GameTripper

Market research Seven months later, it was the start of the greatest time of a young person’s life: the six-week summer holiday. Apart from the Sonics, nothing else we’d bought had really impressed us – but after being on good behaviour for most of the previous few months, we’d generated enough goodwill that we were owed a new game. As with all of our game purchases, we were taken to the “gaming booth” in Castleford Market by our frugal mum.

The greatest thing about Tekken 3 was discovering Tekken Force Mode. Like Streets of Rage but with each character having their own, full beat ‘em up move set, Tekken Force saw you fight your way through the group of non-descript Foot Clan wannabes who had various levels of bird ranking assigned to them depending on how much health they were assigned (Crow, Falcon, Hawk, and Owl), before fighting various bosses.

Having helped Twinsen escape from prison before collecting his magic ball and ancestral tunic, it quickly became apparent that Little Big Adventure featured a scale and freedom I’d never seen. I could go wherever I liked; solve puzzles; talk to the array of anthropomorphic animals and beach balls that made up the game’s citizens; get into fights using Twinsen’s fists or his magic ball; and enjoy exploring an unpredictable world.

When I first picked up The Book of Atrus, I hadn’t known it was based on a game. It was only due to the blurb on the book’s back that I discovered that Myst was, in fact, a highly thought-of game on Mac and PC. Having only ever played consoles and not paying much attention to PC gaming, the whole Myst phenomenon had passed me by. But after enjoying the book and its two sequels, I decided to hunt this game down. When I finally played Myst, I was completely absorbed by it.

So, did I manage to complete it? Without cheating? Er, no. Cheating in games is something I’ve always loathed to do, for two reasons. Firstly, games were expensive, so I was keen to get to the end properly. Secondly, well, it’s shit, isn’t it? There’s no real sense of achievement. It was the case back then, and it’s the case with any new games I play now.

When my mother was clearing out her loft a few years ago, she asked me to check some notepads I’d written in as a teenager. Any hopes I’d written a potentially award-winning novel were dashed when I saw my scribblings: it was just a list of WWF championship belts and tally charts. I remembered what these meant straight away – they were my title reign histories for WWF SmackDown!. I’d played the Season Mode so far into the future, the game itself had lost track.

Iain Mew was late to the Zelda party, but The Wind Waker proved to be his gateway drug to the classic series, with a personal twist. My roommate during my first year at university was a decent, considerate guy. Once, at 2am, he fell over a chair in the kitchen, stumbled in, stomped up the stairs to his bit of our duplex room, and when his phone rang, answered it with a hushed “I’m trying not to wake up my roommate”. I was touched.

Luke Beardsworth talks about his six-year journey playing through Telltale’s The Walking Dead series, starting at his bleak studio flat in Birmingham and finishing in the modern day – taking three different consoles to complete it. To talk about how I went from a young man obsessed with online gaming to someone utterly gripped by a game that could be described as a really long, interactive cutscene, I probably need to give you some context. In 2014, I left my home Preston for the first time.

For Luke Marshall, NHL 97 was so good, he owned it twice – and in 2021, it helped him rediscover old friendships in more ways than one. When I was a kid, I had a bit of an obsessive personality. I didn’t just get into the latest craze; I threw myself in headfirst. Whether it was Biker Mice from Mars, Bucky O’Hare, Pogs or Pokémon, I collected the stickers, the trading cards, the action figures… I was all in. My youth was spent creating my own imaginary worlds with my own rules.

Nick N Adams’ introduction to gaming was marred by missing games, but he was saved by Codemasters – specifically Magicland Dizzy, its classic platformer. My personal gaming adventure began on a blisteringly cold and wintery Christmas morning. The year was 1992, and the fields outside our old family cottage in the remote, north-east Scottish countryside were covered with deep drifts of snow. As myself, my brother and my sister awoke that morning, we knew it would be particularly special this year.