Peace, love, unity
The year 2017, as it was stated in E315, has not been one that has given me much to be cheery about when I have not had a controller in my hand. In April, my father-in-law passed away, and a month earlier – almost to the day – one of my oldest and dearest friends passed away, long before it was his time. Andy was a friend since I responded to his advert in Zzap! 64 looking for contacts to swap software with (which at the time involved exchanging 5.25 inch floppy disks in parcels, with Pritt stick over the stamps to save on the cost). I visited him at his parents’ place when we were both at school: my parents drove me there.
Our friendship was off to a flying start. We played games and enjoyed demos on the Commodore 64, moving on to Amiga, PCs and consoles. As our joint relationship with games progressed, so did our lives in the real world. He never married, but I did (twice). He was there as my best man for the first.
I remember that day less clearly than the day we went to the software shop in Cheltenham to buy GoldenEye on N64 and
played the hell out of it. We would write to game programmers: I still cherish my handwritten note from Andrew Braybrook, and he had his newsletters from Jeff Minter when his mailing address was in Reading and he was working on the beloved platforms of the Commodore VIC-20 and C64.
One of the many things Andy and I had in common was our enjoyment of this magazine. We bought it every month without fail. I had moved several times and some of my issues were sadly left behind. There were still dozens of boxes with copies in, but there were gaps. A couple of months after he passed, his belongings were being sorted and his sister called me about these boxes of magazines he had. She knew we had this, amongst many things, in common so she asked if I wanted to collect them, which I did.
Now, after some sorting and a couple of missing issues purchased from Ebay, my collection is complete. In his honour, and in honour of his feeding my love of videogames, the set is there. A glorious history of this wonderful world of videogames. Rest in peace, Andy, and long live videogames.
Thanks immensely for this, Rob. It has suddenly got very dusty in the Edge office.