored, venture away from the Stranglethorn Coast in search of greater prey. In PVP battlezones where insects build palaces and plagues jaundice the sky factions contend with little impetus, grinding rep, then moving on. There’s little satisfaction striking down enemies in designated warzones; far better to lead an assault on an outpost or city or capital.

Our war lasted two hours on a Sunday evening. We were summoned by message board and then by word of mouth, to a massive PVP event on the Hillsbrad bridge. Factions massed on both sides, glaring across the river, fidgeting with excitement. When the clock struck, we’d surge like Biblical seas and meet battle, buffed and ready to bleed. Totems, druidic enhancements, a dozen sorceries, icons flickering on screen. I’d never felt so powerful.

And I’d never been a team player, never braved instances, never grouped. My one companion in the World of Warcraft was a middle-aged Greek man who whispered to me whenever he needed help with a quest. He’d talk about his son, who’d hit level cap and urged his father to do the same. He couldn’t join his guild, he said, until he had the right armour.

Mine was falling apart. I was clad in hand-me-downs and whatever greaves I could find in the bellies of the few mobs I could dismember. I was a charity case, taken pity upon by a guild who fought the Warmaul champion in Nagrand in order to win me new threads. Still, according to the WoW armourysite I had the worst equipment on the entire server. I had no place in war.

Our organiser grouped us in a gargantuan raiding party. Prompts flashed on screen, red print accompanied by the dread chimes of computer crashing. On his word both parties jumped, ran and flew into battle. Screams split the air, magical effects fell like fireworks as buff and de-buff met and cancelled one another out. The battle crept forward; we held our ground and pushed, killing low level, high level, every level, forcing back the hated Alliance. They dug in their heels and sent pets and familiars baying, laying traps where we trampled, planting totems like pinwheels.

But we pushed, and we won, and after carving enemy lines both sides reset positions and prepared to fight again.

We warred in bouts, both sides exuberant, both sides breaching battlelines before word was given. Beyond the World of Warcraft, the Alliance complained we were attacking before they were ready; inside, gathered at the end of the bridge and muttering over raid chat, we said the exact same thing of them.

Their numbers thinned. Their army became ragged. Alliance scum logged off, bemoaning the state of the game, and our organiser scolded us like a teacher: “If you don’t behave and play by the rules this’ll be the last time we have a PvP event.”

The fourth bout of the night was to be our last. We’d spent an hour or more milling about, playing tug of war with an increasingly brittle Alliance army. One more push and we’d all go home.

Cobbles under our feet, we pushed. Enemies at our throats, we pushed. Bodies falling, spell-shimmer, cries of defeat, we pushed, we pushed.

We pushed enemies from the bridge, an unstoppable bulldozer sweeping them back, following their defeat onto road and on grass, on mud, on land, pushing harder, barking wildly as they turned tail and, no longer pushing back, fled.

This was unfamiliar territory: the enemy’s lands glimpsed only on stealthy midnight sorties. I’d hastened through snow, past farms, steering wide berths round NPCs patrolling by torchlight. I’d explored under cover of dark when few Alliance were awake, running quests that took me through lands where the Horde was emphatically unwelcome.

Now we were brazen. We snaked single-file up crooked paths, ignoring low-level players who gawped as we drove on. We fanned out, swallowing guards and spitting out remains. We were a terror, a plague engulfing the land. I’d been caught in daring raids on Thunder Bluff, where Alliance had captured elevators and people leapt, risking sudden death on Mulgorean grass rather than fall to their blades. I’d seen Cairne Bloodhoof roused from his tent, sending humans and night elfs flying to restore peace once more.

But nothing like this. No daredevil attempt on the capital city had ever driven so far. We hewed down gatesmen and as alarms sounded their champions fell beneath our onslaught. We stampeded through streets, and drove up through the tundra, rampaging across Dun Moragh to brand our mark on Ironforge.

How far distant was the nearest spawn point? How could we reclaim our bodies amid the thunderous shuffle of combat? To fall now would be to leave the assault, so we fought on, numbers falling as all of Ironforge answered the call to arms. We hid in alcoves to recuperate, then sprang back into the fray. Their champions massed against ours while their low level comrades skirted battle, killed carelessly by level 70s who knocked them unnoticed to the ground. Coming from every corner of Khaz Modan, every enemy was a target.

An army against his warhammer, qe reached the throne room to face King Magni Bronzebeard, With every attack our numbers thinned. We bled from hundreds to scores, then dozens, then tens, and only our fading buffs gave us any chance to succeed.

I kept out of range and still my health was whittled. We all had seconds left; only the strongest and most craven remained. I fought like a coward, attacking from the shadows, attacking, eager to witness what would happen next.

And Bronzebeard, best of all the Alliance could, was not insurmountable. Chipped in miniscule fragments his health bar ran low. His magics and special attacks ramped up in their ferocity; he clung to life, with only code to guide him. Our numbers sank, but his vitality fell faster. Surely he realised he had come to an end.

If the World of Warcraft hadn’t been a game, on that night we would have claimed its throne. Let an Orc sit upon it, a Tauren or a troll. Let a Blood Elf wear the crown and decide the fate of Ironforge. For though Bronzebeard fell with so few of us left to gloat, in defeat he left his throne empty, and undeniably ours.

Alas, WoW is just a game and those within it merely players. Bronzebeard remained dead a matter of minutes. We jumped and danced and many big cats snapped claws in jubilation. Moments later he returned to his still-war throne and struck down those few brave Horde still dancing. I never saw his warhammer coming; he smote and then I was a ghost, suffering resurrection sickness rather than reclaim my body from where it lay at his feet.

The final tatters of the Horde army ran to safety across the bridge. Some Alliance followed, but for the most part they stayed close to Dun Moragh, in case we returned to conquer once more.

Azeroth. A living, breathing world, and a game unlike any other, where war rises and falls with the swelling of the seas, and epic battles are a staple every Sunday, after tea.

And while I only spent two months there, by which point I’d more than had my fill, sometimes I feel its call. If even the lowliest, weakest orc on the server can feel powerful its easy to see why for some the World of Warcraft is more than just a game.

Game Saved: Rest In Peace

I’d like to say a few words in remembrance of a dear friend of mine. A place, not a person: the amusement arcade, may it rest in peace.

(SFX: ARCADE AMBIENCE)

It was with some trepidation I approached each cabinet in the arcade. After all, ten whole pence was a lot of money to waste on a bad game. Worse, to waste it on a game I couldn’t fathom, a game I hadn’t played and didn’t yet understand. That would be a terrible mistake.

So I watched each machine before I played it, gauging whether it was worth the pocket money kept in the plastic saver around my neck. The attract mode, as the industry calls it: the arcade equivalent of a carnival barker hollering patter through a megaphone. “Come one, come all,” they seemed to say. “Roll up and take your best shot.”

The attract mode’s rolling demos showed levels played by players who were always a little worse at the game than they should be. They let down their guard, made stupid mistakes. “I could do better than that,” I thought, every single time. I wouldn’t let my guard down. I’d succeed where the invisible player had failed.

It helped if there was a player’s guide on the cabinet, an explanation of what each button did. There was little worse than playing a game for the first time and discovering--through no error of your own--that the first button you hit was a special move or smartbomb in short supply. Not yet acquainted with the controls you hit a button and bam!, the empty screen fills with ninja magic and you’re left to face the rest of the game underpowered and alone.

But work out which button did what and oh, the riches that awaited you! Here in this smoky Aladdin’s cavern, buttons scorched and melted by fag ends, ashtrays protruding, sticky carpets in spiralling designs, faded posters on the walls, the giddy carnival sound of a thousand digital fanfares, coins belched from fruit machines, gamblers pulling one armed bandits, coin pushers undulating, light bulbs flashing, and you, you and you alone are a bad enough dude to rescue the president. Only you can save the galaxy. Only you can claim the high score and graffiti your initials on the leaderboard for the whole world to see.

Visiting the arcade was like taking a trip into the future. The graphics were . . . incredible. Photo-realistic.  At every blow in Mortal Kombat, as blood flew, the crowd grimaced--and you’d draw a crowd. People would stand to watch, and wait their turn, and join in, asking, “Need a hand, mate?” and they’d thumb in a second credit, player two has joined the game.

Alliances formed in the heat of battle. Two player Golden Axe, four player Gauntlet. Six! player X-Men, from Cyclops to Dazzler, beating down the Juggernet, fast friends for as long as your pocket money holds out.

You couldn’t play games like this at home. The colours, the sounds. The gruelling inversions of an R360 cabinet, the machine gun thud of Operation Wolf, the whole cab shook--it juddered, sending shivers along the floorboards, making the whole arcade stop and stare. Sitting down secluded in a galaxy far far away, running trenches in Star Wars, tearing up the highways in Road Blasters. Games that spoke as you passed them, that taunted.

-- “FEAR ME, COWARD” --

And cranes grabbing plush toys, and miniature race tracks, camel races, the Grand National.

-- “Place your bets now, please.” --

Tickets to win prizes. Bingo stools and change machines. A thousand ways to spend your money, all clamouring for your attention.

The seediness of it all, the danger, teenagers with flick-knives hogging Rainbow Islands, slamming pinball machines into full tilt. Dystopia and utopia blended into one: this was the future; it couldn’t be anything else.

And then,

-- SILENCE --

nothing.

The arcade limped to its grave, a drawn out death ushered by a new generation of home consoles. The past caught up with it; then, like an onlooker rubbernecking a car accident, drove on.

Arcades are sad places now, like defiled temples or graveyards. Only a few gimmicks remain from the last of their glory days: failing markers like Dance Dance Revolution, Virtua Tennis and Silent Scope. If you’re lucky you might still find some Daytona cabs still linked together. But with every year that passes, and without maintenance, even these reminders are fading into history. The coin pushers and quiz machines live on, but they’re scant support for the amusement arcade which has sadly passed into shadow.

I miss them, my good friends, who were always there at every seaside holiday. I miss the Whack-a-moles, the Final Fights, the Dig-Dugs, the Pac-Men, the Space Invaders, the Double Dragons, the Combat Tribes and more. Even with boundless gaming technology at my fingertips, I still miss the arcades.

We will not see their like again.

Game Saved: The One That Got Away

The one that got away. The one you didn’t buy. The one you wished for on Christmases and birthdays, or just because. Mum, dad, I’ve been good, you know I have.

The one you asked for and never received.

The one that sat in WH Smith, first floor, home computer department, on a shelf just high enough you had to stand on tip toes to reach it. The one you never had enough pocket money to afford, but that you pined for every weekend for months. You’re out on a Saturday trip to the town centre, and Dad says: ”Before we go home, are there any shops you want to visit?” You make a beeline there, straight there, no distractions, no diversions. You take the escalator up and pull down the game. Flip the box over, examine, pore, drool over screenshots doubtless taken from a format you didn’t have--but did any of this matter when it was a game you couldn’t buy? Watching footage on a monitor, among a number of similarly slack-jawed kids gawping at video games played by unseen hands. How long was it you stood watching for? An hour? More? Long enough for the tape to hit the end, rewind, reset and start all over again?

The game you read reviews of, but never bought. The game you played but never owned--and didn’t that make it all the more appealing? Brief glimpses at end of level bosses, brief turns on unfamiliar controls. Brief moments on another kid’s floor, waiting to play, staring at a loading screen, urging it on. Then: It’s my turn first; or: It’s getting pretty late. And the controls are wrenched away while you are sent home for tea.

The game you saw in amusement arcades, on the last day of summer, quarters or ten pence pieces burning holes in your pocket like shrapnel still hot from the barrel of a gun. One coin, one credit, one game, over too soon. The game you’d have to be a millionaire to buy, around which you plan your future mansion. When you’re rich every staircase will be a waterslide, every bathroom a plunge pool, your kitchen will be a KFC and there at the heart of it all, one room: the arcade room, and at its centre: this game, your first purchase when you’ve found the pirate treasure surely buried in your back garden.

The game that only ever appeared on home formats as a pale shadow of what might have been. The one you pleaded, begged for--and got!--but that turned out to be . . . disappointing. The one you discarded a week later. The one that turned out to be bad.

The game with the exciting adverts, that everyone in class had played except you. The one your parents said would rot your brain should you ever play it. The one too gory, too mature, too expensive--far too expensive for anyone to ever play.

The one the rich kid had, the kid everyone hated but who you decided couldn’t be that bad, and maybe you could be friends, and maybe he’d invite you around on Sunday, and maybe you could play the game he just happened to have.

The one you lost, that was stolen--thief! The one you unwrapped the morning of your birthday, that you took to school in case a burglar broke in and stole while you were out, the one someone took all the same, pushing you down, skinning your knee, taking the game, breaking it in front of you. The one you still remember being ground to splinters beneath the heel of a shiny Clarke’s shoe. The one spooled out to ribbons, tape fluttering in the wind.

The one that simply stopped working one day through no fault of your own. The chewed tape. The disc that became corrupt. The cartridge no amount of huff or puff would ever bring back to life.

The one that came out in the final days of a dying console, just a little too expensive to buy on day one, so you waited for it to come down in price, just a little more, just a little further. The one whose price and stocks dwindled until one day, cash finally in hand, you realise it’s gone, forever.

The one that--even now--you hunt for second hand. But what was rich at sixty dollars costs far too much at eighty, one hundred, two hundred, and more. The price skyrockets. Soon it costs too much to even think about.

Yet you still think about it--why wouldn’t you? It is, after all, the one that got away.

Game Saved: Shenmue

The folly on the hilltop. The towering keep built so high stardust catches in its brickwork. God’s mighty finger, accusing the heavens of neglect and abandonment. The totem of a forgotten tribe, worn but still worshipped, casting shadows the length of midwinter’s night. Forever unfinished.

Shenmue.

Its legacy is too large, its shadow too sprawling. Who can remember what games were like before Shenmue changed our world? No interactive cinematic experiences beyond FMV nightmares and the odd Cinemaware title. It is as important as Space Invaders in the development of our hobby, our culture, our way of life. Bigger, more expensive, and more pertinent to today’s games than Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII combined, Shenmue wasn’t just a game, not a disc pressed into a drive, not software, not . . . code.

It was another time, another place. Another me and you, elastoplast on our cheek, revenge in our soul.

When I think of Shenmue I don’t think of challenges, of levels. In truth, I barely remember the game.

But the world? The emotion it provoked within me?

From a distant land in the East it crossed seas, ended up on shelves, and was so heavily hyped it was a legend before completion. Not set in some steampunk fantasy nor science fiction apocalypse, it took place in the real world of yesteryear--and not in ancient history either, buoyed by ballistas and crossbows and chainmail, but the recent past, captured and digitised. Jet Cola replaced mana potions, and could be purchased from any vending machine. Magic precipitation followed weather patterns circa 1986, transforming Dobuita’s streets overnight. How many day/night cycles, blustering storms, blankets of crystal snow do you take for granted now they’re commonplace and everywhere? How many seamless transitions from area to area, hiking from high countryside through chicken-scratch villages into cities alight with streetlamps and fairy lights and neon? How many Grand Theft Autos and Calls of Duty have numbed your senses to the litter skittering at your feet, the pedestrians passing you by?

In 1999, this was new. So new that watching the original trailer was akin to living a dream. It promised a world that ‘transcended games’ How could we have known it wasn’t lying? So richly detailed, the leafy lanes and sooted docks, the kids in the park playing ball as dusk falls. It still seems unreal that such a game ever existed. The melancholic, majestic score tugging heartstrings as surely as a kitten playing with yarn. It was our first glimpse of an epic story that would pass into myth, the hero’s fate uncertain. It was as though we shared the same dream and started awake too soon.

For too short a time Ryo Hazuki’s life was my own. His furniture was mine--his drawers, his SEGA Saturn resting anachronistically atop his eighties television. The shishi-odoshi spilling water into the koi pond with a sound I’ll forever think of as intrinsically Shenmue.

And our job driving forklifts; Mimi, our kitten; our collection of capsule toys; our friends . . . their number thinning as the snows came and time moved on.

-- NOZOMI QUOTES --

Our investigation to find the man who murdered our father. Our run-ins with his henchmen, our friends now in danger, our way of life under threat, and on the day our curfew--that we abided by for so long--evaporated like mist under morning’s sun I realised the situation had spiralled too far out of control. My days in Dobuita were numbered. My life there was coming to an end.

Shenmue encapsulates nostalgia as no game has attempted to before or since. It’s set on the border between new and old, where cliff lanes meet city streets, and rustic water features give way to industrial cranes. Even the arcade--and was ever a facsimile so redolent of pocket change and sticky carpets?--became neglected as soon as I bought games to play at home.

Nostalgia. The painful yearning to return to a place now passed. Carson McCullers once wrote “We are homesick most for the places we have never known.” I knew Dobuita, the largest pearl on a chain leading through the village of Sakuragaoka, up along Yamanose and at its crest, the Hazuki residence, my home for however many days and weeks. I knew it so well I sometimes see it behind closed eyes, coming to me as the dream it always was, and as homesick as I am for the many places I’ve lost, I find I’m homesick most for a place that never was.

Let us not remember Shenmue as the brightest star in Sega’s fallen sky, but instead as the one experience among many that lived up to gaming’s potential. It delivered. It’s as simple as that, and it delivered a world that, like the Dragon mirror, reflected our own, with all the magic and heartache that encompasses. It dared to be different. It dared to be grander. If there was ever a turning point in entertainment software, one not dictated by processing power, but by sheer artistry and immersion then Shenmue divides new from old.

From a distant land in the East it came, and it set gaming F.R.E.E.

Game Saved: Spec Chums

This is Game Saved. I’m Daniel Ness

(SFX: Spectrum Game Loading)

There isn’t a lot that hasn’t already been said about Spectrum gaming. There’s a reason for this.

(SFX: Loading continues)

And it’s not a happy one.

When American gaming culture breached the United Kingdom it did so with the tenacity of the grey squirrel. Do you remember red squirrels? I do, though I’m worried my memories might be misremembered, that I might never have seen a red squirrel in the wild. Childhood memories are so malleable. My wife remembers a kindly, grandfatherly old man plying her with Werther’s Original.

That probably didn’t happen.

And I’ve probably never seen a red squirrel in the trees, munching on acorns. By the time I was born the greys, immigrants from US shores, had infested our woods, our forests.

And many years later . . .

Look, I never owned a NES. Nobody I knew back then had one. There was no Nintendo culture to speak of in the UK until the Game Boy’s release and Tetris fever. My first run in with Super Mario Bros. was in the arcades for Pete’s sake.

And while we might have had some inkling of Duck Hunt and Mario from those demo pods in the Co-Op, we had no grounding in Metroid or Zelda or Ice Climbers or any other NES classic you care to mention. Where I live now, in the United States, yeah, sure, but we didn’t play Nintendo back home in good old Blighty.

We played computer games.

Yes, computer games. No video game systems, no Atari, no Sega.

All right, a little Atari, and a little Sega, perhaps, but only when the cartridges were cheap. Ten quid for The Ninja, sure, we could just about manage that. But forty, fifty pound a pop? For a video game?

Computer games were where it was at. And when I called Master System carts cheap, I was lying. Codemaster’s budget titles for the Spectrum, for two or three quid, those were cheap. Mastertronic games were cheap. Two months pocket money, avoiding The Beano, The Dandy, no Kola Kubes, no Sherbet Dip Dabs, find a penny, pick it up, scrimp and save and for three pound notes you’d have a new game.

And all of us, with skinned knees and school uniforms, skinny ties pulled in peanuts, playing off-ground It and singing from Come and Praise hymn books at assembly . . .

. . . we’re angry.

Because ours was a diet of cassettes and diskettes, of loading screens and rubber keys, and R-tape loading errors. Our rampant piracy, trading games in the playground, and our Darling Brother heroes, our Saboteurs and Wally Weeks and attribute clash and Dizzy the Egg, and it’s all gone now, subsumed beneath false nostalgia like the last of the red squirrels drowning under grey. We are of a dying tribe. Our culture is gone, our language corrupt. Our kings, our Gods are jokes now. Sir Clive Sinclair, a fool in a C5. Sir Alan Sugar, a collection of ill-tempered catchphrases.

So we proudly shout: This is not how it was. We shout: This is not how things were.

And we spin stories of our history, like legends from before time began, when games loaded from cassettes and an Acorn was mightier than any full-grown oak.

To you . . . foreigners  . . . our wars were petty. To us, they rage on still. Spectrum versus Commodore, Amiga versus ST. Our battle lines were drawn and divided us in fanboyish ways. Never was there a kid who played the best of both worlds, who was rich enough to own more than one system in a generation.

You were one thing or another. You were with us or against.

Our bitter rivalry endures. As a matter of fact, as far as I’m concerned, anyone with a C64 is still The Enemy. Ooh, Paradroid, ooh, Rob Hubbard. I’ll give you the SID chip, but everyone knows the Spectrum did gaming better. Faster, more colourful, more iconic. Your washed-out palette was no match for magenta, cyan,  green, blue and yellow . . .

All dead, now. Even the CPC and Amstrad compatibles. Even the ST, reaching with withered MIDI interface, the musician’s choice, as dead as the rest.

Our memories have been tainted by what has come since. There’s little that remains of our once proud industry. Whenever dim life flickers in hope that a once-loved franchise might flourish again, it dies, unfulfilled. There’s no room for Great Britain in today’s video game market, except as pedallers of American sensibilities.

And every once in a while one of us weaned on gaming, our gaming, speaks with historical authority, blows dust from the pages of Your Sinclair, Zzap 64, Digitiser and spins a tale of what once was but is no more.

And you read, and you move on. It’s a curio; no more, a feature padding an Internet already fat with nostalgia. Little Britain’s little games, of little value, of little worth.

We have a lot to say, us Spec Chums. But our voices crack and wizen, and we wrinkle, and we fade. And what we once loved falls forgotten, to be ignored by those still to come.

How tragic, Britain’s heritage, computer gaming at its finest, which gave birth to developers beyond comparison and writers beyond reproach, is now gone in all but memory.

Even recording this, I struggle to remember what made Britain great.

Except there were games, once. Many, cheap and colourful, traded like stickers, adored. Beloved of me and people like me, who can never let go of the past.

Game Saved: ICO

This is Game Saved. I’m Daniel Ness.

(Music: Castle in the Mists)

Imagine a windmill, fins spinning in the breeze, near a pond, in a castle, in a land far away.

It’s respite for weary travellers and we’ve travelled so far. We found a girl in a cage and rescued her, because that’s what we do when finding princesses imprisoned in castles. We fought shadow creatures with sticks, and lit fires with other sticks which we held like torches lighting the darkness and our way.

We ran through courtyards, under trees and over grass. And the sunlight, when it shines, is dappled by high leaves swaying in the wind that stirs the mill, and her dress, and our hair.

And the walls we’ve climbed support towers high above us; we ran along them stopping sharp at their edges. The ground below was lost beneath mists like a sea. If we fell now, we’d fall forever.

Has ground ever seemed harder? Has it ever flown to meet us so fast? There are no cartoon final moments after hitting that ground; no standing cross-eyed, no holding banners that read: that’s all folks. There are only long falls and sudden stops, and broken bodies, and games over.

So when we come to the bridge with the princess still holding our hand, and it breaks in the middle separating us, we know we should run. We know what’s down there. We’ve teetered on the brink of falling so many times and every time pulled away, treading carefully back from the edge. Every ladder, we’ve approached with caution; every rope we’ve swung on with care.

And every step of the way we took her with us. Trailing two steps behind, we held her hand and called her on. With the princess at our side the doors that blocked our path opened: if we hurried through them, we might escape.

But the bridge opens and the gap grows wide, and we reach for each other, arms stretched, fingers fumbling through air.

We needn’t turn back for her but we do so all the same. Faced with freedom we run toward death, toward the edge, toward her.

And we jump. And we slip. And we fall from a bridge, in a castle in the mist, over a lake, in a land far away.

Gamer Saved: Empty Slot

In 2012 I decided to start a podcast.

It was a foolish idea coming at a foolish time. The videogames market was saturated with podcasts, many following a familiar, tired execution: news, what the presenters had been playing, what they were looking forward to, and letters from their listeners. Threading these beads together was banter, a factor wholly dependant on the charisma and interaction of the hosts. The best podcasts made this an artform. Though it’s presented by four game writers Regular Features rarely mentions gaming at all. Neither does it rely upon a tired formula. It’s carried by wit, irreverence, spontaneity, and is a stronger product for it.

Few podcasts scale such heights, or even attempt to. Instead, they act as the recorded minutes of social gatherings. Once a week, gamers talk about what they’ve been playing, at the end of which a recording is uploaded to iTunes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I decided if I was to make a show I didn’t want it to be another formulaic ‘bantz’ fest, lost in the crowd.

At around the same time Roman Mars launched a campaign to fund the next season of 99 Percent Invisible. 99 Percent Invisible is a shortform podcast about design that packs research, interviews, professional production and, yes, the odd moment of banter into ten-to-twenty minutes of the very best podcasting has to offer.

I’d always thought of it as one of the Internet’s best kept secrets, but Mars’s Kickstarter campaign proved me wrong. Fans donated in their thousands, raising its profile and making the third season stronger, more polished. Season three is littered with field reports from a wide roster of co-presenters, something the show had hitherto been lacking. Thanks to its fans Roman Mars’s small, personal podcast now spoke with the voice of thousands who were passionate or otherwise interested in design.

Another podcast in ascendence at that time, produced by a sometime contributor to 99 Percent Invisible, was Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace. Produced intermittently, it would soon find itself produced regularly for the Maximum Fun Network, the independent production organisation behind shows such as Judge John Hodgeman, RISK! and My Brother, My Brother and Me.

In The Memory Palace, DiMeo describes small, often forgotten stories from history in evocative and haunting detail. There are many fine history podcasts out there--Hardcore History and BackStory come to mind--but none are so vivid, so atmospheric, so magical as The Memory Palace. Whimsical and heart-wrenching, whether describing the hanging of a rogue circus elephant or the scammer who wormed his way into New York nobility, it is always essential listening.

And that’s what I wanted: a small show about the fun and wonder in games. I wanted it to conjure in my audience what it’s like to win or to lose and have a great time either way, to lose yourself in fantastic landscapes, to fret over decisions that in the real world matter not, to care about code and character, the moving of a piece or the roll of a die. What keeps us at a table, playing cards? What holds us in front of a screen, motionless bar the flicking of our thumbs?

All this and more I wanted to convey, in a short form podcast easily consumed on the way to or from work. The thrill of opening a new console. Staying up at E3, watching keynotes overnight. The joy--and perhaps I’m dating myself here--of standing in front of an arcade machine, watching the attract mode and pretending to be playing.

And if stories from past and present weren’t good enough, there was always the exhilarating march of technology. Who knows what gaming will be ten years from today? When I had the idea for this podcast I hadn’t heard of the Oculus Rift. But now, when I think of the future, I imagine gamers in VR headsets, lost in other worlds like kids in an arcade.

I called the show Game Saved. Hardly the most distinctive of titles, but there was something nostalgic about it, something fond.

After writing a number of scripts and recording a couple episodes, it fell by the wayside. Reactions were positive--and I thank those who offered advice--but it seemed gamers were uninterested in short form podcasts. A few months later Joe Martin would produce Unlimited Hyperbole, a short and nontraditional podcast about gaming. I don’t know how big a success it’s been, but I’m sure however many listeners it’s had, it isn’t nearly enough.

In the past year I’ve lost much of my passion for gaming. It’s a sad thing, to lose part of one’s self in such a way. Hopefully one day it will again find me.

Until then, here are the scripts for Game Saved. They were written to be spoken aloud, and some contain production directions, prompts for sound effects, beats of silence and such. By turns nostalgic, hopeful and bittersweet, they yearn for how things once were, how things might one day be, for other times and other days, for the probable, the actual, and the impossible.

And that, I think, is as fine way of summing up gaming as any.