Those of us who were born in the mid or late seventies were lucky enough to be able to enjoy the first 8-bit orderers with the look of a child who is freaked out by anything, of a boy who at the age of nine or ten has access to some machines that he doesn’t quite understand but that open the doors to a new universe capable of offering him hours and hours of fun.
I dropped an MSX. A Sony Hit-Bit, to be more exact. I remember the moment my parents gave it to me. I know that I hallucinated when I saw the box and that I opened it excited, although I am unable to clearly distinguish all the details. Who would have told me back then that, many years later, I would end up writing about video games for a living.
I had a great time with that thing for a long, long time. I always found a hole to connect it to a small tube television that I had in my room and play a few games. At that time we lived video games in a different way. We were doing things that may sound strange now, especially from the point of view of someone who was born in the 90s or later and has not been interested in the 80s scene until now, like for example…
Call by phone if you got stuck
Back then, many video games included a helpline somewhere. If you got stuck at one point or encountered a problem with no apparent solution, you could call and talk directly to one of the creators to give you a cable. Development teams were small, and four or five members were enough to get something decent to market, so contact was direct. Isn’t it amazing?
Companies like Dinamic also offered in their guarantee the possibility of sending them the game so that they would exchange it for a new copy if you found any fault or defect in manufacturing, recording or loading for an unlimited time. They gave you their address inside the game cover, you just had to put your tape in an envelope, without the case, and send it to them.
Writing cheats in BASIC
Yes, friends, to get infinite lives in a current video game it can be enough to press a series of buttons in a specific order or enter a certain string of characters in I don’t know what game menu to activate the cheat, but before that you had to be almost a hero to cheat.
The magazines of the time like MicroManía or MSX Extra included pages with POKE instructions (just pokes for friends) and loaders thanks to which we could enable certain tricks.
They were written in BASIC, a programming language that will sound familiar to many and not so much to others, and generally you had to interrupt the loading of a game to introduce them. Sometimes the loaders consisted of many lines of code, so you can imagine the kids in the eighties replicating that gibberish on our computers very carefully so as not to screw up any line.
That of not having game save systems forced us to start every time from the beginning, with which it did not hurt to receive the odd little help if we wanted to see the end of the games. The difficulty of these titles was high and our age was very young, an explosive combination.
Wait and wait for games to load
Before the advent of cartridges, which were also very expensive and not everyone could make the leap just like that, the games came on cassette tapes. Some computer models like my MSX didn’t include a tape deck, so you had to buy another piece of equipment to connect it to the computer and be able to play. Loading times were hellish. If I remember correctly, they used to be no less than five minutes, but they could be more. Imagine us with nine or ten years, with a tremendous desire to play some quick games after school and having to go through the hoop of high loading times.
All this taking into account that no failure occurred. If the load failed, something that usually happened at the end of the load, just before the game started fucking up, you had to start over. If you were lucky on that second try, good. If not, start over. Or you changed the game pissed off and thinking that that tape had been damaged and you had run out of it. A drama.
Dubbing Games to a Double Deck Cassette Player
This is not much of a mystery: since the main format of the games for these computers was the cassette tape, the way to make copies while being reasonably sure that the games would load correctly was through a piece of junk with double plate. Putting two devices of this type together with a single tape each and recording with background noise was certainly not the best idea of all. And I know more than one who tried their luck. What I don’t remember is the result.
The curious thing about the matter is that there were double deck devices capable of recording at 2x speed. It may seem silly to you, but at a certain point we didn’t feel like wasting time waiting for the recording to end in real time, so one of these gadgets saved us precious minutes that we could spend wasting time anyway. Another way. Of course, games recorded at double speed tended to crash more than games recorded at normal speed, at least in my own experience. Another drama.
cassette tapes
Draw maps… and covers
Ok, maybe some of you still have the habit of taking pencil and paper to make sketches of some of your favorite games, but it is not usual in these times that we live. Back then, when we didn’t have the Internet to consult anything, nor access to guides, nor to all the magazines on the market in which with luck something could appear, we were content with making the game maps ourselves. Some titles were so labyrinthine that there was no way to navigate easily and our own maps became the most precious treasure.
The maps weren’t our only opportunity to bring out those artistic qualities that no one else was able to appreciate, no: there were also the covers for the games that we copied thanks to the kindness of our friends. A game is not the same without its cover, and the cassette tapes we bought to make copies were sad. We had to give life to that and what better opportunity were we going to find to take out paper, scissors and a few colored pencils. That of works of art that would be conceived in the rooms of thousands and thousands of kids. Of course, trying to reproduce with dignity (and without tracing) something drawn by Alfonso Azpiri or Luis Royo it was an unattainable challenge.
And it was not the only thing we did:
- Some played in monochrome monitorsAlso known as phosphor screens. The most common were green phosphor and the truth is that, although the games of that time could not show many colors on the screen, seeing everything the same was quite horrible.
- We cleaned the heads of the apparatus in charge of reproducing the tapes with Cotton swabs for the games to load correctly. If a lot of dirt accumulated there we could find errors. And usually something did get dirty, because the swabs used to end up black.
- We would get like handymen to tinker with the azimuth of the cassette player. Let’s remember that we were nine or ten years old and there we were, trying to fix something that we didn’t know very well how the hell worked in an attempt to get that game that didn’t load even at three to end up running.
- We created video game compilations on cassette. There were small games that allowed us to put several on the same tape. Then one already managed to know at what minute each game began. All an art.
- We copied the source code of entire games published by magazines. Wildly. Lines and lines of code so that later an error would escape that would make us review it from top to bottom with the magazine next to it.
- We extracted the soundtrack of the games using an advanced technique that consisted of moving the cassette recorder closer to the television. If some background noise slipped in, nothing happened either, hey. The goal was to be able to listen to those melodies at any time of the day.
I don’t miss those days. Not for these reasons, I mean, but for others. I had a great time, I remember it all fondly and I’m very happy to have been able to experience that time, but that’s it. Cassette games, tedious loading times, and the noises that accompanied them can stay where they are.
In ExtraLife | The best Spanish games. Or at least fourteen of them
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