This couldn’t be right. Three stamps on that card meant a free game? A free game of your choice, from the prolific, bulging shelves of the great Mr. Boots?
Maybe we’d been spending too much time in the company of Dizzy, Miner Willy and Freddy Hardest, but the rampant cacophony of excitement you would rightly expect from game starved joystick junkies didn’t come. Our binary minds were racing along at over 2.7Mhz; perfectly synchronised like two Sinclair joysticks on a game of Target; Renegade. Deals like this never lasted long, and it needed full and detailed exploitation if we were to extract the maximum amount of valuable code from those pressed tin shelves.
You see, Boots really did cater for the gamers, viewers and listeners – in every possible way. Of course you could buy new games, videos and music tapes at The Chemist, but you could also buy blanks, and double cassette decks. E240s and C90s were almost as big business for Boots as the commercial tapes, and we made every possible use of them. We thought nothing of buying one new game and three blank tapes in a single transaction. Hell, if the jumped up trolley-wally at the counter had asked us, we probably wouldn’t even have bothered lying.
I don’t think we even vocalised our collective plan. There was no need. Three of us, three stamps, three free games. So simple it was beautiful. Beautiful like the microscopic science that binds atoms together and creates universes; awe-inspiringly primal as the savage elegance of a lion taking its prey; intricate yet dazzlingly ergonomic like a vast, thriving ant hive.
By staggering our purchases, our painstakingly slow acquisition of games quadrupled with that first stamp on the Boots Game Card. Each of us would buy our monthly game on a Saturday, while the other two bought a cheap blank tape. The card was stamped and passed along. Next week, another game, another stamp. On that wonderful third week, the third stamp meant two games! Never has a sprint to the bus station, a 2-mile ride on the Number 362, 20 minutes at the cassette deck handling the “logistics” and ten minutes of loading time seemed so long.
Our joysticks arms were strong, our legs wasted, and our thoughts filled only with the next big game. During Boots the Chemists’ wonderful Game Card promotion, we learned what it was to be rich men and kings, and I still feel the pangs of loss as I stare once again at the rows of tampons that were once so full of incredible games.
