Budget Computer Games
When I was 11 years old, I subsisted on “pocket money”. From when I had been old enough to go into town on my own, I had been given money each week on a Saturday morning to do what I wanted with. It seems like such a simple idea to an adult, and a very minor amount of money, but to a child having those two pound coins burning a hole in your pocket was a tremendous feeling.
You could buy literally anything with them if you saved them up. You pretty much knew the entire contents of the toy section in the Argos catalogue, and had figured out how many weeks you would need to save up to buy a snooker table. Of course you never bought a snooker table, because you never saved up for more than about an hour on a Saturday morning.
By 10am at the latest you would find yourself walking the aisles of the local toy-shop, your BMX parked in the bike rack out-front. You also knew the entire contents of the toy-shop, and looked at everything you couldn't afford anyway. If you were really unlucky (I was), the staff knew your parents, and had known you ever since you could walk. If you were even more unlucky some of the staff lived in the same road as youthree houses along. You daydreamed in the most bitter manner possible that their children almost certainly had all the toys available in the known universe locked away inside their house, but you never found out because you never went to visit. They were not your friends.
So what could I afford with the contents of my pocket at 11 years old? Quite a lot actually. A 72nd scale model aircraft was within your grasp. You could have a Supermarine Spitfire, a Hawker Hurricane, a Gloster Gladiator, or even a P51 Mustang. You wouldn't be able to afford glue, but you could always borrow that from your brother while he wasn't lookingalong with his paint, brushes, and craft knife. If you feined interest in building model aircraft he would actually help you toountil he realised you had the patience of a monkey. I lost count of the number of aircraft I built with superglue. While tremendously fast, it was also very good at attaching fingers to spitfires, so most of my kits had unintentional panel lines that looked curiously similar to fingerprints.
One sure way to wind your brother up was to mix two model kits together, and glue the parts together randomly, claiming you were building a robot.
What else could you afford ? I'll tell you what else. A computer game.
Early in the days of the 8 bit computer craze in the UK somebody figured out that they could buy a game written by a back-bedroom recluse, copy it onto lots of cassette tapes, and sell it to local shops for idiots like me to buy. What started as a cottage industry exploded all over the country within months, and became a very big business indeed.
By far the most prolific cheap game marketing company around was called “Mastertronic”. You can probably find their corporate history online if you look long enough, and I guarantee it's probably far more amateur than you might ever believe. Of course as an 11 year old, all I ever saw was the neat line of tapes in the local toy shop. The neat line of tapes right at the bottom of the entire WALL of games for other computers.
My Dad had chosen the MSX for very sound reasonsI would probably have done the samebut it didn't stop the rest of the industry completely ignoring it, and making games for the Spectrum, Amstrad, and Commodore 64. The entire wall in the shop was covered in titles for themtitles I never even bothered looking at. My meager selection down on the bottom row consisted mostly of titles such as “Professional Snooker Simulator”, “Professional Chess Simulator”, “Formula One Grand Prix”, “Decathlon”, “The Way of the Exploding Fist”, “Spin Dizzy”, and “Head Over Heals”.
While most of the games were out of my price range, anything by the likes of Mastertronicand this included “Professional Snooker Simulator”were within my grasp. So I bought them.
I remember playing the snooker game with my Dad for an entire Saturday morningtrying endlessly to pot balls. It seemed tremendous at the timewith superb graphics, and an incredible aiming system. Looking back, it was shockingly awfulbut what else could you expect for less than two pounds?The Formula One game was a sight to beholdessentially consisting of a stripey road racing towards you with seemingly random corners coming out of nowhere, which you wrenched the joystick away from, filling the room with electronic screeching sounds, shortly before you crashed again. The opposition cars were oddly reminiscent of the Les-Flics carscollections of black blobs that grew in size until alongside you, at which point they vanished entirely.
A lot of imagination was required in the early days of computer games.
I do remember being shown another driving game a year or so later running on the BBC Micro, called “Revs”. It was written by a guy called Geoff Crammond, and looked nothing like any other game I had ever seenthe track was drawn from vectors, and seemed to actually exist within the computer, unlike the Mastertronic reaction testing idiocy. It was obviously the futurealthough it would take nearly 10 years for that future to manifest itself.
During that same session, late after school one evening, I saw another game for the first timeagain, drawn with simple vectors describing the space around you. It opened with the view of a rotating wedge shaped spaceship while the strains of the Blue Danube crackled from the computer's tinny speakers. The game was called “Elite”, and it would change everythingbut that's another story, for another day.