I want to tell you about the game that has made me the happiest this month. It is a game I did not complete. It is a game I did not even start. I just held it. And smiled. I have played the game before, but not for many years. Forty of them, to be precise.
The game is Daley Thompson's Super Test for the ZX Spectrum. I know, it is not even the superior first outing, Daley Thompson's Decathlon. But I sat in my chair, opened it up, read all the information on the cassette inlay, and smiled a giant smile.
I was given it by a chap at the outstanding Forgotten Worlds store in Stewarton, a 30-minute car ride from Glasgow. From the outside, it looks like a standard retail warehouse, but inside it is an absolute heart-and-eyeball-exploding cornucopia of joy. Retro games, new games, arcade machines, comics, merchandise, figurines, and random gaming-adjacent drinks and snacks. I sampled a Japanese chocolate in the shape of a chicken wing, something everyone should do at least once in their life.
I was doing a book signing there. It was supposed to be an hour either side of lunch, but numbers meant I was there for nearly five hours. Just signing and, more importantly, chatting to my people. And I mean it when I say 'my people,' because it was a rather profound experience for me. I lived on the other side of the world for 17 years. This was the first real professional appearance I have made in the UK since. It felt like coming home in more ways than one because of the chat.
Proper chatting, too. I cannot stand that thing they do at Comic Cons where you queue for two hours and get charged 50 quid for a signed photograph, and Quentin Tarantino only says 'hello' while staring at his feet. Or, more likely, yours. And he does not have to try to sign old Nintendo cartridges with a thick Sharpie over ripply plastic bits.
I was thinking about this a few days later when my brother and I went to Pleasureland in our home town of Arbroath, still one of the very few covered fairgrounds in the UK, where we cut our gaming teeth on Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Gorf, and Defender. The games in there are different now, but it looks and smells the same, and we have so many stories!
I was still thinking about this a week later when I was at the OLL 26 Video Games Show in Norwich. A Q&A was followed by another signing that was not planned, but people had started to line up with all manner of 90s artefacts and wanted my daub on them.
They do this because of GamesMaster, the show I hosted for seven series back in the 90s. I am touched that people remember it so fondly, and in such encyclopedic detail. This is a show that was last on the telly nearly 30 years ago. (I know there was a reboot, but it is not canon.) When I talk to people about the show, and the games of the 90s and 80s, I realise why this stuff is remembered so vividly. Because of the stories we have of those times, there is a light in people's eyes when they talk about it that you do not get with gaming today.
A lot of that is analogue versus digital. You have a physical relationship with the old games that you do not have with a 15GB update to a game you just bought two days ago to fix all the bugs in it. The point of physical purchase was important as well. It was great to go into Woolworths or Dixons with your saved-up money. You would hang out and chat to other gamers before spending your paper cash on your chosen game, which you held in your hands on the bus home, reading through every word of the backstory and instructions, daring to dream of how great it would be to play.
At OLL 26, my brother and I touched a ZX Spectrum for the first time in decades, and marvelled at how we ever managed to have a two-player game with both of us using keyboard controls.
We finished off OLL 26 with an evening show, Dominik Diamond's Retro Rumble, recreating GamesMaster challenges on stage with kids like we did in the 90s, only now the kids were in their 30s and 40s. It was two-and-a-half hours of what I gather the young comedians call 'crowd work,' but it felt like the biggest and best Christmas family gathering because we were all so happy in that room, just as we all were in the shop the weekend before.
We sidestepped the grisly panopticon of the 2026 world for a few hours. We were in a safe place, a reliable place, a world that made sense and where most problems can be fixed by simply blowing on a cartridge. It was an antidote to the untrustworthiness of the modern world. No one is going to be queueing for hours to talk to someone who made AI slop in 30 years.
We were told this leisure pursuit would lead us to a friendless existence, stuck in our bedrooms playing games on our own, but it is a living, breathing entity that still sparks conversations and forms bonds 30 years later. Which is why I am sitting here weeks later back in Canada, tossing that old cassette of Daley Thompson's Super Test around in my hands like some kind of emotional fidget spinner.
