The year was 1989.  I was 17 and started my first job.  I used to work near Hamley’s, that’s a shop in London England.  I remember visiting the shop every day.  Partly due to the fact that my pay sucked and I could get to play their latest games for free.

One day I saw this really small looking console that appeared to be a brilliant white NES.  It was something new.  It was the PC Engine.  The games on it looked arcade perfect. (Emphasis on the word looked).  It even had a CD Rom.  Now you must remember that for many a year after the PC Engine used the CD Rom, the PC and many of the consoles  only used cartrides od floppy disks and the only other console to use CDs being the FM Marty letter on.  Anyway, they all used cartridges or floppies.  The games were about £60 on import, somewhere in the region of 120 Dollars.  I decided to save up for one and on the day of buying this machine the guy who worked in the shop hit me with a sledgehammer reply.  “You know that this machine is only 8 Bit!”   I decided to buy a Sega Megadrive instead and on that day I became a graphics whore.  I like games just as much as the next man but I want the prettiest looking version and I don’t care if I have to pay double for it. 

I must admit that the PC Engine was in fact a better console with hindsight.  The problem was.  As good as it was unlike you people in the great USA, it was never released in Europe or any of its updated iterations and seemed a bad choice.

The funny thing is.  I remember some old git talking about Pong and Space Invaders.  He was saying that the games today were not as good as back then.  Personally I hated Pong and found Space Invaders to be a tad limited.  My favourite games were Bubble Bobble and Puzzle Bobble.  The reason I mentioned this was that it seems to me that whatever time period you became a games player, someone always looked to the past and referred to it as the golden age or something just as daft.

I think the reason that we may do this is because the further back that a person looks into any industry, the more we forget.  For example.  Each year that passes brings some good games and a lot of rubbish.  As each year passes into our memory, we remember less about ten years ago, let alone twenty and only remember all the great games and not the total SHITE that was released at the time. 

I sometimes think that games are a metaphor of life.  We can either hark on about a golden age that never existed by living in the past or, we can get on with life and enjoy all the wonders that it brings and not realise that you’ve wasted your whole life moaning about how games are easy, too short, or rely on graphics.