I don’t think of myself as being overly sentimental. I do seem to remember a lot more than other people, though – small things that when I bring up to those involved, I’m looked at as if I’ve fabricated the world’s most mundane story. “I had a really wonderful brownie there,” I’ll say to my wife as we pass a restaurant we last visited 12 years ago. “I had lasagne and cheesy garlic bread,” I add as she looks at me in a way that is clearly questioning if we’ve even set foot in the building before. It appears that I’m like this with games, too, a landslide of the past hitting me as I learned my mum’s house, my childhood home, is going on the market this week.
We all look back, hopefully with fond memories of games we’ve played over the years, but perhaps rather foolishly I’d not really considered how where I played these games and who I was with is just as important. My memories, in fact, are less about the games themselves (what I thought of them, key events, etc), but more the moments in time and place. We all remember what we were doing during huge world events, but where were you when you booted Super Mario 64 for the first time… and who were you playing with?
My first gaming memory, I’m pretty sure, is of the Amstrad CPC 464, the one that came with a green-screen monitor. I can’t have been very old, but I remember a game about stunt driving that I’ve come to learn is called Super Stunt Man. The most bizarre part of this memory isn’t how terrible I was at the game, but that in my mind the whole thing is red, like an off-hue polaroid photo – all except the very green monitor screen. Strange. Have you ever tried explaining to anyone under the age of 10 what life was like before Netflix and YouTube? Imagine telling them about a screen that only displayed shades of one colour!
My mind is less red-tinged when I think about the C64, in reality more of a sideways step from the Amstrad than a massive upgrade, but I had it on a colour TV which made a huge difference. We bought a bumper package, the one with the amazing artwork of an owl on it (I must have stared at this box for hours in what I assume was the Woolworths or WHSmith catalogue), bundled with two joysticks and a second game collection that had 20+ games included. Amazing days, but again, aside from the odd specific game memory (I was big into Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, for my sins), my overriding feeling of the time is one of a puzzle.