Trigger Happy
cassette, and I would swap copies and hints with my schoolfriends.) For many years, the myriad delights that videogames offered were a reliable evening escape, their names now a peculiarly evocative roll call of sepia-tinged pleasures: Jet Pac, Ant Attack, Manic Miner, Knight Lore, Way of the Exploding Fist, Dark Star . . . Then I decided, at the age of sixteen, to put away childish things. So I bought a guitar and formed a skate-punk heavy-metal band.
While I was away practicing my ax heroics, home computers—the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, as well as a later, more powerful generation comprising the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga—were gradually being supplanted by home videogame consoles. These little plastic boxes could not be programmed by the user, and the games came on cartridge rather than on cassette tape. The big players in the late 1980s and early 1990s were two Japanese giants: Nintendo, with its Nintendo Entertainment System (or Famicom) and the more powerful Super NES; and Sega, with its Megadrive. Each company was represented by its own digital mascot: Nintendo had Mario, the world-famous mustachioed plumber, and Sega had Sonic, a cheeky blue hedgehog.
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