The Mystery Of The Uninformed Purchase

Is it just me or was the sun shining just a little bit brighter this morning?

I was having a bit of a read of various sites the other day, places like the retro forum over at ntsc-uk and World Of Spectrum, and I was struck by some great feelings of nostalgia. It all took me back to my childhood and the days of getting and playing Spectrum games, when the process of both obtaining and playing them was far different to how it is now.

The last few years have been for me (and I’m sure many other games-players of my generation) fairly soulless and disappointing from a games point of view. Sure they’ve been fun, and I understand that they’re always going to be re-hashing some tired formula or another, but regardless of that there was still something missing. That umph factor, that thing which made sitting down to play a game an exciting prospect. Some of that of course is to be expected thanks to Mother Nature and her accursed aging process *shakes fist skyward*, but I couldn’t put my finger on what else made it different. Not until I started reading back-issues of magazines such as Sinclair User and Crash on the WOS Archives.

In the days when I had a ZX Spectrum as a boy there was very little in the way of information available. The majority of my knowledge of games would come from my friends, or occasionally an old magazine, but by and large I had no idea what to expect from a game. The Internet was a pipe dream, and the very idea of review archives, video reviews and months and months of leaked screenshots and backstory was unheard of. I think this added to the lure and appeal of games, the most you had to go on to make a decision in most cases was the back of the cassette inlay – unless you were feeling particularly flush and went for a boxed game costing a whopping £9.99. As a result I played some stinkers. The point though is that I had to discover they were stinkers, I didn’t check an online review score aggregator or check for legions of disappointed forum-dwellers. It was the mystery of it all which made the game.
It seems I’m not alone on this front, an increasingly popular way of preserving this mystery has started to emerge on the forums where the more serious games playing public hang out – a self-imposed media blackout. This basically involves purposely avoiding all contact with anything to do with the game before launch, all the photos, videos, press spiel and everything associated with it. It’s not easily done, especially if it’s a series or genre you’re a big fan of, but it does work. Remember that feeling you had the first time Manic Miner loaded, or Sabre Wulf? That feeling of not having a clue what’s in for you or what to expect? That’s a similar feeling to the one I got recently playing Call Of Duty 4 for the first time, and the same for Super Mario Galaxy. It’s not the same feeling, I think that would be expecting a bit too much, especially with new genres being all but impossible to come up with now, but it’s as close as you can get for those of us forever children at heart.

Even just writing this now reminded me of being sat in front of the computer and TV, waiting for a game to load, inlay in hand and story and keys firmly implanted in my brain. It’s a wonderful feeling, and if any of you reading this remembers it for themselves, head over to the World Of Spectrum magazine archives I linked to above and bury yourself in a rose-tinted duvet of comfort and familiarity. A time when random adverts from software houses you never heard of painted pictures of fantastical worlds recreated on a machine you knew had no hope of doing them justice, but it didn’t matter.