Geek C'est Chic

Having a total geekgasm. Mum's decided to clear out the attic and in the process unearthed a large cardboard box with most of my childhood in it!

Look at this! Vintage VGA Lemmings, Monkey Island on 3.5" floppy, Shufflepuck - which my uncle used to run on an early Apple. Took me ages to track it down for PC. Personal Nightmare, about a village much like ours which was taken over by Satan - Hot Fuzz precursor - and a woman (anyone remember Elvira?)  with huge knockers on the front.

Horror, soft. Hairstyle, hardcore.

I think those were the definers once text-based moved to graphics:

• Monkey Island
• Day of the Tentacle
• King's Quest
• Shufflepuck Café
• SimAnt
• Duke Nukem
• Sam and Max
• Zak McKracken

I'm now in possession of a floppy reader and a copy of DosBox. What a blast from the past! To think all computers once used to run from the C:\ prompt! It's incredible how fast it comes back to you. Ugh - nostalgic.

Unfortunately, I haven't managed to get past the compatibility issues yet. Think it may be a lost cause. Any suggestions hugely appreciated.

Another thing I found in the box was a living, almost breathing Matsui auto-reverse walkman!!

The batteries were a bit mouldy so I plugged it into the mains and it only seems to play on double-speed. Everything sounds like it's being sung by the Chipmunks. Tried everything to slow it down but think it's just a bit ancient.

Also found a tape which has confused me horribly.

Side A is a playlist of songs I used to think were dead cool when I was about fifteen. Well, they are dead cool, but I haven't listened to them for many years:

A

1. Somewhere Down the Crazy River - Robbie Robertson
2. Black Magic Woman - Santana
3. Take Another Little Piece of my Heart - Erma Franklin
4. The Thrill Has Gone - B.B. King
5. Take Me to the River - Al Green
6. Smokestack Lightning - Howlin' Wolf
7. Right Next Door (Because of Me) - Robert Cray
8. Fade to Black - Dire Straits
9. Little Red Rooster - Howlin' Wolf & Eric Clapton
10. One Bourbon One Scotch and One Beer - John Lee Hooker
11. All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix

Those were mostly Merrick's influence. That man can play his guitar.

Side B was also - I thought - a list of songs I liked in my early teens. I just sort of assumed this was a musical time capsule from around the same time as the games.

B

1. Romeo and Juliet - Dire Straits
2. Love and Affection - Joan Armatrading
3. Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush
4. Aidia (Born Innocent) - Sarah McLachlan
5. Patients of Angels - Eddi Reader
6. Black Velvet - Alannah Myles
7. You're so Vain - Carly Simon
8. Tracy - Mogwai
9. A Little Soul - Pulp

I think everyone was just a little in love with Sarah McLachlan when she played that live, no?

See, that makes sense because it came out in 1997 when I was sixteen.

It all works until the last two, which come from an album called Jesus Life For Children Under 12 Inches. I remember this because it was about my first year of uni and I had a fling with someone who brought it home from the sale bin one evening. Hard to forget as the cover is strewn with naked ladies. I remember lying on the bed drifting off to Tracy and just thinking Kid Loco had done something magical with it.

Funnily enough, I've recently been obsessed with the French drama The Returned. Turns out the creepy music for that was provided by Mogwai. Très cool.

Anyway, digression. I must have been at least 18 or 19 when I first encountered that album, yet they're on a cassette tape with a whole bunch of stuff I liked aged 14/15. 

How? 

I assumed we'd all switched to CDs by 1999/2000? Whenever I think about playing music at uni, it was on a CD, not a tape. 

Having said that, I found a 3.5" floppy in the box with a load of coursework on it, so maybe we weren't that technologically advanced. It's crazy this overlap of time. I still remember 5 1/4" floppies, but couldn't tell you when we switched to  hard floppies. Heck, I even remember games on tapes for the ZX Spectrum, but I was little then.

Ho hum. 

I feel like I'm living that episode of Futurama where Fry buys the tin of anchovies and converts his house back to the the 90s. It would be kind of interesting, just for a day. I miss ASKII art, coding MUDs, and web addresses that stretched on for miles. Back when the Internet was Fidonet and something mysterious, littered with BBSes like Karnak and Demon's Domain. It's all gone a bit mainstream since.