One of my favourite games when I was a kid was The Seventh Star, a text adventure for the BBC Micro. Not that I was any good at text adventures. Or any games full stop, really. The number of games from the time I actually completed can be counted on one hand.1
So I never even came close to finishing it. Nor did my older sister. Which is why it’s slightly sobering to find this playthrough on YouTube. If I’d known what to type, a game which I failed to complete over years… could have been over in less than 20 minutes.
And yet there was something disturbing, as I watched that video recently. Because as I did, I was aware of part of my brain self-destructing.
As the locations of the game flitted past – some of which I remembered, some of which I definitely didn’t manage to get to at the time – I knew I could never quite remember the game as I did as a kid ever again. The memory of seeing the game completed in 2024 instantly squashed many of my memories of the late 80s and early 90s. The memories of which of the locations I managed to actually see then, and which were brand new to me in 2024, is already fading in a jumble of confusion.
* * *
If there’s one thing men of my age are very good at, it’s watching old adverts from their childhood on YouTube. Which is why I was surprised a few months ago, when I randomly came across this Monster Munch advert… and was pretty sure I really hadn’t seen it since the 80s. I was instantly dragged back through the decades.
And yet watching it again, right now… I simply can’t capture quite the same feeling. As with The Seventh Star, as soon as I saw it in 2024, it instantly pasted itself across my memory afresh. I’m not so much dragged back through the decades, as just dragged back a few months, when I first came across the advert afresh.
That feeling can never quite be recaptured. I can’t drag my brain back to the point before I reexperienced these things. And there is an ever-dwindling source of material which I a) still remember well enough as a kid, b) had a huge gap between watching them as a kid and as an adult, and c) haven’t already gone back and killed my old memories by watching them again.
Surely neither The Seventh Star or Monster Munch were really designed to induce this much melancholy.
I think The Devil’s Domain was the first game I ever finished. ↩
5 comments
Philip Tate on 29 October 2024 @ 10am
Games were definitely harder to actually finish in those days. Two of my favourite games were Jet Set Willy and Spindizzy, but I never came anywhere close to finishing either (at least not without cheat codes). And I knew I wouldn’t, but it never bothered me. The fun was in exploring.
Paul on 29 October 2024 @ 10am
This is a really good description of something I’d never considered or seen described before. But it is definitely the double edged blade of having a bunch of stuff that was previously consigned only to memory gradually become available online that you just sort of rewire your brain when that weird TV show or advert gets uploaded to Youtube because someone found it on a tape in their attic.
I watched a video yesterday about the WipeOut soundtrack (the PlayStation game, not the entertainment show) and there was one line that initially annoyed me – about how truly new and exciting WipeOut and the 3D games of that era were – the commentator said “You really just… had to be there.” And I felt like it was a cop out (and potentially slightly snobbish to people going back to play retro games for the first time round) but… it’s true. The excitement of that first contemporaneous play through was the product of a million subtle things all lining up at that particular point in time. And it’s something you really can’t recreate.
Ramble over. This post struck a chord – as always, your posts are so eloquent and enjoyable to read – many thanks. (Just because I don’t feel the need to comment on the research that goes into what’s on Onslow’s telly, doesn’t mean I’m not hoovering up every single post with an imaginary bag of popcorn.)
John J. Hoare on 30 October 2024 @ 10pm
Cheers Paul, much appreciated! I’m sure someone must have written about this elsewhere too, but I can’t recall where.
Currently working on a couple of Fast Show pieces, which should be published next month.
Smylers on 31 October 2024 @ 6pm
That’s a good point, that I hadn’t really thought about in that way before.
It also applies to sharing culture (TV programmes, books, comics, whatever) with children: I have fond memories of enjoying, say, Maid Marian and Her Merry Men or the Adam West Batman as a child, but if I recommend them to my offspring, will that tarnish the memories? What if they turn out not to be as good as I remembered them being, then not only have I inflicted something substandard on my own children, I’ve also diminished my own childhood in some way.
(Maid Marian is as good as I remembered, and has dated much better than many programmes from the time — partly, I suspect, because it’s set in the Middle Ages rather than the 1980s. Batman I haven’t risked, after being warned by by a friend …)
John J. Hoare on 1 November 2024 @ 7am
For what it’s worth, I did all of the 60s Batman a few years back. Season 1 is *great*. As is Season 3, although I think that’s a controversial opinion – it’s often roundly slagged off. It’s definitely cheaper on-screen than the other seasons, but I think the addition of Batgirl in S3 really lifts the show.
It’s Season 2 which is the problem. There are good episodes there, but there’s 60 in total – and I think it quickly becomes clear that the production gets lost. As I recall, they barely had enough time to think about the season before being flung into it, and it shows.