Feature: Sammy's PS1 Memories 1
Image: Push Square

It’s funny how you don’t realise the significance of things until you look back on them. On a grungy Tuesday in the mid-90s, I was on a train to Birmingham with my family. Hopping on the whirring Class 323s was a regular occurrence for us in those days, as Brum – grimy as it was in that era – was our nearest city.

I was most excited to visit the Toys ‘R’ Us, as they always had good Transformers toys in store. But the real purpose of the visit was to attend some kind of PS1 community event in the upstairs of an HMV; I can picture the scene but I couldn’t tell you exactly what street that shop was on today. It definitely doesn’t exist anymore. (In fact, ironically, HMV’s flagship store is now located where the aforementioned Toys ‘R’ Us once was.)

On the inside, loud dance music was playing and I distinctly remember a giant projector beaming WipEout and Ridge Racer onto a dark wall. There was a table furnished with party snacks and Pepsi bottles which you were supposed to help yourself to. Me, under 10 at the time and for some reason unsupervised, somehow managed to spill my drink all over the carpet. My Dad told me to just pretend it hadn’t happened; apologies to anyone cleaning that night.

Having discussed this with family earlier this week, I had wondered whether I’d simply dreamt about this event and misplaced it in my mind. Apparently, no, it really happened. We’re still not entirely sure why or how we got invited, but that’s my earliest memory of the PS1.

I think I probably did get a new Transformers figurine from Toys ‘R’ Us that same day, and I was almost certainly more excited about it than the cutting-edge PS1 games I’d just seen on a projector screen.

Even though we weren’t particularly well off growing up, I was always extremely lucky in that video games were plentiful in our household. We had tons of Super Nintendo and SEGA Mega Drive cartridges, and even a catalogue of Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum titles. I grew up playing all of these, and they helped nurture my lifelong relationship with the medium.

PS1 was truly special, though: we had piles and piles and piles of games for it. I won’t delve into the exact details, but many of you will know that the system’s CD-ROMS were relatively easy to make replicas of – and somehow a lot of burned discs inexplicably made their way into our house.

I distinctly remember, we thought that in order to avoid the piracy detection, you had to stick a piece of tape over the little button which caused the disc to spin. Now I’m a bit older and wiser, I’m actually not sure what difference that bit of tape made, and I’m almost certain the games would have run without it.

One of my favourite games to play growing up was Re-Loaded, does anyone remember this one? It was an isometric shooter by Gremlin, a little bit like Smash TV. It got universally abhorrent reviews at the time, and I haven’t actually revisited it recently. But I loved it – and it’s kinda nice to think of a time when I wasn’t swayed by review scores or social media discourse; I just enjoyed what I had. Which was a lot in those days, thanks to all those shady CD-ROMS.

In the mid-90s, the Internet did exist but it wasn’t something I was particularly familiar with. Our household wouldn’t properly get connected until the very end of the century, and so anything I discovered in games either came from my own exploration or from magazines.

I distinctly remember when completing Tekken with a specific character, you’d unlock someone new selectable off-screen. When I showed this my brother we thought we’d discovered something no one else knew.

We hurriedly penned a letter to Official PlayStation Magazine, explaining the steps so that other readers could appreciate this “secret” for themselves. It turns out it was just a common feature in the game, but we thought we’d found something so obscure only we knew about it.

While I love writing about games and sharing everything I know about them, I do miss that era where there were no guides or social media, so everything I discovered felt like a deep dark secret exclusive to me. I think, as I’ve gotten older, games have become less surprising and exciting as a result.