After 39 years the marriage of my parents has apparently run out of coins to be used for extra credits at the “continue now” screen. The relevance that this has on a predominantly games oriented blog is that it required me to drive the 100 miles down the M1 to my Mum’s house, in an attempt to begin helping to empty some of the many belongings I abandoned there, originally leaving in “the year 2000” (feel free to imagine that in a sci fi voice) to go to University at the tender age of 18, and only briefly returning between 2004 for around 11 months, when I lived in what I can only describe as an amalgamated room that was part my stuff, part my brothers, who had also fled and never returned and had lead to two previously child filled rooms being made into one room of almighty crap and one home office.
This weekend started and ultimately ended in the loft, growing up I have always been envious of anyone that had one of those impressively cool “Hollywood” movie style lofts that seemed spacious and well lit, with a pull down ladder. Evidently as a child I was clearly a fucking idiot to have hoped that a former council house in Corby would ever hold such a loft, the loft in question is somewhere I dread going, a torturous hellhell of a space that existed long before Guantanamo bay and water boarding became all the rage in torturous hellholes.
The loft space itself is accessed by an impossibly small hatch, that requires you to position a ladder dangerously close to the top of the stairs, the loft was originally nothing but beams, although I was made to lay some boards out at the age of 15 so we could slide storage crates and suitcases onto them, there is no light what so ever. Even light from the hall below the hatch for some reason doesn’t make it into the loft, stopping at the hatch itself as if it can sense it has no place beyond it, and so you have to work with what ever you take up there (this Saturday it was my iPhone and built in torch). The loft is also impossibly hot regardless of the actual weather or temperature of the house, that heat is topped off by it being full of poorly cut fiberglass insulation that gets everywhere and sticks to everything it touches.
However it was crawling around in this scarecrow-from-batman-like-inner-nightmare that I stumbled across the evidence of a gamer past you will see in the photos, as far as I was aware there was nothing at home other than my NES, however what I found was far more interesting, a box of loosely purchased Sega Saturn Magazines, a couple of tips books for the Snes and Mega Drive, and a whole barrage of predominantly empty boxes for games that I don’t remember keeping the boxes for. In addition to this I found a smallish stash of tips and guide booklets that you used to get with Official Nintendo magazine, and a copy of Xmas 1996 Edge Magazine, that features a preview of Mario Kart and reviews inside of the original Tomb Raider.
Even to this day I consider myself a games player rather than collector, I never used to keep Nintendo games boxes because they were card and the carts themselves were plastic, regrettable for the games current pricing I admit but that’s how I was, I wouldn’t not buy a retro game I wanted to play purely because of the condition of the box or a lack of a box and instruction and find the people who collect sealed games or games just to add to their collection slightly odd, however finding so many boxes was actually quite a nice surprise. In total I find the original boxes to my:
Amigia CD32
Sega Saturn
Mega Drive and Mega CD
Dreamcast
Gamecube
Xbox NTSC machine
Again all devices I couldn’t remember saving the boxes for.
I never thought that one of my most surprising retro finds would be stuff from my own previous house, once I have had a chance I will post up some screens from the magazines that I find interesting. Although I am actually excited about getting to have a look through the Saturn magazine stuff.
morethanagamesite 