My Gaming History: Part 4 - A Lifelong Love

I forget the exact circumstances under which I obtained my first PlayStation, but I remember that I didn't actually buy it.

Rather, it was originally my brother's console — a Japanese unit that had been hard-modded with a non-removable SCART output for use on PAL TVs, and a huge, bulky power transformer to compensate for the difference in voltage between Japan and the UK.

When I first came into possession of it, I had three games: Ridge Racer, Tekken and Raiden Project. Tekken was a pre-release copy on an unmarked CD and had a few bugs in it, but the other two were Japanese releases in their standard packaging. I loved all three games — and I very much miss Raiden Project, I must say, since in retrospect I feel that game was probably the birth of my love affair with modern shmups, despite my incompetence at playing them — but after a while I found myself hungry for more.

My friends at school — yes, those same ones with whom I'd discussed Street Fighter II and its ilk at length back in the 16-bit days — all had PlayStations, too, though in their case they had official PAL models. One of my friends had heard of a technique called the "pen lid trick", however, and suggested I should try it. My Japanese PlayStation was region-locked, see, and this meant that even if I were to buy a new UK PlayStation game, I wouldn't be able to play it. Unless I either modded my console — which was a brave new world none of us would dive into until a little later — or made use of this supposed magic trick.

For the unfamiliar, the "pen lid trick" involved getting the lid of a Bic biro or similar and using it to hold down the button at the back of the PlayStation's disc tray to trick it into thinking the lid was closed, even when it was open. Once you had set this up appropriately — a process that often involved Blu-Tac to hold it in place — you could then boot the PlayStation with a disc from its native region, watch it spin up to read the regional protection information, then, when its spinning slowed down again, quickly whip out the disc and replace it with the game you actually wanted to play.

It actually worked, too. Okay, over time it would knacker the laser in your PlayStation's disc drive, but in the early days this was the number one method of getting both "import" (or, in my case, domestic) and pirated games to work. And as such I started to pick up some UK games.

One of the first ones I bought was Final Fantasy VII, a game I knew very little about, but which had piqued my interest when my brother had told me about it. Supposedly it was the first game he and several of his colleagues had played that had actually elicited an emotional response… they had cried over it. A video game! Surely not. Despite my skepticism, I wanted to see for myself, so I grabbed it, booted it up and tried it.

A good four or five hours later, I finally understood what an RPG was and why people might want to play them. I raved about it to my friends, who subsequently ended up buying their own copies. And, over the course of that summer, we each ended up playing and beating the game over and over again, such was the impact it left on us. (Yes, it made all of us cry, too.)

My fondest memory of Final Fantasy VII comes from a period of time where my parents had gone on holiday to the States and left the teenage me home alone for the first time ever. During that period, I had an ill-advised party that I'd rather forget (it involved, among other things, blowing my Dad's speakers, leaving a large scratch on our five-figure value grand piano due to people dancing on it, breaking a rather charming cat statue and spectacularly failing to Get Off With Stacy Redman, a fact that my friend Woody took great delight in reminding me of at every opportunity for the next few months… who am I kidding, that was an awesome party) but the thing I enjoyed the most from that time was the period I spent with my friends getting quietly drunk, smoking weed, eating Pot Noodles and playing Final Fantasy VII for 36 hours straight.

By the time this particular incident rolled around, my aforementioned friend Woody and I had both beaten Final Fantasy VII several times over, and were well familiar with things like chocobo breeding, natural materia and all that good stuff. Our friend Edd was there, too; he had also enjoyed the game but was a little less enthused about it than we were, so after an evening of playing drunken Frogger fueled by tequila (which we all discovered we didn't like very much) he went to bed, while Woody and I decided to boot up our favourite game for yet another playthrough to see how far we could get.

We reached an agreement that we would keep one another awake and see how long we could play for without stopping, and we both remained true to our word, bashing one another over the head with sofa cushions every time our comrade appeared to be flagging. "WAKE UP!"

I don't think we made it through the whole game in that one sitting, but we certainly had a good crack at it. I recall finally succumbing to slumber in the forest where you get the Apocalypse sword, since the music there was so hypnotic it was almost impossible to resist. Woody also passed out momentarily during the G-Bike sequence at the conclusion of the Midgar chapter, and woke up with a start demanding to know "What's an X-Walker?!" To this date, we have no idea whatsoever; we feel it may have been some sort of confused, drunken, weed-addled brain's attempt to combine the Weapon enemies, X-potions and W-item materia, though over the years we've come up with a few more outlandish theories here and there.

I wouldn't attribute my love of JRPGs entirely to this particular incident — remember, Woody and I had already played the game through four or five times by this point — but it definitely played a part. And Final Fantasy VII in general is certainly the main reason I'm into what I'm into today, so I will be forever grateful to it for that.

I hope the remake turns out to be good, but even if it doesn't, it won't be able to take away the magic the original still holds for me.