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: 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.