Trickytoon

My dad ran a shop that sold games during the 8 bit era (during the early and mid '80s), so really I was "that kid" that used to have access to the obscure or new systems and titles as and when they came out. He used to bring a different system home every weekend and me and my friends would feverishly make through as many games as we could before Monday rolled around and he had to take the system back to the store. A large part of my collecting now is focused on revisiting that era, particularly systems like the Ti99/4a / Vic 20 / MSX which were never popular in the UK but I have incredibly fond memories of as a child. Later on Sega was so dominant where I lived in the early 90's that the one kid who had a SNES was semi famous, and had a near constant stream of people wanting to visit him. He even started recording video cassettes of him playing games and handing those out, and until relatively recently my only experience of the SNES library was watching a tape of him playing Super Mario Kart and Pit Fighter (urgh). He later sold almost everything he owned to buy a 486 PC, became famous all over again for being the only guy to have access to Doom, and started churning out gameplay videos of that too. Great thread, thanks for the opportunity to reminisce!

The original release of Manic Miner on the Bug Byte label for the ZX Spectrum, Christmas 1983 if memory serves me correctly. I got that, Jetpac and Atic Atac with my brand new speccy, three utterly iconic games I still play regularly 36 years later.