You know what’s funny? I spent forty years thinking racing games were just cars going around in circles, maybe because the only exposure I had was watching other people play them for five minutes here and there. Then I discovered retro gaming in my forties and started working backwards through all these classics everyone kept talking about. San Francisco Rush on the N64 wasn’t even on my radar initially – my daughter had mentioned it…
Been having a proper clear-out of the spare room – you know how it is, start looking for an old cable and three hours later you’re knee-deep in boxes you haven’t touched since the last house move. That’s when I found them again: two gold N64 cartridges that honestly might be worth more than my car at this point. Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, sitting there looking as precious as the day I first…
The lad next door got a Genesis for Christmas ’91. I’d had my Mega Drive since the year before. Exact same machine, you’d think, just different badges stuck on the front. But at twelve years old, those differences felt massive – like we were playing in completely separate gaming worlds that only overlapped when we’d swap cartridges and argue about whether his version of Sonic ran faster than mine. Spoiler alert: it actually did, but…
Man, the smell. I can still conjure it up perfectly – that weird cocktail of cheap pizza grease, cigarette smoke from the adult section, and that distinctive electrical tang from CRT monitors running hot all day long. Walk into Tony’s Pizza & Games on a Saturday afternoon in 1987 and you’d hit that wall of sensory overload that meant one thing: you were about to blow your entire allowance in the next two hours. My…
That arcade cabinet sat right there between a busted Galaga machine and a Street Fighter II that perpetually reeked of cigarette smoke and whatever mystery substance someone had spilled on the joysticks. I must’ve fed that NBA Jam machine twenty dollars in quarters over the course of summer ’93 – enough money to actually buy the Genesis cart, but you know how it is when you’re fifteen and logic takes a backseat to pure arcade…
Christ, where do I even start with King K. Rool’s laugh? I mean, we’re talking about a sound that’s been rattling around in my head for twenty-five years now, and it still makes me want to check over my shoulder. This was back in ’99 – I was about twenty-five myself, working my first proper IT job and still living in a grotty flat share in Fallowfield. My flatmate Dave had somehow convinced his girlfriend…
My buddy Jake claimed he could nail Sub-Zero’s spine rip fatality every single time. This was 1995, we’re crammed into his basement rec room that always smelled like stale pizza and that weird musty carpet smell, and Jake’s going absolutely nuts on his six-button Genesis controller like he’s trying to break it. Here’s the thing about Mortal Kombat 3 on Genesis though – it wasn’t just about button mashing. You couldn’t just flail around and…
That chunky six-button controller showed up at my friend Mike’s house on a random Saturday in 1993, and I swear it changed everything about how we thought about fighting games. Mike had been bragging about it all week at school – three extra buttons, he kept saying, like that somehow made him gaming royalty. I figured it was typical Mike exaggeration until I actually held the thing. The weight felt different, more serious somehow. Instead…
Back in 1991, I was twelve years old and completely convinced that my Genesis was about to change the world. I’d been defending Sega since getting my Master System three years earlier – you know how it is when you’re the weird kid with the “wrong” console – but Sonic felt different. This wasn’t just another exclusive game to add to my arsenal of playground arguments. This was ammunition. I still remember unwrapping that first…
You know what’s funny? I’ve been gaming for over forty years now, and I can still remember the exact moment I realized helicopter games were something special. It was 1992, I was fifteen, and my friend Dave had just gotten Desert Strike for his Genesis. We’d spent most of that summer trading games back and forth, but when he popped this cartridge in and handed me the controller, everything changed. Most games back then were…