The Nostalgia of Being Nostalgic

How childhood memories opened a window into the past

I think I've all grown up. I’m 42 in four days and I’m different from this time last year. 52 weeks ago I was aware, in the back of my mind, that I have lead a relatively interesting life. I have had an interesting career and have generally spent most of my awake time in a relatively good mood but I think now I have indeed grown up because, for the first time in my existence I am looking back fondly.

Now bear with me while I go back a few years to my childhood. I had good parents who did their best for my brother and me, nurtured out interests and tried, wherever possible to get us what we wanted or needed within reason.

In 1979 they bought us our first videogame console, a Mattel Intellivision (Google it all you Xbox fanboys) — it was awesome. State of the art for the time and it became something the whole family used to sit around playing.

These days you get a PS3 for your kid and they lock themselves in their room playing Call of Duty while rampaging around fictitious enemy states shooting uncountable numbers of bad guys in the face. Progress probably.

On the Intellivision though there were a few games that stick with me because they were the ones my parents liked. My dad was obsessed with a 10 pin bowling game. Every Sunday we would play it all afternoon, all trying to get the highest score. Now, ask me what I had for breakfast yesterday and I’ll pause and have to dredge the information from somewhere, yet I know the highest score any of us ever achieved on that game was 244 almost 35 years ago. What’s all that about brain?

My mum was more of a Dracula kinda person. She used to play it incessantly with us. That and Tron: Deadly Discs. I had a mum that was into Tron. Once again, what’s all that about?

Me? I once played Astrosmash for so long in a row I developed a patch of hard skin on my ankles (I sat with my legs crossed!) which I still have today!

It was these early memories that in the last year have come to the fore for me and made me realise how important they are. Games such as these and Sunday afternoon wars playing Armor Battle and Sub Hunt with our family friend Billy shaped my future career.

Having first been paid for a review (a 10 pound cheque) for a review of Barbarbian on the Amstrad CPC for an online service that pre-dated the internet by more than a decade (Prestel), I went on to a career in videogames journalism that took me around the world playing games for a living. At the time I didn't realise it but it was the dream job. I mean I always knew I was better off than if I’d been carrying bricks around in the British rain while I was sunning myself in Los Angeles but what I mean is I didn't appreciate it. Not fully.

I dropped out of the industry in 2000 and have never returned. I fell out with games a bit for a few years and even though I have always had consoles under the TV, they never really get played with that much. Dabble is a good word here.

Then a year ago something deep in my brain has changed and I’m not sure what exactly. I’m back into games, but not Grand Theft Auto this and that. I couldn't give a monkeys about Titanfall. I’m never going to play the latest Call of Duty either. If I did, I’d log into the online server, get wiped out in rapid succession by a 12 year old with a sniper rifle and then sell it on eBay.

I’m back into the games I played as a kid.

I know what’s triggered it and without going all gothically morbid it was the passing of my dad and mum in the space of two years. Suddenly I wanted things to remember my childhood by. When my mum died I hunted in her house for our old Intellivision. I hadn't seen it for decades. I didn't find it and I was gutted. I have no idea where it ended up but suddenly something I hadn't cared about for many, many years was a tangible connector to the past and time spent with my mum and dad.

So I bought one. Yes, I didn't go to the shop and buy a brand new next gen console last Christmas. I bought an Intellivsion on Ebay. It cost me £20 (which was cheap to be fair). Since then I have hoovered up pretty much every game we had as kids. I know I am not obsessively collecting everything because I have no interest in the once we never had.

I tried hooking it up to my nice TV in the lounge. No chance. You have to tune it in to pick up the signal. Er, you can’t do that anymore? When did that stop being a thing?

I bashed out a request on Facebook for anybody who might have an old portable TV lying around they no longer wanted. I was inundated with offers and thanks to my wife’s mum I could suddenly play Bowling and AstroSmash. Tron and Advanced D&D again. Pitfall Harry was back in my life. All of them except Dracula because I refuse to pay £60 for the only copy of it I can find on eBay.

Not having Drac pisses me off. It has become an obsessive treasure hunt now. I have family in America trying to track one down for me. Deep in my heart I know I will eventually pay £60 after all if the hunt drags on.

Second to this I have just about completed something I have wanted to do since my mid-twenties. I have built my own arcade machine from scratch and it is my pride and joy.

It runs everything I need and more. Thousands of games. Arcade games in their original state via MAME, early Nintendo consoles, pinball simulators, more Sonic the Hedgehog that you can shake a stick at. It will happily play every single Intellivision and Amstrad CPC game we owned as kids and then some.

One memory remains as an irritant though. A game we used to play in an arcade in Tramore, Ireland on holiday in the summer as kids in the eighties. It was a western game. A cowboy themed quick-draw shoot out thing. I can’t remember that it’s called and it annoys me. I know I probably have it. My Mame collection is 28000 arcade games large but I doubt I’ll ever find what it was.

As for the other games, every time I play one I enjoy it. Not because they were great games but because it floods me with happy childhood memories. It reconnects me with family that are no longer with me. It doesn't make me sad though. They are, in the main, silly little memories, packed full of detail I have no right to remember. Here’s an example.

In 1986 (I only know this because of the game title!) we bought a game called Mexico ’86 for our Amstrad. It was a football management game by a company called Qual-Soft and it came mail order through the post. It’s not famous at all, nobody else will remember it. Me? I remember my brother and me playing it all morning long, living the dream as being England manager before the World Cup, but having to stop playing because we my mum was waiting to take ‘Commando’ with Arnold Schwarzenegger back to the video shop and we hadn’t watched it yet!

I then remember really enjoying the film and having a crush on the girl in it for years Alyssia Milano. I’ve just googled her. After 28 years. She’s still hot, although I have just found out she was 12. This is allowed though I was 13.

But I digress.

All these guys who poured their time into making incredible software at a time when the technology was against them changed my life for sure. Back then their dreams were undoubtedly bigger than what they could achieve but they not only managed to give these games a soul of their own, they managed to leave a little extra storage capacity to keep hold of a little of the soul of those that played them too and it’s only now I have grown up I finally understand that.

* By some ridiculous twist of fate, two hours after I had published this my brother sent me a text from the USA to say he had found a Dracula in Chicago. £23. I have just been bought an Intellivision game for my birthday for the first time in 30 years.

Paul McNally has written for magazines and companies worldwide including FHM, BSkyB, The Commonwealth Games the BBC and the Manchester Evening News. He has edited market-leading leisure magazines and now works in the professional sport arena. He drinks a lot of coffee too.

His two non-fiction novels ‘The Peasant Wagon’ and ‘Gym Dodgers’ continue to edge ever closer to release.

Follow him on Twitter @IAmPaulMcNally