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Editor’s note: Lee continues his series on growing up as a gamer in England with a best friend with the ultimate hook-up — a father in an executive role at Sega. In this entry, Lee writes about getting into a game show before anyone else and discovering something millions of American children were already enjoying. -Jason
My best friend’s dad was the vice president of Sega Europe. Thanks to this I received certain perks. I’ve already talked about Damian’s arcade and the endless stream of cartridges that I was lucky enough to have access to, but something even better was still to come.
It was just a shame my school friends didn’t believe a word of it.
In a particularly gray and drab spot of West London sits Earls Court, one of England’s largest and oldest indoor arenas. Over the years it’s hosted a massive variety of events, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the 19th century to Metallica gigs and WWE SmackDown! in the present day. It’s a bit of a British institution.
Another, slightly less glamorous-sounding show held at Earls Court is The Amusements Trade Exhibition International. As the name suggests, ATEI is an industry expo in which various coin-operated-machine manufacturers show off their wares to potential buyers.
Sadly, a quick search through the list of confirmed exhibitors for 2010 reveals that not one video game company plans on attending. Not one. Instead, tens of thousands of square feet will be devoted to air-hockey, fruit machines, pool tables and kiddie rides.
It wasn’t always like this.
Back in 1989, the event was dominated by videogames, with just about every single manufacturer, including Sega, keen to show off their latest machines. It was an infinite sea of arcade games, with classic standup cabinets, massive hydraulic-powered driving sims, and everything else in between. Year after year, every new game of note from around the around world appeared there.
The ATEI was, without a hint of hyperbole or exaggeration, a 10-year-old boy’s gaming nirvana. It was the holy land. And in an act of unprecedented awesomeness that I’m thankful for even 20 years later, Damian convinced his dad to take us.
We were actually going.
What’s more, we were going on Thursday, when all of the exhibitors were putting the final touches on their stalls before the influx of potential buyers the next day. With Damian’s dad busy doing whatever it is that Sega Europe VPs do, we had hours of unfettered access, without lines or interruptions, to every single game on show.
I honestly can’t think of a time in my life when I was more excited.
The night before the show we stayed at Damian’s castle. Staring into the darkness, we whispered across the room until the early hours, alternating between hushed excitement and musing over what terrible accidents might stop us going.
“Maybe the car will break down.”
“Or explode!”
“Oh, god, yeah, it’ll blow up.”
“In the car park as we arrive.”
“Definitely.”
We simply couldn’t believe our luck.
Entering the massive hall was as intimidating as it was exciting — a cacophonous jungle of bleeping, blaring, flashing, strobing machinery. We didn’t know where to start. Each machine screamed louder at us, desperate to be heard over all the others. It was too much.
Thankfully, Damian’s dad arranged for one of his team members to give us a guided tour of all the must-play titles at the show.
We saw a lot of games that day, many that have since fallen to the back of my mind, collecting in a messy heap with a million other random arcade memories. But I remember one very clearly.
Led by our tour guide, we saw a spin-off game from some bizarre American TV show. “It’s going to be absolutely massive, a phenomenon. The American kids are nuts about it,” he said.
Damian and I shared a cynical look. The machine was splashed with an image of a questionable-looking green thing, and it had the most ridiculous name we had ever heard: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (in Europe, they believed the word ninja would turn us into demented killers).
Heh, heh — silly Americans.
We played the game, anyway, clicking the free credit button more out of politeness than desire. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles is of course, one of the most fondly remembered arcade games of all time. It provided the blueprint for such massively popular beat-em-ups as X-Men and The Simpsons. Go to any battered, decaying old seaside arcade in England and the odds are that you’ll find one of these games in a corner, clinging to life among the fruit machines, Dance Dance Revolutions, and sandy, trampled chips.
So we played through the entire thing, marveling more at the graphics and characters than the limited, slightly repetitive gameplay. It was so bright and colorful, populated by bipedal hogs with guns, masked foot soldiers, and the kind of samurai/ninja hybrid boss that made our young, kung-fu-obsessed brains pop.
You could choose characters with katanas, a bo stick, funny fork things, and even nunchaku! Up to this point, British television removed nearly every nunchaku reference, most famously censoring the Enter the Dragon scene where Bruce Lee uses the weapon against some guards. Rather than block nunchaku from our consciousness, this treatment afforded us an illicit thrill that only served to make us more fascinated with them. Nunchaku are cool.
TMHT has just five levels. It isn’t a particularly long game. But in that old-school arcade way, it’s despicably cheap in its attempts to rob you of money. It was a good thing that we had free credits.
We died and died and died again until finally we beat the game, rescued April, and stumbled off to find something else. The whole experience couldn’t have been more than 30 minutes from start to finish, but it’s something I will never forget.
Returning to school and boasting of my experiences brought the now familiar mix of scorn and disbelief. Because my school friends had never met Damian, they simply didn’t believe my increasingly outlandish stories. For a while they even took to calling him my “imaginary friend.”
They laughed even harder when I told them about the four pizza-loving turtles who walk and talk and know ninjitsu.
Just a few short weeks later, the last laugh was mine. They had no choice but to believe. The turtles had indeed turned into the phenomenon the arcade man predicted, selling a crap-ton of merchandise and mesmerizing millions kids with their adventures. I was vindicated. Finally, they believed me.
But it wasn’t all good. Having such close links with Sega had certain disadvantages. The late ’80s saw the first Nintendo vs. Sega console skirmishes break out in playgrounds across the world. War was coming, and at one small school in London, the Sega supporters had a reluctant leader.
>(Chapter Four…coming soon)
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