My Gaming History: Peter Pt2

I was eleven years old and I’d just moved four hundred miles away from my childhood home and all my friends. I started a new school for the last few months of primary education and wasn’t particularly quick to make friends. My Spectrum was still seeing plenty of use but I’d lost the luxury of friends with consoles.

My cousins had a Megadrive and a few friends they swapped and borrowed games with. Most weeks we’d drive over there and I’d spend a couple of hours amazed at the graphics and the new ergonomic pad that had three buttons. I wanted a Megadrive so much.

I had been told, foolishly, that if I passed the entrance requirements and got into the grammar school (the same one my mother went to) then I could have a gift to celebrate. We’d just sold our house before the move so I think there was a bit more cash around than usual and, while I knew I wanted Sega’s 16-Bit beauty, I was being talked in to wanting a mountain bike. Every time I talked about the console my mother would do that mind trick perfected by mothers all over the world where she suggested that what I actually wanted was a mountain bike. I was just about convinced. I almost never got my Megadrive.

This is where my dad makes a triumphant entrance into the story. The morning that the letter arrived telling me that I had been accepted into the grammar school he opened it (I think, as I remember it they’d addressed the letter to my parents). He grinned and told me the news. And then he said, in a very deliberate way. “You know, this means you get to pick what you want for a gift”. I did know, I wanted a mountain bike, right?

“You know, anything… you can even pick that Megadrive. Anything you want”. The spell was broken. We broke the news to my mother who, to her credit, relented in her quest to get me to want a mountain bike almost immediately. We went to a little independent dealer that afternoon and bought a Japanese import Megadrive (with the red “16-Bit” on the front). I was convinced that the only game I would need for the foreseeable future was Sonic.

Of course, I bought, swapped and borrowed my way through a large number of different games in those first few months and when I did start at that grammar school I met new people who also had a Megadrive and the swapping and borrowing grew in scope. For a kid from a family that didn’t have a lot of money, a wider range of people to share with meant a wider range of games to experience.

I think it was a year or so later when I met my first SNES owner and although I thought he was a bit weird for buying the wrong console I did enjoy the regular multiplayer sessions we had on Mario Kart and others. I also made friends with a guy who owned an Amiga. He was always really envious of our consoles (his parents wouldn’t buy him something to play games on, the Amiga was good for his schoolwork…) but I was always attracted to the loading, the floppy discs and the feeling that you could program this thing. I suppose it was my Spectrum days bubbling back to the surface.

These years, in secondary school, surrounded by different people (most of whom were from very well-off families so had much better games and stuff than me!) were a time of variance and sharing for all of us. The console wars (Megadrive Vs SNES) were very much in action and were at least as hard fought as they are today but there was always a grudging respect for certain aspects of another’s choice. Even if you knew they were so wrong to pick anything other than the Megadrive.

It would be my final year at secondary school which started with my dad getting his hands on an old PC and finished with me having a part-time job and buying a PlayStation that would probably be the strongest defining year in my gaming history. I went from booting DOS from floppy discs to loading WipEout on CD-ROM in one year. My foundation in PC gaming was born and my love for home consoles had been consolidated. I was starting college just as console gaming was beginning to look cool and I’d started playing with a PC just before the internet exploded into our lives.