On one of those expansive Saturday mornings only found in childhood, my father led 10-year-old me into a newsagent in Twickenham and invited me to pick out a magazine. I narrowed it to two options. In one hand I held one of those publications that gives you a different bit of a model aircraft carrier each month as a cover mount (the first issue is heavily discounted; you pay to finish the damned thing). In the other: the video game magazine Mean Machines.
I had a Game Boy at the time, that grey Soviet block featuring maroon buttons and a calculator’s LCD screen. So, once I’d waveringly opted for Mean Machines, I was introduced to a bright and alluring multi-format world of Super Nintendos and Sega Mega Drives. It felt as though I had joined a club of older boys. The writers had vibrant personalities and arcane in-jokes, and beneath their reviews, a little cartoonish portrait –a more Beano-like version of the New Yorker’s stately caricatures. Most of all I loved their verdicts on the graphics, the sounds, the “lastability” of games that, frankly, I had no prospect of ever playing. Their words were enough to conjure these little worlds in my mind, and their judgments on them felt reassuringly final, definitive.
