- Joined
- Mar 3, 2013
I'm on the East coast, and for the longest time you'd only ever get games in Dixons or Woolworths. We didn't actually get a proper computer game shop until 1998, and even then it didn't last long. Electronics boutique (later became game) opened up soon after and got a Gamestation years later, and yeah, they has a cabinet with retro and odd stuff in. They were also considerably more generous when it came to trade ins, which was another thing Game fucked up when they took over, the shops essentially became another Game store with metal music being played and neckbeards and "alternative" looking girls behind the counter.
They actually lost my business completely one day when I was buying something and the assistant was very aggressively trying to push me towards buying one of their second hand copies instead which was only £5 cheaper, I eventually shut her up by saying "I'd rather support the industry" As a shop, they didn't offer anything that any other store that sold games offered, so I was free to take my business elsewhere at absolutely no cost to myself.
Like I say, we didn't have much money growing up, so until I was nine or ten, the only exposure I had to gamess was at friends houses, but even then I was fascinated, I wasn't even that fussed about having a shot, and would happily watch them play. We got a Master System in the early 90's when everybody else already had a SNES or Megadrive and only ever really played new games when we swapped with friends or saved up our birthday money, and one year I saved up my Christmas and birthday money to buy myself a Game boy, which led to arguably the most important event for me as a fledgeling gamer. I borrowed a copy of Zelda, Link's awakening from a friend, and even at the age of 13 or so I was blown away by the sheer quality of the game and how it exceeded the incredibly limited technology of the console. To this day, I believe it stands as one of the finest examples of game design ever.
We couldn't afford the more modern consoles, but we still bought the gaming magazines, so we were really keyed into what's hot or not.
I still remember pouring over the pages of Sega magazine, absolutely enamoured with the screenshots of Guardian Heroes on the Saturn, dreaming of playing it.
A couple of years later, some family friends gave us their old Atari ST with a shit ton of discs, then a couple of years after that when our finances were a bit better, I got my mates old Mega Drive. My brother got a SNES at some point, I got ahold of my Saturn in 98 (even though I knew it was dead in the water), then my brother got a Playstation and an N64 as he was at uni by this time. We'd finally "caught up" with everybody else and I was there for the release of the seminal Ocarina of Time. I've been really fortunate to have been exposed to almost everything the industry had to offer, and wasn't restricted to just one company.
I still look back on that time with enormous fondness, being a gamer in the late 90's when Squaresoft were absolutely at the top of their game was something else.
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