I'm working on a presentation in which I intend to use the premise of Rambo 2 - the one where he single-handedly rescues a bunch of POWs, causing lots of chaos and collateral damage, winning the battle but not the war, etc. - as an analogy to help make my point and while looking for an appropriate image of the (anti)hero himself to include in the corresponding slide I came across the image used on the Commodore 64 movie tie-in game cassette cover and it reminded me of an important moment in my teenage life.
Let me take a quick moment to clarify some points for those younger readers among you for whom that last paragraph may have been a little confusing:
Rambo 2 - mid-1980s movie by Sylvester Stallone about a renegade/disillusioned Vietnam war veteran.
Sylvester Stallone - movie actor who starred in the Rocky and Rambo movies before falling into obscurity when he tried his hand at comedy.
Commodore 64 - popular home computer/gaming system that was far superior to the Sinclair Spectrum and which allowed owners of such systems to look down upon their Sinclair Spectrum owning friends and say "I don't care if it doesn't have many good games on it, it's got 64k of memory AND I can program it in Basic to say 'Hello World' over and over again".
We were lucky enough to receive one of these fabulous machines for Xmas one year (bless you for all your sacrifices, Mum and Dad) and it was upon this device that I wrote my Computer Studies 'O' Level project program called 'Shipment Manager' (in which I received an 'A' grade, no less), before attempting a more ambitious project to create a Word Processor as a follow-up. The latter was never finished due to my discovering that girls didn't really think it was that cool for you to have a Commodore 64 in your bedroom. Of course, I also never told them that I had written a computer program and was often heard denying that I'd ever done Computer Studies or joined the Computer Club at school. But that's another story...
Cassette - antiquated portable storage medium that was used for music distribution (looked up Walkman on Wikipedia) and latterly for computer games that would take up to 15 minutes or more to load on to the home computers/gaming systems of the period.
The moment in my teenage life that it reminded me of was when I submitted a tremendous high score I achieved on the Rambo 2 game and submitted it to the then leading Commodore 64 gaming magazine Zzap64! I can remember the pride when I received the issued in the mail - I was a subscriber (paid for my by paper round/fish & chip shop income), although I never admitted that to the girls either (especially not Kate Spencer) - with my name featured prominently in the Scorelord section as the leading scorer for the Rambo game. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about a score that was a few thousand points more than then next guy. Nor 10 or 100 thousand points more. I'm talking millions and millions. There was no one else even close to me. It was like night and day - alot like Justin in the local swim meets he's been attending before getting back into the serious long-course meets in a month or so's time. I had good reason to be proud - I was the leading scorer for Rambo on the C64 (as we affectionately called it) in the whole of the United Kingdom. Of course, no one else really cared. But, it was something that I had achieved all on my own. It was my success. And for the last 20+ years it has been part of what makes me me.
Anyway, seeing the cover of the game reminded me of this success and I wondered if anyone on the Web had published anything related to the Zzap64! magazine. Sure enough, upon entering a google search I was whisked away not just to a site the mentioned it, but to one that had a complete catalog of scanned pages of all copies of the magazine that had ever been printed. I was momentarily stunned. And then I started to wonder; would they have scanned the high score pages? Would I be able to find my name once again, immortalized on the internet for everyone to see and allow me to bask in the glory of my incredible prowess at a long forgotten game, on an obsolete gaming system?
And so I started to search through the scanned copies of the magazine; starting somewhere around the middle of 1986 when I think the game was published and I recalled playing it with Tim Burgess and Andrew Nicholas. Month after month I eagerly looked at the contents page, found the Scorelord section and viewed that page. And click after click I couldn't find my name. Had I got the dates wrong? Was it released earlier and I needed to go back to 1985? Did I only achieve the high score after stopping playing for a while and going back to it the following year? I checked 1987 - no luck. I checked all of 1988 - still no luck. I then checked all of 1989 (when I had finished school and started working as a trainee accountant at Logan & Brewerton and probably didn't have time to play silly computer games any more anyway). After a few hours of searching - it was ok, M was running late at FHS anyway - I had to admit defeat. My name wasn't there. But yet, if it had actually happened wouldn't it be there, printed in black and white for me to prove to everyone what a star gamer I had once been?
And so, dear readers, here I am - a broken, dejected, shadow of my former self. If this had all been a fantasy, perhaps more of what I remember from my childhood and formative teenage years are also just a figment of my imagination. Did we even receive that Commodore 64 for Xmas that year? Was it really the fairies that decorated the house on Xmas Eve each year, filling our hearts with joy and delight upon waking up on Xmas Day to find that Xmas had magically arrived while we slept? Did Mum ever really make those fantastic home made pies that I remember? And did that fancy American chocolate coating for ice cream really solidify so hard that we couldn't break through to eat the ice cream underneath?
I have one hope - after double checking all the issues once again to make sure I'm not missing something - and that is that Jay remembers me talking about it and showing him the magazine when my name got printed.
And, if not, I will just have to pacify myself safe in the knowledge that I did get to kiss Kate Spencer once. Unless, of course, I made that up in my mind too...
1 comment:
Oh man, I'm really not very good with those kind of pressures. You want me to cast my tattered and torn net of recall back some 20+ years to catch (a red herring?) some faded memory that you will then use in order to reinforce the foundations of your personality? Sheesh, I can't even remember my parent's birthdays (fact!). And they happen every year!
With that caveat in place however, I can venture that I *do* remember Tim Burgess (he's a professor of something now - insanity probably. He was charmingly deranged) and Andrew Nicholas (he was a sadist. His girlfriend of the time's sister, Hayley Ekins, works here at RM!). I can also remember your C64 and the Rambo game - particularly the part where you had to use a rocket launcher to take down a Russian helicopter, right? Zzap64 was real; Kate Spencer was real (ugly. Joke!). Unfortunately though, I cannot vouch for the veracity of your high score claim. Sorry dude, it rings no bells.
Now, rather than having you sink into a fug of despair I will attempt to distract you with a tale of my own mis-remembered (if that's what yours was) youth.
When I was about 11 I had an extremely vivid dream (I later realised) that I was able to breath underwater by pursing my lips together very tightly and then drawing water ever so slowly through my clenched teeth - almost as though I was straining the water for oxygen. So vivid was this dream that the next time I went swimming at the sports centre, I dived into the deep end, sank to the bottom of the pool, held onto the bottom rung of the ladder and pursed my lips in order to "breath" underwater. It will come as no surprise to you that I was not endowed with any Sub-Mariner type special powers and I did in fact nearly drown in a 7ft deep chlorinated soup of piss, pubes and plasters. I got to the surface, choking, and was helped out by a lifeguard. Whilst heaving at the pool edge I managed to gasp out a story about how I'd got my foot caught in the ladder and it was then that I realised that I needed to pay close attention to the distinction between dreams and reality.
So, Mr Sullivan, I think that you can either, tell the scanners of Zzap64 that they've made a mistake, and you have the proof, held in your pre-adolescent memory (!), or, you can accept that your memory re-drew itself incorrectly and was then reinforced (mistakenly) with each subsequent recall over the ensuing years. This is a actually a very interesting phenomenon discussed by Michael Shermer often in the Skeptic magazine\website. Personally, I'd count myself lucky that it was, in the great scheme of things, a fairly benign mistake. Does that help?
PS I take back what I said about Star Trek. Whilst I still won't see it at the cinema, the new trailer looked good :)
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