You know the feeling. You’re a kid and all of your mates have the latest thing. You want the latest thing but, due to a chronic lack of income, you have to rely on your parents to get it for you. So you give them the details. You take great care to explain that it has to be a BMX. You hope that it turns out to be a Diamondback but you’d readily accept anything north of a Raleigh Burner. Thus charged, out go your parents, presumably in search of a Halfords, their mission clearly imprinted on their brains.
Inevitably you end up with a Safari 5000 from that well known cycle / home furnishing specialist, House of Holland.
So, while my friends were expounding the virtues of their Spectrums, C64s and even BBC Micros, I cut my teeth on a Texas Instruments TI994/A. To a kid, this was social suicide. I mean, I had a mate who had both an Atari 2600 and an Intellivision. Man, was he ever cool.
As you could count the number of places you could pick up TI software in the UK on the fingers of a one-armed man with a fondness for bacon slicers, you had to make do with code listings. I would purchase most of those little books you could get – you know the ones with the robots and little bugs and things on the cover? They were filled with code, came with names like Better Basic and promised hours of entertainment once you’d managed to transfer their contents to an electronic format...
Except none of them supported the TI. They were written for the ZX81 or Spectrum and had little callouts so that people could get them working on the BASIC for their machine. It happily supported the BBC or even the PET but the poor old Texas Instruments was left to fend for itself.
Salvation came in the form of my dad who was able to borrow a Spectrum+ from work on occasion. In those brief and fleeting times I could safely lord it over my rubber-keyed friends. Eventually, I was able to persuade my mum that we should get one on a more permanent basis. Gaming heaven followed shortly afterwards, to the utter detriment of my schoolwork.
From there I never really looked back. The +2 followed with the bonuses of 128k and an inbuilt tape drive. In theory, that meant no more messing around with cables and volume levels. In practice, it felt like some degree of control was lost whenever a tape failed to load.
In a radical departure, my mum even managed to get me a Colecovision although, in another typical parent moment, it turns out that they also sold it years back as “it was just taking up space” and “I never used it anymore”. Despite missing out an entire level, the version of Donkey Kong was just superb.
Next comes the 16-bit era. A friend of mine had an Atari ST and we used to bunk off school to go and play Populous. Just before I started at Bullfrog, I decided that I needed something like that. Given that the Amiga was Bullfrog’s weapon of choice, it was Commodore’s puppy that got the nod - an A500 with the memory expansion to give me a full Meg of awesomeness no less.
Thanks to the success of Bullfrog, especially in Japan, we had ourselves a couple of neat contacts. This enabled us to secure the arrival of the first Super Famicom in the country. After a weekend of Super Mario World and F-Zero the poor thing blew up, but we pretty much all decided that we needed them anyway. A phone call later and, on release day in Japan, 6 units were winging their way
