My Favourite Game

DJ James Zabiela on forgotten heroes and unforgettable combos

The globe-trotting DJ on forgotten heroes, unforgettable combos, and the conflicted existence of Star Wars fandom

James Zabiela broke onto the club scene at the turn of the millennium, when he gave a mixtape to progressivehouse god Sasha after a show and was taken under his wing. These days he’s the head of record label Born Electric, and a prolific DJ. He may have started mixing records at a tender age, but as we discover here, he was even younger when he got into games. What’s your earliest videogaming memory? Hungry Horace for the ZX Spectrum 48k, with rubber keys – the doorstop, we used to call it. I used to play it for hours on a Kempton joystick. I went from that to Horace Goes Skiing, and Horace & The Spiders. Everyone’s forgotten about Horace. I then got into Ninja Turtles, and had that on Spectrum too. It would only load one in three times. I completed it, which was no mean feat, given all the time I spent loading it up. Did you stick with home computers, or move over to consoles? I went from Spectrum to SNES, though I did have a Game Boy. I borrowed another one off a friend so my Dad and I could play two-player Tetris with the link cable. That was amazing; the first twoplayer, two-screen game I played.

From that point I was really sold in as a Nintendo fanboy. I had a Game Boy bumbag! My friend was very Sega, he had a Master System and we used to have proper fights over this stuff. Who was better, Sonic or Mario? It’s weird to see them playing together harmoniously now. Something about it just feels wrong. What sort of games did you play back then? Did you find yourself drawn to certain styles or genres? With my SNES I got Street Fighter II and Super Mario World, and I played them to death. Mario World had 96 levels, but if you found all the hidden exits it’d show a little star next to the number 96 on your save file. One of the Star levels had this impossible jump, and I had a friend at school who just couldn’t do it. He gave me his copy of the game, and I took it home and did it one evening so he could tell everyone he’d done it. Of course I told everyone it was me [laughs]. That was my claim to fame at school for a while. Did your love of games endure when you started getting into music? No, I actually stopped playing videogames when I started DJing. One took over from the other. I missed the whole N64 and PlayStation era. For me it was a natural progression; playing games isn’t too far removed from DJing, really. Going from doing all the combos in Street Fighter II, say, to using an effects unit… they’re not so different. As a DJ you spend a lot of time travelling. Do you play on the road? I don’t. The only console I’ve ever carried around with me was a DS Lite. I did a festival tour in Australia called Good Vibrations in 2008. Sinden, High Contrast, myself and a few other DJs were all playing Mario Kart wirelessly on the Qantas flight. I don’t think you’re supposed to set up your own ad-hoc network on flights, but it was great, and everyone got off the plane alive. When you’re at home, what do you play? You’re a big Star Wars fan… I bought a PS4 for Battlefront. I got the Darth Vader console, with a laser etching of him and a controller that’s the same colours as his chest panel. I got super addicted to playing Battlefront II online. I know it’s not the best game, but when you’re a huge Star Wars fan it’s amazing. You go in to Galactic Assault, 40 people playing, Rebels against Imperials… then it’s six hours later and you’re still at the bottom of the scoreboard, having had your arse kicked by 13-year-old American kids until six in the morning. What’s your dream Star Wars game? I just got a PlayStation VR, and played the Battlefront VR mission last night. It was great, but I just wish it was longer than 15 minutes. It’d be so good if they made a whole game like that. So, what’s your all-time favourite? It’s Street Fighter II, for sure. My agent in South America has one of those shady arcade machines with 1,000 games on it. We’d been out all night, then stayed up playing SFII until god knows what time. It’s just as good, and it’s amazing how this stuff just gets lodged into your brain. I still remember the cheat code for the SNES version: Down, R, Up, L, Y, B, X, A. I’ll take that to my grave.

“I got super addicted to playing Battlefront II online. When you’re a Star Wars fan it’s amazing”