Not the movie!
We, if you are of my era, are getting to that age, who am I kidding?…we are that age! The age when every day an anniversary of some amazing, influential or simply well remembered and loved game crops up in your various online feeds. Gaming is such a new…hobby? That’s what we called it back then, the handful of us geeks that played them, it was an exclusive club, not the cool kind. As the hobby gained in popularity it started to hit the news, kids were spending too much time playing games, they made you fat, turned to into a gun toting psychopath, made your eyes grow dim, a malady that was usually blamed on a boys other favourite hobby. Eventually graphics became so “realistic” that the entire industry ended up in court and games fell under the same age restrictions as video nasty’s.
Jumping back in time a bit, just before Night Trap ruined it for us all, there was a moment when the tide changed, when we went from geeks to gods, well, at the very least to being “normal”, when gaming was the `in thing` to do, from adults playing Tetris on the Gameboy to teenagers and kids all wanting a games machine. In the UK, it was the year the micro computers died.
Obviously, as with all things, no one person can say definitively say when a certain section of society moves away from a particular type of technology, there will always be arguments, for example, as to when vinyl died or indeed when it came back! But we do know when the Walkman came out and its effect on the music buying public, but trends like those can take time to filter through to different parts of the world, I suspect quite a few of you reading this were not affluent enough to purchase a genuine Sony Walkman. I had something from a market stall, it was red, it played tapes, it had fast forward only, old people on the bus glared at me because there were no restrictions on loudness back then and the sound bled from the black foam pressed against my ears. Sod you Grandma!
There is nothing wrong with only being able to afford off brand electronics, there is nothing wrong with buying things from a market stall under a carpark. I should know, its where I started, a geek kid of 16, who`s parents mantra was “you will never get a job playing those computer games” as they slammed the door on my computer room, which was actually a cupboard at the top of the stairs, usually reserved for boxes you couldn’t be bothered to open after moving house 6 years earlier. A cupboard that my dad decided would be the best place to keep me and my hobby, a cupboard that butted up to the eaves of the house, meaning a small hole was made in the plaster board, all the afore mentioned boxes were placed in the now accessible loft space through the hole, leaving the cupboard free for a large CRT at one end, a small plank of wood on another TV stand to act as a table for whatever computer or console I had at the time and 2 chairs, one behind each other as if me and a friend were re-enacting a scene from Top Gun. Which was fine if we were playing a flight sim, which we weren’t.
But I did get a job playing computer games and it was the best time of my life.
It started down the afore mentioned market stall, 1992, summer, just as I left school, it was either that or spaceman, I chose well. That one market stall was the beginning of what would end up being the largest independent games retailer in the south of England, trust me, I had a huge amount of fun, my boss became my best friend, Rave was at its height and so was the battle between Sega and Nintendo. The SNES had only just come out, in the UK that is, that’s my point, little did we know what masterful trick Sega were goin to pull, not just on the game playing public, but on retail, changing the world forever.
Those of you who know your gaming history have no doubt been screaming “Sonic 2sday”, yes, you are right, well done. I cant get over to those of you who weren’t there how important a shift this was, we, in Britain, never got games when you guys in Japan and the US did, for example Mario Bros 3 came out end of 1988, we in the UK didn’t get it until summer of 1991, one of the finest games ever made didn’t make it to our shores for nearly 3 years after it came out overseas. Imagine if that was the latest hot summer blockbuster film, the only difference is we didn’t have YouTubers spoiling it, just the odd screenshot in a mag and the Wizard.
So there it was, a near simultaneous worldwide release, I say near, because it came out a couple of days prior in Japan, but for us retailers it was shocking, there was no point trying to get in on import, until that point we were doing well selling adapters for consoles to play imported games, there was even a rival shop in the nest town along that only dealt in import. I must make in clear, we were a 2nd hand shop, a place to come and trade your games, a new thing in itself, but the excitement was “when will it come in”. It was always a good or bad sign of how a game was received, will it break the record of being sold in the local department store and 2 days later ending up discounted on our “pre-owned” shelves? There were the usual suspects, the middle class older kids who bought their own games, completed them in a day or two and brought them in to us to trade or sell, not caring if they lost nearly half the value in a few days or the people who just didn’t like whatever game it was and just wanted rid of it.
As luck would have it, we were open on a Tuesday, yeh, I know that’s an odd statement, but this was a market, a year or two away from having a shop in every town in the area, we were only open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So there I am, just turned 17 a few months earlier, opening up on the day of a nearly world wide release of one of the most anticipated games (in retrospect the often regarded best in the series) wondering, when will I get to play it? Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long.
I think it was about 2 o`clock, pun not intended, that one of the more affluent customers came in with Sonic 2, “I’ve completed it, with all the Chaos emeralds”, he said, I didn’t even know what that meant, I had no idea there was a variety of endings, I didn’t care, here, without me having to move or pay any money, at least not my own money, was Sonic 2, in my hands, on the day of release, with hours left in the day to play it, not in a cupboard, you owe me royalties Rowling!
I paid the man what he wanted, like an addict with his dealer, I didn’t care, I wanted to play this game, the same day they were in the USA, the same day they were in France, the money wasn’t mine, why would I care, I had waited so long for Nintendo, I wasn’t going to wait for Sega.
I cant do that feeling justice, 2 pm of the day of release, playing the best game ever, which it was at the time, truly, it was brilliant, it was so fast, you really couldn’t do this on Nintendo, it handled like a dream, once you got rid of Tails, twat, it was sublime, oh my god, the Chemical Plant Zone and its tubes, Casino Night Zone, I could have stayed there forever, the music, the colour, the joy, the absolute joy, a joy I knew, for once, I was sharing with every gamer like me, who had come out of the cupboard, all around the world at the same time. I must have played from 2pm till gone 3pm, when I stopped and turned round, there were all the school kids, fresh from a dull day of learning, only one thing on their minds, the geeks kids, the cool kids, the young, the old, watching in awe. A game that had come out that day, being played down the dark damp game swop shop in the market, being played by a fellow geek, who was now a gaming god, handing out the control pad to his followers “go ahead, have a go, its great” and they did, one after the other, some played 2 player, all patiently waiting their turn, a few minutes wait was better than 3 years.
That game turning up on the day of release changed things, a shop selling games at a reduced price, because they were “pre-owned” as we had to say, meant a whole new class of customer would call in on us, even if it wasn’t the same day you could guarantee most games would turn up within a week of release, the only place trickle down economics actually worked. The demographic changed that year too, more girls came out of the cupboard, I made a point of only employing women to work with me on those busy Saturdays in the 90s.
From then on it was all about release dates, midnight openings, pre-orders. None of them quite matched `Sonic 2sday`, I find it hard to say Sonic never quite matched that day either, that makes me sad, it makes me sad that no one will ever gather in a shop after school to see if a game has turned up 2nd hand on the day of release and the “cool guy” lets them have a go on it, now its waiting on pre-order download when they get home, no poster in the box to put on the wall.
You dont have to wait, you can download Sonic 2 now, not the movie, play it on any system you want, just like me back in the winter of 92, I didn’t have to wait, I didn’t even have to wait for it to download. Happy Birthday Sonic 2.
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