My mate Dave knocked on the door last Saturday morning holding a battered cardboard box like it contained the Holy Grail. Inside? His dad's old 486 DX2/66 complete with a double-speed CD-ROM drive that made sounds like a cement mixer having an argument with itself. "Thought you might want this," he said, grinning. That's when it hit me—we're living through the archaeology of our own childhood, and the 90s PC gaming scene is buried treasure…
Standing in my mate's bedroom that summer of '89, watching him unwrap what looked like a sleek black spaceship, I had no idea I was witnessing the opening shot of a war that would define my teenage years. The Sega Genesis—or Mega Drive as we called it in the UK—sat there gleaming like something from a sci-fi film, all curves and air vents where my chunky NES was all right angles and beige plastic."Sixteen-bit," Dave…
My first experience with the game DOOM was in 2011 when my daughter told me I had to “play this old shooter.” She said, “Dad you can’t possibly understand gaming history without playing DOOM.” I was somewhat hesitant to play it initially due to wondering how well an “old” computer game could be. Boy was I mistaken. After loading a source port version of DOOM onto my laptop (yes, I know that’s not the same…
Ok, let me take you back to when star wars games actually mattered. When Lucasarts still knew what they where doing and way before Disney stole the lot. I mean the good Star Wars games, not the shite EA keep churning out. My first experience with a Star Wars game wasn’t on my bedroom computer (we weren’t rich enough for that luxury). Nope it was at the arcade down the road in Stretford wedged in…
The sound of cardboard hitting cardboard still makes my ears perk up. Proper weird, that—but there's something about that distinctive *thwack* of milk caps colliding that takes me straight back to Year 5 break times when everyone smelled like Ready Brek and had grass stains on their knees.I remember the exact moment Pogs invaded our playground. Must've been early '94, maybe late '93. This kid called Marcus turned up one Monday morning with a leather…
Picture this: it's 4pm on a Tuesday in 1994, and I'm sprinting home from school like my life depends on it. Not because of homework—that could wait. Not because mum had promised fish fingers—though that was a bonus. No, I'm running because Nickelodeon's afternoon block was about to kick off, and missing the opening credits of "Legends of the Hidden Temple" felt like a personal failure.You know that feeling when you burst through the front…
The sound hit me first. That metallic crunch when Scorpion's spear connected, followed by the digitized grunt that my Mega Drive's YM2612 chip somehow made sound more menacing than it had any right to. I was hunched over our living room carpet—the brown one with those weird geometric patterns that looked like a computer had hiccups—frantically scribbling move commands on the back of a school exercise book. Down, forward, high punch. Got it. But what…
The Top Ten Sports Games Ever Made This ranking will break all of your friendships. As soon as David proposed that we rank the greatest sports games of all time, Samuel was already muttering something about Amiga superiority, and Elena was preparing her usual defence of the Dreamcast. Then Joe jumped in and said that NBA Jam deserved to be ranked at the top due to the fact that “chaos beats simulation every time”, prompting…
The Technical Evolution of Racing Games: From Vector Graphics to Polygons I get what it takes to send code out on constrained hardware. I know the impossible optimisations you need to develop a game that has some sort of responsiveness when you’re limited by kilobytes of memory and a CPU that’s clocked at single-digit megahertz. Racing games offer the ideal way to see the technical development of the 80s and 90s since each generation had…
Last night I stumbled across Alex G's "Nintendo 64" while scrolling through Spotify's rabbit hole of indie recommendations, and honestly? It hit me like a perfectly timed power-up when you're down to your last life. The song's barely three minutes long, but it managed to capture something I've been trying to articulate for years about what retro gaming actually means to those of us who lived it the first time around.You know that feeling when…