Picture the scene. It’s the early ‘90s and the beginning of the summer holidays – six sweltering weeks at your disposal to do whatever you please. You’ve read the summer specials from both The Dandy and The Beano, and with no days out on the horizon, the only thing to fill the void until CITV comes on at 4pm is to play video games. Well, that and go outside and eat dirt.
My earliest memory of playing video games during the six-week break is of taking a trip to Cornwall in the late ‘80s. We’d set an entire day aside to visit the Trago Mills department store – which I had been assured was a magical place that not only sold everything imaginable, but also had ponds, statues and other tourist trap style amenities. It seems they had somehow acquired a bunch of surplus video games, with shelves lined up of Atari 2600 deadstock.
With holiday money burning a hole in my pocket, I scoured the shelves and ended up purchasing Q*Bert at a knockdown price. This, of course, meant that the rest of the holiday was spent eager to return home and play this new purchase, reading the manual and staring at the screenshots on the back of the box during the drive back. I can even remember running up the stairs, stepping over the suitcases and popping it into the Atari 2600 as soon as arriving home. Turns out that I picked a corker as Q*Bert was one of the better, more faithful, Atari 2600 conversions. Until the time came to ‘upgrade’ to a SEGA Master System, it rarely left my console.
Memories from around the early ‘90s are hazy, aside from pestering my parents daily for 20p so I could purchase stickers for the Official Nintendo Sticker Album – the first album I fully completed, albeit by sending away for missing stickers when the amount approached single digits. There was also the time we were about to go out for the day, but a ‘quick go’ on Asterix for the Master System ended up with reaching the last level – a chariot race set in front of Julius Caesar. As the game had no password or save feature, I had to pester for “another five minutes” until seeing the ending credits for the first time. As I had found Asterix a bit tougher than other games, I spent the rest of the day beaming.
I wasn’t just a SEGA diehard during the ‘90s. Under the Christmas tree in 1993 was the Super Mario All-Stars SNES bundle, which had dropped to £99.99 around two weeks after my parents had paid £129.99. As much as I loved the SNES, there was a problem: the games were too expensive. I had a daily paper round, which made buying second hand Master System games possible, but SNES games were in the vicinity of £50.
As such, I never really owned a great number of SNES games at a single time, forever selling and swapping. One game I couldn’t part with though was Super Mario Kart, which was played religiously not just every night but also throughout the summer holidays as well.
With a friend over, we’d play two-player using a ‘no friendly fire’ rule to ensure that at least one of us would end up 1st. This involved refraining from using red shells when the other was ahead, aiming green shells at AI racers, informing where bananas had been placed, and avoiding one another when activating a power-star. All the while we’d curse the cheating AI, with such sights as observing Mario and Luigi using power-stars multiple three times in a single lap.
After acquiring a second-hand Mega Drive 2 circa 1994, I quickly discovered that the best way to experience lots of games was to swap with friends. Cunningly, a friend had agreed to lend me the recently released Theme Park just before school broke up, meaning I had six weeks to play it rather than just a weekend or a few days. Becoming an obsession, I’m willing to say I played it almost every day that summer for hours on end. Using cheats, I’d pause the game and then construct entire fully decorated parks before unpausing and watching the visitors arrive and make their way around the sprawling labyrinths of pavements and rollercoaster tracks.
In this summer of business acumen, this year was also spent playing Transport Tycoon on a friend’s PC. Not something typically known for being amusing, but we found a way – by giving towns, stations, and whatever else that could be renamed the stupidest names possible. Believe it or not, this caused a spot of trouble. After gloating about naming a town “Eggy Dave” word somehow got back to “Dave” and I ended up with a fat lip. Looking back, I think it was another Dave entirely, meaning I took a punch to the gob for nothing.
I digress. Shortly into starting college the price of the SEGA Saturn tumbled, resulting in picking up a console for a mere £65 during mid-1997. There were plenty of new releases on the horizon, but it was also clear that it never going to catch up with the PlayStation. While the system is mostly remembered for its first party titles (Virtua Fighter 2, SEGA Rally, NiGHTS, Panzer Dragoon, etc) there were plenty of decent third-party games to experience too. A friend had recommended Crusader: No Remorse – a pretty good, and now forgotten, isometric action game published by EA – which I found for a pittance. I also recall enjoying the Saturn version of Hexen more than its scrappy rendition of Duke Nukem 3D. It was Bullfrog’s Magic Carpet that had me captivated one summer though. This fantasy rug flying sim was innovative for its time, involving battling creatures and gathering mana by tagging it for collection, where it was then hoovered up by a hot air balloon. You weren’t alone in this pursuit, with other spellcasters trying to achieve the same goal, resulting in conflict and
A new issue of SEGA Saturn Magazine hit newsagents while on holiday “up north” (Shropshire) during the same year, being one of the rarer issues packaged with a demo disc. Just like Q*Bert all those years ago, the rest of the holiday was spent looking forward to trying it out. If memory serves it included Sonic Jam, Die Hard Arcade, and SEGA Rally – with Sonic Jam featuring a handful of zones from Sonic 1 and Sonic 2. If there’s one Saturn game out there that didn’t need a demo, this was it. Any SEGA fan would’ve played these games extensively yonks ago. Still, it was cool that SEGA took the effort, and it did show-off the new 3D Sonic World segment as well.
By 1998 I had a part time job. Two, in fact – even in the ‘90s, gaming was an expensive hobby. There was little time to spend gaming throughout the summer breaks, even though college was shut for six weeks. For me, those halcyon days ended with the Saturn – days definitely seemed longer than they are in the present. If you’re a parent and your offspring begs for an extra five minutes to defeat a boss, let them crack on. You never know, they may end up writing a self-absorbed blog post about it some thirty years later.