What we remember

JESS KINGHORN STAFF WRITER

On a holiday to Devon, a family friend hashed out a plan to distract me from pestering the neighbourhood cats. Yes, my earliest PlayStation memory starts with – what else? – a demo disc. I got stuck on both

Disney’s Hercules and Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee within the first four screens. Videogame literacy was a hard-won skill from there.

Many moons later, my sister and I found a brand-new PlayStation 2 tucked under the Christmas tree. The New Year break was spent burning rubber in The Simpsons Hit & Run, trying to see how far we could get before switching off the console for the day and losing all our progress. Our IT professional parents had thought that the console would happily save our data onto its own internal storage – you know, like a computer. After repeated explanation that, no, this wasn’t the case, my sister and I were soon given our own memory cards that, despite not looking anything alike, would somehow still lead to confusion and lost save data.

But I think my mum’s first PlayStation game is definitely cooler. Fast-forward to when I was too broke to buy myself a PlayStation 3 but not quite broke enough to pass up a good deal on a classic game. Finally, my very own copy of Final Fantasy IX! And my mum mentioned she maybe… sort of… perhaps would quite like to play it too. I gave her two original PlayStation memory cards that she quickly dubbed ‘Mum 01’ and ‘Mum 02’ with her label maker. She’d never know the pain of lost save data.

MIRIAM MCDONALD OPERATIONS EDITOR

Terrible confession time – back when I played my first PlayStation game, I didn’t own a PlayStation, I had a console from another manufacturer. I was already working for Future, and this was the days before the internet became popular so magazines were huge, and we had a massive videogames department, with the forerunner of this very magazine right at the head of the pack. For the 1998 World Cup they had a massive FIFA tournament, which anyone could join in with. Needless to say, I got knocked out in the first round, having no clue about either football nor the PlayStation controller, but it was still great fun.

The game that had the biggest early impact on me was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Remember the days when magazines had guide books on the cover? I do; I had to fact-check and edit the things! And what grabbed me about GTA was the story. Nothing before it had ever felt as interesting or exciting – sorry, Lara – and that, combined with an editor who insisted on playing the Emotion 98.3 CD from the soundtrack box set on loop really fixed it in my mind. I can’t hear those songs to this day without thinking of GTA.

Vice City taught me that PlayStation was the place where stories really came alive.