The Saga Begins

If you were to put a gun to my head and loudly demand “Tell us when you first got into Star Wars!”, I wouldn’t know what to tell you.

There’s globs of memory from when I’m small. I can remember running around the living room as grown-ups vainly tried to get me to sit still and watch the first film.

For me, the running around was part of it - not a distraction. The spinning of TIE Fighters. The zeeoommshf of clashing lightsabers. The peeakao-peekaow screeching of blaster bolts. My first memories of Star Wars are of motion. Action. Spirit. The Living Force.

Far out.

My mum scoured car boot sales for the Kenner figurines and associated vehicles (these being the days before they were full-blown collectors’ items). So I ended up with Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine, R2-D2, C3-PO, Princess Leia, Chewie, a few Ewoks and a couple of Stormtroopers. I also had a Hoth Snowspeeder - not quite as cool as the X-Wing, but still brimming with niche appeal (“Yeah, this baby’s strictly for planet-side jobs. Her engine will handle sub-zero temps with no trouble - you won’t find that on your T-16s.”).1

Years later - mum is bringing hot dogs into the living room of our house in Llandudno. I’m sat watching a tape of the Droids cartoon - rented from Jubilee Video, now long gone - depicting the spin-off comedy adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO. And there were nights where I sat in bed watching tapes of the animated Ewoks series, accompanied by the droid-like hum-click of of my bedroom tape player.

Then, older still.

I turned 10 in May, 1997, when the Original Trilogy was remastered and re-released in cinemas. My dad took me and a load of friends to see The Empire Strikes Back at the Llandudno Palladium (I can remember us walking past a house with a poster of John Major in the window, and dad leading us all in a chant of “Ya lost! Ya lost! Ya lost!”, this being in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s 1997 landslide win). Going to see Empire that night is burned into my brain, and is one of the foundations of my descent into fanboyism.

The following weekend, I celebrated my tenth birthday. The same clump of mates came round to the house, dressed as various characters. Bin bag and bike helmet Darth Vader. Karate gi Luke Skywalker. We were still in primary school and didn’t have the budget for anything screen-accurate.

My own costume was a point of pride. Mum had made me a set of Obi Wan-style robes from some old curtains, and I completed the ensemble with one of those knock-off toy lightsabers, likely sold under the name STAR KNIGHT LASER SWORD to dodge any trademark quibbles. Happily enough, mum had enough of the curtains left over to make an additional, much smaller cloak for my brother, who hadn’t quite reached two years old. He decided that he was Yoda, and his party piece involved lying on the couch and pretending to die (having watched the video of Return of the Jedi with me and dad earlier that week).

It was at this point - after the knock-off lightsaber fights and cake highs had worn off - that I started really getting into Star Wars. Really getting into it.

With the onset of the re-releases in ‘97, Walkers Crisps ran a marketing promotion under their Tazo range, and produced a series of collectible cardboard discs (similar to Pogs, if you’re old enough to remember those) featuring characters and scenes from the films.

These, naturally enough, could only be acquired through the purchase and consumption of large amounts of Walkers crisps. I was the sort of kid who ate quite a lot of crisps anyway, so getting a few collectibles thrown in as part of the deal seemed pretty sweet to me. And whenever family members tucked into a packet of their own I would hover over them, seagull-like, to see which of the TAZ-Os they might unearth. I collected the full set, and even got my parents to send off for the binder in which my collection could be stored (because I was that sort of child).

(A quick browse tells me there are a few of these collections in circulation on eBay. I must resist. That leads to the dark side. But - for those who fancy an even deeper dive - that same browse also unearthed this great piece on Walkers’ promos for Star Wars in the late 90s by Mark Newbold)

When the binder arrived and I was able to assemble my collection, I also started swotting up on the trivia notes within. One summer afternoon, I asked mum to test me on the quiz in the back, whereupon I managed to get all but one of the answers right (it was on the subject of Chewbacca’s age - how was I meant to know the guy was 200, and him with such good hair?).

Considering I’d eaten a lot of crisps in pursuit of the binder, it’s ironic that the tidbits and info within left me hungry for more. So I began hunting for other books, pressuring parents and relatives into picking up whatever scraps of apocrypha I might find. And it was in these books that I learned Darth Vader was part of a group called the Sith, and that the Empire’s ships were designed by a guy called Raith Sienar. And - much too late for me to ace that quiz - how old Chewbacca was. I found out lightsabers were powered by something called khyber crystals; that Admiral Ackbar came from a watery planet called Mon Cala. And - much to my amazement - I discovered there was a whole world to Star Wars outside of the films, with stories of ancient Jedi, or claimants to the Emperor’s throne after his death.

Getting to see the films had been one thing - finding out all this other stuff was another. This was enthusiasm guided into research and exploration. Into discovery, wider reading, memorisation and recall. Once a youngling of the Living Force, I was now becoming a precocious, pre-teen padawan of the Unifying Force. And a massive nerd, to boot.

If you were to stick a gun to my head and loudly demand “Tell us when you first got into Star Wars!”, I wouldn’t know what to tell you. Because “first” doesn’t make sense when it’s always been with me. Star Wars surrounds me; it penetrates me; it binds my galaxy together.

Doormats, Cookie Jars and Studio Heads

Much is talked about Star Wars’ role as a game-changer in the world of film merchandising. In How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Chris Taylor devotes a chapter to the impact the films had in this space, beginning with a visit to Rancho Obi-Wan - a fandom Shangri La run by expert and collector Steve Sansweet, judged by the Guinness Book of Records to be the largest single collection of Star Wars memorabilia on the planet.

Taylor notes:

It’s the large items you notice first; the life-size Darth Vader with red lightsaber drawn (codpiece and helmet from the original costume), the original mold of Han Solo in carbonite, the larger-than-life Boba Fett, the head of Jar-Jar Binks, the stuffed Wampa, an animatronic version of the Modal Nodes band from the Mos Eisley cantina…

It’s packed tightly into shelves as if it were a department store where space is at a premium - except the space seems to go on forever, with at least two sets of shelves on every wall, vanishing into the distance, where stands a life-size Lego Boba Fett and a Star Wars marquee from 1977…This is the point at which grown men and women have been known to weep.2

Later in the same chapter, Taylor quotes an estimate that the franchise and its various arms have generated £20bn in merchandising sales (though this dates back to the mid-2010s - with further films, series and Baby Yoda himself having emerged since then, estimations of $40bn+ are likely not far off the mark).

A to-do bullet on the bucket lists of many fans, Rancho Obi-Wan offers an insight into just how much Star Wars stuff is out there - not just the impressive maquettes and models, but also merchandising outputs in every conceivable form.

Taylor continues:

(Sansweet is) delighted to show off some of the worst official products ever to emerge from Lucasfilm licensing; a C-3PO tape dispenser where the tape emerges suggestively from between the golden droid’s legs; a Williams Sonoma oven mitt in the shape of the space slug from Empire Strikes Back; Jar Jar Binks candy where you have to open the Gungan’s mouth and suck on his cherry-flavoured tongue.3

This is similarly shown in Brian Jay Jones’ George Lucas: A Life, in which the biographer details some of the products which went to market in the immediate wake of the release of Star Wars in 1977:

There were Halloween costumes, lunch boxes, and bubble gum cards. Coca-Cola would market plastic Star Wars cups. Burger Chef would sell posters. A twenty-page souvenir program sold 300,000 copies. The double-LP sound track of John William’s music sold more than 650,000 copies by mid-July - one of the first, and some cases only, albums of symphonic music many people would own… And Lucas would finally have his R2-D2 cookie jar.4

Tempting as it may be for me to wryly shake my head and bemoan the nature of corporate cash-ins, I have to bear in mind I own some of this stuff. While I’m not blessed enough to have an R2-D2 cookie jar (if any fictional character was meant to be a cookie jar, it’s Artoo), but a I do have a Chewbacca-themed biscuit tin. And a Yoda doormat, letting visitors to my home know ‘Welcome, you are’ (Yoda may be less suited to being a doormat than Artoo is to a cookie jar). Those particular bits of paraphernalia have come into my possession because friends and family know that Star Wars stuff makes an easy gift for me, and partly because I will, occasionally, put my hand in my pocket for novelty tat. There’s a lovely line in Taylor’s book quoting academic Dr Jennifer Porter, who likened such gear to “tacky mementoes from Lourdes”5 - and I suppose where Star Wars is concerned, I’m an Amalfian grandmother.

If we were to get into the weeds, it’d be interesting to consider where we make the split between original media, spin-off media and merchandise - or where we draw the ever-nebulous line between “This is a commercial product created to generate revenue” and “This is a compelling creative contribution to the fictional universe in which it features”.

After all, every item of Star Wars media is expected to be a return on investment, so it’d be easy for us to denote them all as commercial - but that then sets hundreds of novels on the same level as the info written on bubblegum cards, or four-panel comics on cereal boxes. But if we go too far the other way, we might end up at a point where we have to consider everything from Empire Strikes Back onwards as weird spin-out media from the first film. And then we have to start thinking about whether any creative act can be truly devoid of commercial considerations in the late-20th century entertainment industry - at which point everyone (me included) starts nervously side-eyeing their collections.

Lucas himself isn’t removed from these considerations. Stories of his early creative efforts, THX-1138 and American Graffiti, tell of battles with interfering studio execs, whose commercially-minded meddling and scepticism led to Lucas’ increasing disillusionment with the Hollywood of his time.

In the series of interviews Lucas undertook with writer Paul Duncan for Taschen’s The Star Wars Archives, he shows a degree of self-awareness of that divide, and had to rely on the money he made with the first film to give him creative control over the franchise’s subsequent entries.

That’s the thing about Hollywood. You’ve got people who basically know nothing about making a movie. They don’t even know how it happens, yet they command and have these ideas about how they’re the ones basically making the movie. And all they’re doing is running the studio, and getting the letter of credit from the bank.6

It’s easy to draw parallels between Lucas’ story and that of Darth Vader, as he veered from plucky rebel to creating a multi-billion dollar studio empire of his own, going on to create both Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic to ensure his creative independence, while also creating capacity to execute his vision more faithfully in the future.

When Duncan raises the fact that Lucas had to become “that guy” in order to retain control over his vision, he adds:

I became that guy. So I was doing it to myself, which I felt very satisfied about…In the creative world, you do what do you need to do to make it work, make it good, and make it right. If that means spending more money than you think you should, then you have to do it…because I want to get my vision done, I’ll put up with anything. I’ll sacrifice my life, if I have to.7

It’s tempting to get all very theoretical and ruminate on how Lucas’ experiences with the alienation from the product of his labour led him to becoming one of the culture industry’s foremost moguls. And the means by which he assured his later independence wasn’t just through box office receipts, but the sales of toys and other licensed products (Lucas having been canny enough to negotiate a hefty percentage of the film's merchandising income in his initial dealings with 20th Century Fox).

That led to the hordes of stuff we mentioned earlier on - the suck-Jar-Jar’s-tongue sweets, C-3PO’s suggestive tape dispenser and my Yoda doormat. But as well as bringing to life the sort of kitsch worthy of Lourdes, it also allowed for the creation of quite a lot of apocrypha.

So - a film released in 1977 spawned a further 11 films (with two more due in the next couple of years), 10 animated series and seven live-action. That’s meant that over the years, I’ve forked out for cinema tickets, videos, DVDs, Blu-Rays and a Disney+ subscription, just in order to keep up with the core material.

But as mentioned above, my childhood engagement with Star Wars wasn’t just acted out through the films - it also came through the Kenner toys, made-for-TV animated series and Walkers Crisps promos. As I approached the nominal rank of grown-up, that ballooned into things like PC and console games, books, comics, T-shirts, badges, patches, hoodies, Lego sets, figures and cosplaying.

It, if anything, can take the full blame for my having turned into a nerd - it showed me that you could love a thing over and above its “core” outputs. That instinct didn’t stay stuck to Star Wars alone, but it’s where the seed was first planted.

It probably also doesn’t do any harm that I’m one for stories.

The Sacred Texts!

I was lucky enough to attend Star Wars Celebration when it came to London in 2023. Celebration is the official convention for the series, and likely the premiere gathering on this planet for fans, collectors and afficionados (outside of the vaunted San Diego Comic-Con).

In between trying to catch snatches of people like Jon Favreau, Anthony Daniels, Kathleen Kennedy and the late Carl Weathers on stage, I spent some time wandering the genuinely gigantic innards of the Excel centre. Eventually, I found myself in line for a panel discussion on the spin-out comics for the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story. Not the film itself, mind you, nor even all of the sundry publications which were born as a result of it, but just the comic books. Not only was this enough to keep a room full of fans interested for just shy of an hour, but it also struck me how amazing it was that a someone like me could still be surprised by the new things which that universe had to offer.

Much like the aforementioned toy empire, the publishing flank of Star Wars is a megalith in its own right. Novels and comics licensed via Lucasfilm or Disney number in the hundreds, with enough backstories, spin-offs and rarities to keep even the most devoted fan sated for lifetimes. The fan database Wookieepedia has a list of official published novels which numbers into the hundreds (and as with any Wiki, the caveat has to be made that this is likely incomplete).

Just on my own shelves, I have 35-odd novels and similar books set in the worlds of Star Wars, and a handful more books which are, in some fashion or another, about the films.

I don’t discriminate when it comes to particular arcs, eras, storylines or writers. So long as I can be reasonably comfortable that I’m not diving into a sprawling storyline halfway through - or that coming in late doesn’t really matter - I’m happy to pick up a Star Wars book and just start reading.

(I ought to note a quick debt of gratitude to Mark, a friend and fellow Substacker who recently tipped me off that a local antiques centre had quite a large amount of second-hand Star Wars books for sale - a tip-off which has likely given my bookshelves a hernia)

Some of the titles are more recent additions set in the new canon, while others are purely nostalgia-buys. This includes the Essential Guides published by Boxtree, which were my first introduction to the EU; and Del Rey’s 1984 A Guide to the Star Wars Universe, by Raymond L Velasco. Both are out-of-date by now, but they represent a charming bit of franchise history from the time between the trilogies.

For my sins, there’s still vast swathes of more recent output which I’ve not seen, including the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series, helmed by showrunner Dave Filoni, who was recently crowned president of Lucasfilm with the exit of Kathleen Kennedy. Nor, come to think of it, have I watched Andor, The Acolyte or Asoka.

But while there’s bits of Star Wars I’m content to see as more to the tastes of other fans than my own, I’ve never met a part of the universe I didn’t like.

I’m as likely to enjoy work set in the now-apocryphal Legends as I am in the new canon, whether that’s the various Clone Wars offshoots or the steps back in time into the days of the sprawling High Republic.

Canon Fire

If that paragraph above left you feeling a mite confused…

George Lucas helmed the production of Star Wars films from 1977 to 2005. These six are broken up into two sets of three, with an Original Trilogy running from 1977 to 1983, followed by a Prequel Trilogy from 1999 to 2005.

When the Original Trilogy came out, it was accompanied by lots of tie-in books as part of the merchandising rush mentioned earlier - including Alan Dean Foster’s 1978 novel Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, and the Marvel Comics adaptation of the first film, which came out before the film in order to gee up publicity.

There was quite a big lull between Return of the Jedi in 1983, and the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999. So during that lull, the Star Wars universe was expressed not through films, but through other media. This included depictions of what happened to our heroes after the events of Jedi, and journeys back into ancient history, with tales from the Old Republic. These stories (and the associated video games) were dubbed the Expanded Universe, or EU.

It gave hungry fans something to keep them going between films, and provided entertainment, continuity and illumination. As a result, many fans became quite attached to the stories told in the EU, and gave it semi-canonical or even outright canonical status. As far as they were concerned, the events in the books were what ‘had happened’ in the Star Wars universe when the cameras weren’t rolling. But as Lucas himself didn’t pay much attention to it, seemingly preferring to let individual writers handle things until such time as he decided to step back in (correctly assuming he could re-write stuff if and when he wanted), the EU never got a Word of God-type sign-off, with the Creator’s own seal lifting it from haziness into reality.

And then, both cleaning the slate and complicating matters, George Lucas sold Lucasfilm and Star Wars to Disney in 2012 for $4.05bn dollars. It was clear from the outset that Disney wanted to make good on their investment, and the announcement of the deal also featured news that they would start making new Star Wars films, with plans to release an Episode VII in 2015.

For reasons on either side of the commercial and creative divide, Disney decided to pursue its course for the saga, writing a brand new stories of its own rather than adapting EU novels for film. And this new storyline wouldn’t just encompass what happened after the events of Return of the Jedi, but also go right back into history, giving Disney the chance to create, brand and sell an entirely new range of stories through various media.

So the Expanded Universe was renamed Legends, and the new stories would simply be called Canon. As well as the Sequel Trilogy, released between 2015 and 2019, the new Canon also includes Disney+ series’ such as Clone Wars and The Mandalorian, plus the new novels, comics, games and series set in the High Republic, which takes place hundreds of years before the main storyline (not to be confused with the Old Republic, which is now Legends and predates the main storyline by, in some cases, thousands of years).

(For my own future reference if nobody else’s, the fan-site Youtini has what looks to be a well-curated list of novels and comics split across Canon and Legends in chronological timeline, and a suggested reading order)

I appreciate this might be the point at which non-afficionados reach for the emergency cord. But in a very nerdy way, this diversion in canonicity is is serious stuff. If you were a 13-year-old Star Wars fan in the 90s, you had a completely different version in your head of what happened after Return of the Jedi than a 13-year-old Star Wars fan does now.

Timothy Zahn’s lauded Heir to the Empire trilogy (1991-1993) was, for many, the definitive story of the post-Jedi universe. This was where Luke Skywalker’s journey had taken him after he’d blown up the second Death Star and redeemed Darth Vader.

One of the standout characters in the Heir series is Grand Admiral Thrawn, a blue-skinned Imperial commander and its main antagonist. Although the stories in which he existed were knocked out of the official canon post-Disney, he proved so resilient and so popular with fans that he’s actually been written back in to the canonical story, making the leap from the EU/Legends into the established Disneyverse. The newer Thrawn novels by Zahn are just some of his recent outings, but he also served as an antagonist in the Rebels animated series and the live-action series Ahsoka.

I hope no-one thinks I’m being facetious when I make this comparison, but imagine if the Pope one day announced that the New Testament was going to be expanded with the addition of a lead character from the Book of Mormon, or the Gnostic Gospels. “Look, I get this is our lead IP and chief stream of income generation, but we can’t step back from opportunities for synergistic folding, people! There are BoM and GP fans out there whom we can’t afford to lose in today’s increasingly fractured believer market, and character integration gives us a chance for growth of up to eight per cent over the next three fiscal terms!”

To me, this is one of the chief appeals of Star Wars - there’s enough of it out there to allow for re-invention and fresh adaptation. Late May, 2027, will mark fifty years since it first came to our screen. Without that potentially endless stream of possible stories and histories, it’s unlikely that the franchise would have shown the resilience and longevity it has.

As before, there are definitely debates to be had as to the merits of those stories told largely for the sake of a particular vision, versus those which exist primarily as a cash-grab - and satirical memes circulate predicting Disney’s endless recycling of minor background characters for multi-part life story series.

It is easy to get cynical about big entertainment franchises, and such criticisms aren’t without merit. And I acknowledge that the sprawl of expanded literature to which I have dedicated no small amount of time likely wouldn’t exist had it not been for a few acts of commercial savviness in the late 1970s, and it forms part of an IP ecosystem which also features a plastic amphibian with a suckable cherry tongue.

But it’s also a lot of fun. And, in my way, I love it.

The Living Force

It’s easy to speak of Star Wars as part of our pop-cultural inheritance. Akira Kurosawa, Ray Harryhausen, spaghetti Westerns and the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials blended together, with some all-encompassing Campbellian monomyth thrown in to keep things just the right side of educational. The Hero’s Journey. Sacrifice. Redemption. Wisdom. Power. Good vs Evil.

Then, there’s those parts where Lucas was keen to allegorically mirror the politics of his time. That which his generation saw as the inherent wrongness of US involvement in Vietnam comes out in the struggle of the slapdash Rebels, or sticks-and-stones Ewoks, against the technological terrors of the Empire.

And then there’s just the stuff that’s sheer good fun. The space battles. The lightsaber fights. The podraces. Hand lightning. Aliens. Robots. The cinematic, entertaining things that keep you coming back when the mysterious energy field ruling the galaxy gets a bit too much.

Finally, there’s the dimension that risks being talked about less - the personal.

I can understand why that’s not talked about as often. It’s anecdotal, and bound up in unreliable things like human memory, sentiment and emotion. And it’s personal. That living force, again.

As seen at the start of this piece, my mum figures a lot in my earlier memories of Star Wars. She was the one who bought or hired videos, and who searched through car boot sales to find precious clutches of Kenner figures and vehicles. It was her who made me my first set of Obi-Wan robes. She put up with my childish hyper-enthusiasm enough to quiz me on minutia. And when she talked about characters like Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, she did so in the tone she reserved for names like Merlin, Arthur and Uther Pendragon (no faint praise from a woman born in Gwynedd).

Sadly, my mum died of cancer in March, 1999, at a much-too-young age. Weirdly, one of the minor irks I have around the timing of her death is that she never got to see The Phantom Menace. Nor, indeed, any of the latter films or series which have emerged since - but Phantom Menace seems particularly cruel, as it came out not long after she died. She had an enthusiasm for the films which was distinct from mine, and while I don’t think she was as mad on them as I am, it’s her reverential handling of them and her encouragement of my passion which led me to becoming who I am today.

It’s thanks to her that when I look back at early memories of Star Wars, they are always ones of warmth. Of happiness. Of love.

From the outside, my enthusiasm for a universe of space wizards and laser swords might raise a few eyebrows. I collect stories. I play dress-up. I am a grown man. While I’m all about that life myself, part of me understands why such behaviour would be ripe for derision.

And indeed, this isn’t something that bedevils the Star Wars fan alone. It also applies to elf-eared Lord of the Rings enthusiasts, uniformed Trekkies or scarf-clad Whovians. Fans of Supernatural, of Marvel, of Dungeons and Dragons - the same slings and arrows are levelled at everyone within nerddom (and, despite some bits of hyper-enthusiasm, the Venn diagram of such groups is often a circle).

Yes - the above is about the geeky stuff. The minutia. The trivia. The background details ripe for endless obsession. And it’s about the social politics, the mytharcs and the real-world tensions of trying to separate genuine passion and communal involvement from cynical marketeering.

But above all else, it’s about memories.

It’s about the love.

And I love Star Wars.

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Bibliography

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. Taylor, Chris. Head of Zeus Ltd, 2014.

George Lucas: A Life. Jones, Brian Jay. Headline Publishing Group, 2017.

The Star Wars Archives: Episodes IV-VI: 1977 - 1983. Duncan, Paul. Taschen, 2020.

Footnotes

I also had a BBC Micro, which, if memory serves, mum bought at a car boot sale. I could have put the Micro to good use, learning stuff which might have laid in some decent groundwork for a lucrative career in computer science or software engineering later on in life. Instead, I spent my time on it playing a game called Repton 2, in which a weird insect-man scuttles around a labyrinth trying to avoid other, more predatory insects. While not the most engaging of plots, the sounds of Repton 2 were dreamlike and otherworldly, with clings and pings and ragtime music.

As I aged, I graduated to other machines. The Master System became, by degrees, the Game Gear - a big thing which had a screen in the middle and stretched the definition of “hand-held” - then the Mega Drive, which had a curvy controller and more buttons, though the games weren’t massively different.

My mum was a teacher, and during the summer holidays would bring home one of the school computers, - usually an Acorn, which was the successor to the Micro.

The Acorn was big step up from the Micro.

Though produced by the same team, in my mind they seemed like different creatures on an evolutionary chart. The Acorn was an upright guy clutching a spear and dressed in mammoth skins with a wolf by his side, who when he wasn’t busy hunting would collect dyes and daub the avatars of his prey on a cave wall, treading that strange line between art and mysticism. The Micro was a hairy guy with a club who periodically said “unga bunga”. Like our early ancestors, both seem horribly out of date when compared to the things we have now, but one of them was certainly further out of date than the other (it’s like the Flintstones and Captain Caveman - both stem from prehistory, but at least the Flintstones get to shower using mammoths and dispose of their household waste into the beaks of wise-cracking pterosaurs).

The Micro was a relic of the days when computers were a pursuit for hobbyists alone. Its floppy disks were actually floppy, and they had to be locked into the drive to make sure they didn’t fall out. The chief input tool was the keyboard, and there was no intuitive visual interface. If you wanted something done, you had to type it in yourself.

I had a go at some of the most basic guides. I can remember working on one game in which a farmer had to try and catch falling eggs laid by chickens high up on a rack (why the hell he didn’t put his chickens closer to the ground and stick a few boxes underneath them, I’ll never know), and also nosed at a few word processor builders or home finance programmes.

But, in the end, I always sighed, surrendered and defaulted back to the pre-made games already available to me. Or, more likely, switched the Micro off and the Mega Drive on. The tempting ease of convenience - in which I could just press a button rather than learning something difficult but useful - already held me in its sway.

The Acorn, while still being a very early machine by today’s standards, would be halfway recognisable to a modern desktop or laptop computer user. It had a mouse - which, if I remember correctly, had three buttons - and a user-friendly visual interface.

It’s difficult to overstate how weirdly mystical and fantastic computer mice seemed to me when I first came across them.

At the time, a lot of computer hardware could be rationalised as the evolution or cousin of something else; the monitor from the television, the keyboard from the typewriter, and so on.

But the mouse seemed to be something that was wholly and utterly associated with the use of the home computer. Trackball-based guidance systems had been in military use on either side of the Atlantic since just after the Second World War, so it’s not as though the mouse was without antecedent (or should that be ‘pre-cursor’?).

But the existence of the mouse seemed tied up with the development of computers in a way which couldn’t be ascribed to any other piece of kit I’d used. Even the disk drive, marvel that it was, could be envisioned as a kind of relative of the video recorder or cassette player - a bit of input machinery, which linked up to something else to produce an output. The mouse was something wholly different.

All my life before that, I’d been using keyboards, joysticks and joypads - devices which, while marvellous, took no real notice of anything other than the most basic of human inputs. There was no real correlation, no link, between what you as the user did outside the screen and what happened to the machine within. You might strike the keys and the correct characters would turn up on the monitor, but that really wasn’t any different to the aforementioned typewriter. Even controlling Sonic the Hedgehog via the various elements of a joypad seemed a bit remote and distant.

But the mouse took what you did, and translated it into the exact - exact - same motion on the other side of the screen. If you made tiny circles, the cursor did the same. If you made a big sweeping motion, moving your arm across the desk like lightning, the cursor did the same. It seemed so intuitive, so fluid and so simple that it made me feel linked to the workings of the computer in a way I hadn’t before.

The mouse was not just another piece of kit - it and the cursor were zippy little emissaries, providing a direct and instant relationship between me and what happened within the monitor. Before the mouse, that pane of glass had been an impenetrable divide - now, we were bonded. And fundamentally, even if you didn’t ‘get’ computers you could see the logic of double-clicking on a file in order to open it.

I know this might all seem a bit quaint, especially in the day and age of touchscreen and voice commands. But I think even they, advanced as they may be, don’t have the same strange humanity as the simple action of moving a mouse across a pad and watching the cursor mimic your motion.

Given its mouselessness, basic interface and chunky, weighty design, there was little the Micro could do to compete for my affections when the Acorn Archimedes was around. Yes - the Micro was a lovely machine and had its charms. But given the bright and orderly new world to which the Archimedes had introduced me, it couldn’t compare.

It offered up clarity and intuitiveness, in a way in which writing and executing a lengthy piece of code on the Micro didn’t. While to many eyes it seemed no less nerdy and esoteric than the Micro, to those who were paying attention, it was an obvious leap forward.

So too, I should observe, were the games. I spent hours on the Acorn playing games like James Pond and Lemmings, which had the same colour and vivaciousness as the stuff I played on my consoles, but minus the inconvenience of taking up the living room telly.

Once I reached my very early adolescence, computers had quietly evolved from being the preserve of hideaway enthusiasts to useful household tools, which would be of as much utility to mum and dad as they would to the antisocial kids. I know not everyone could afford them, so to call them “must-haves” would be more than a bit presumptuous , but for kids like me who’d grown up on a steady diet of home computing in an upper-lower-middle class household, they were a self-explanatory necessity.

And even the Archimedes was punted into the long grass when I discovered the amazing world of Windows computers, and the CD-ROM drive.

CD-ROM. It even sounded like something from the future. Like R2-D2, or Robocop. This was cutting-edge stuff. They looked shiny, chromium and sexy - not at all like the pedestrian reliability of floppy disks. By just looking at a CD-ROM, you could tell that it could hold more information, play more media and simply do more stuff than its square predecessors.

And the games they played were better still - not just in terms of graphics and accessibility, but the worlds they opened up to a pop-culture hungry young’un like me.

Disney put games on to CD-ROM. Walt Disney Studios, for god’s sake. The powerhouse which, for much of my early life, produced the tentpole animation classics which defined my relationship to popular media. Major motion picture tie-in games for the likes of The Lion King and Aladdin were all on CD - not the olde-worlde floppies that I normally faffed around with. This was high-profile, excitingly American stuff. The shininess of the disks was matched only by the spark and dazzle of the worlds promised thereon.

The occasional visits to homes of family friends left me snarling and envious at the kind of kit some of my peers had. I can remember going to their homes for summer barbecues or amicable visits by day, and then - quite literally - dreaming of their computers by night, elevating them from the level of family PCs to MI6-like, globe-conquering arrays of tower drives and monitors.

“Interactive” was a word which was bandied around back then, and rightly so - especially where the digital entertainment of kids was concerned. We wanted interesting things to click on, and we wanted them to do interesting things when we did. Or, at least, I did.

And now - just like the Micro before it - the Archimedes seemed the relic of a bygone age. Whereas before, Paint had been an amazing way to while away the hours, now it was limited and dull - especially now that the world was being injected with whacky, bright, full-colour, corporate stuff.

In a move of stupendous luck for me, the trend of mum bringing Archimedes computers back from school during the holidays came to an end when we got a Windows 95 machine of our own - likely just before or around the time I was introduced to the internet at school. This was a hugely celebratory affair for me, because part and parcel of the Windows 95 set-up was - a CD-ROM drive! Boo-yah.

Later, we skipped Windows 98 and went straight to Windows ME. I can’t describe how obvious the achievements of these operating systems seemed to me at the time. The inherently user-friendly designs; the variety and easy availability of applications. And then, of course, came home internet - which even in its pre-broadband days seemed insanely futuristic. An information superhighway, linking together people around the world in collaboration and conversation.

This all came at the right time for me - or, if you think about it a bit longer, the wrong one. I was going through my teens when all of this happened, so the already revolutionary impact of home computers and getting online was made even more turbulent by the added spin of peer pressure. Having a crappier computer than my mates wasn’t acceptable.

And when my dad, bound as he was by clear thinking and sound financial planning, refused to accede to my demands for increasingly better kit as soon as I wanted it, I realised I’d have to content myself with playing second-tier games which didn’t require vast amounts of processing power - or, if not second-tier games, then top-tier games at third-rate playability. And, hell, by this time I’d already acquired a Nintendo 64, so in retrospect my complaints about not being able to play cool games ring more than a bit empty.

My adolescent griping aside, there was something really enjoyable about the games I played as a teenager. I played Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura; Roller-Coaster Tycoon 2; Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds; Civilisation II; The Sims and 3D Movie Maker. While none of them were what would now be called Triple-A games - graphics-heavy affairs with sprawling playability - there was still something impressive and welcoming about them; even if, at times, I had to spend ages waiting for characters to complete tasks which, on better computers, might have taken seconds.

As with all elements of teenage life, there were times when I had to deal with disappointment and inadequacy. After getting some money for my 16th birthday, I headed to an indoor market to see if I could find any second-hand copies of games I’d been wanting to play for a while - namely Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis - only to discover upon getting them home that neither of them would play on my computer, which was a knock-back (being a mini-mosher and hanging out, as I did, with genitive goths, not being able to play a VTM game was an especial blow).

Luckily for me, I had mates who were into computer gaming as well. One in particular had - get this! - more than one PC, which gave us the chance to get into LAN gaming. We never got into the heavily competitive stuff like Eve: Online, Doom or Unreal Tournament, but we spent actual days playing Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, Star Trek: Armada or The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth, both amongst ourselves and with strangers from around the world.

While I’m always wary of the risks posed by rose-tinted glasses, especially as the stuff we’re looking at gets further and further away, part of me sees that period of my life occupying an amazing cultural window which, probably, won’t ever come again.

By this point, games weren’t just the domain of coding hobbyists - they were a proper industry, and people were pouring money into their development. But it was also the time before studios discovered increasingly bastardy ways to make good on their investments, with things like subscriptions, lootboxes, buyable skins or high-level items.

Better still, communication with fellow players was largely done by typing messages then sending them via an in-game chat window - which, given you needed your hands free to shoot people, was usefully impractical. While I’m sure live microphone and headset chatting existed in some professionalised form when I was a teenager, I don’t recall it having trickled down to me and my mates - meaning I never had to put up with twelve-year-olds making ultra-racist jokes or threatening to rape my mum. I know it’s hideously, stereotypically easy for me to sit atop the hill of time and make sage pronouncements at young’uns, both lamenting the state of their behaviour and going on about how much better it was in my day. But, god forgive me, I can’t help but think that in this case, the old sod in me is right.

As I’ve got older, and games in general seem to have improved across a number of metrics (graphics, immersion, stories and variability being chief among them), there’s been an atavistic inkling in me which has taken me back, full circle, to where I started. I’m glad I’m in a world where stuff like Skyrim has come to exist (and hell, even that’s over a decade old by now), but have found myself cycling back to indulge in some of my teenage enjoyments. Thanks to platforms like Steam and Good Old Games, I’ve re-acquainted myself with old friends. As I come close to turning 37, I find myself revisiting Arcanum, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, Civilisation, Vampire: The Masquerade and Roller-Coaster Tycoon, in some cases scratching the itch which my teenage self, limited as he was by budget and technology, couldn’t.

There’s an argument to be made that I should be seeing what’s new out there - tucking into such luminaries as Baldur’s Gate III, God of War or The Last of Us. While I can see the appeal in such things, playing the latest iterations of those series would require me to fork out large sums of cash for the latest consoles or machines - putting me squarely back in the bind which squeezed me when I was younger. Whereas the games I used to play, or longed to play, can be played on my current machine and are on sale for less than a fiver apiece, which in budgetary terms brings them to the same level as a meal deal. Heck, if I were so minded, I could dig out a halfway decent emulator and revisit the games of my childhood, or skulk around eBay to find older consoles.

But as in my childhood, I just want to play the games - I certainly don’t want to have to put any work in to playing them. So forgive me if I grant myself this bit of reassuring, cosy atavism.

For the likes of me, GOG is an absolute haven of nostalgia. In its mission to preserve and provide access to a slew of decades-old games (PC and otherwise), it’s allowed me to dive back into the games I played during my teenage years. Or, in some cases, wanted to play but never had the right hardware to do so.

I’m not a hardcore gamer, but computer gaming nevertheless forms an important strand of my psychological DNA. I grew up with the worlds of the Master System and the BBC Micro. When I got a bit older, I purloined hours on friends’ SNES-es and spent days on the Acorn Archimedes machines my mum occasionally brought home from the school at which she worked (not sure whether or not she was allowed to do that, but she only did it during the holidays and it was 30 years ago, so quelle dommage). And when I entered teenagedom, my dad got me a Windows ME and I dived into the world of PC gaming.

As a nascent gamer I treated myself to the occasional PC gaming magazine, which regularly came with CD-ROMs absolutely stuffed to the gills with demo games, as promos for upcoming releases. One issue contained a review for a then-due release from Troika Games and Sierra On-Line, called Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and a short demo version of the game resided on the accompanying CD. I read the review, spotted the demo and decided to give it a go (though if I could get a message back to my younger self, I’d tell him installing applications from mass-marketed CDs on to the family computer probably isn’t the best of ideas, and I should exercise similar caution when it comes to Kazaa, he’ll thank me later).

An RPG, Arcanum is set in a titular world where a once-Tolkienesque fantasy land is undergoing a Verne-leaning steampunk Industrial Revolution. Formerly hegemonic magical blocs like elves and wizarding colleges are dwindling in the face of rising technological power. Ancient sacred groves are cleared to make way for the rapidly expanding railroad, while previously overlooked human towns transform into London-like industrial powerhouses. Half-ogre bodyguards protect gnomish tycoons; foppish half-elves fan themselves ‘neath gaslight in fashionable saloons. And in the midst of it all, the protagonist may well be the reincarnation of an elvish religious leader, brought back to fight an Evil One in a winner-takes-all spat for creation itself.

I was hooked after playing the demo, and a generous mate got me a copy of the game for Christmas. It spent years on and off my ensuing PCs and laptops (with varying degrees of playability), until I eventually lost the disc and wasn’t able to find another copy.

Recently, thanks to the availability of the game on the GOG platform, I got myself a digital copy and have dipped my toes back into it on occasion. I completed a celebratory play-through with a half-orc swordsman who was also a dab hand at the persuasion skill (opening up a lot of otherwise unplayable plotlines in the world of political skullduggery), and am now having another go with a half-ogre swordsman/gunman/illusion mage. Here’s a shot from my current playthrough:

As I was a nerdy kid entering adolescence during the 2000’s boom in popularity for The Lord of the Rings, Arcanum was absolute catnip to me. It had sprawling dwarven mines populated with crystalline spiders and lava golems; evil swords forged by dark-magic sadists; steam-powered automata guarding ancient ruins and smog-shrouded cities playing home to swaggering aristocrats and orcish labourers.

As well as letting me play in a world with clear Tolkien-derived influences at a time when I was mad for the slowly-unfurling cinematic trilogy, Arcanum was also my gateway drug into all things steampunk, and the associated world of genitive Victorian sf in the mould of Wells and Verne. When the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came out in 2003, I excitedly saw some of the elements it had in common with Arcanum and eventually got my hands on the graphic novel on which the film was based. Being one of those nerds with a completionist brain, I realised I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t gain some familiarity with the texts behind LXG’s core cast, and so went away and - in time - read stuff like Dracula, Frankenstein, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and the Sherlock Holmes stories. That was likely my first proper foray into “serious”, grown-up reading, over and above the Red Dwarf, Discworld and H2G2 stuff I’d read between the ages of 11 and 16 (there’s likely question marks over how “grown-up” you can really be when reading about Martians and vampires, but they’re not questions I feel obliged to answer). Although I was spurred into reading these things by League, I likely wouldn’t have paid much attention to it had it not been for Arcanum. Given how much that sudden enthusiasm for literature factored into my decisions around university and later life, I owe the game an infrequently-expressed debt of gratitude.

But there’s another, entirely separate reason for me to give thanks to Arcanum. Almost by accident, it gave me access to a thoroughly interesting fan community. By being a part of that community, I gained my first taste of what it meant to be a truly engaged nerd - to be utterly and unashamedly into something, without any hint of self-deprecation or embarrassment. It also introduced me to a wider world of literature, philosophy, politics, tech and thinking - the sort of education I was never going to get at school. And while the game itself got me reading, the fan community got me writing.

After getting hold of my first copy of the game, I took some early, tentative forays into Arcanum’s fan forums, eventually finding myself in the fan fiction section. Being a 14-year-old with a hunger for creative opportunities and the longing to connect with like-minded peers, discovering this bit of the forum was about as eye-opening as the game itself had been. This was still the age of dial-up internet, so I had to ration my web use to an hour an evening, and I’d spend the vast majority of my time online in the fan fiction forum for Arcanum, connecting with people from around the world over this weird game.

One of the major boons of the forum was being introduced to slightly older nerds, who’d spent years honing their interests and tastes - an absolute godsend when you’re a bit young and are looking for niche stuff to get into, so you can show off about it later on. These guys shared my enthusiasm for the game, but they also provided fascinating tidbits about esoteric stuff which I might never have come across otherwise. These guys had read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hobbes. They - being from far-flung places like New Jersey and Singapore - knew about things like communism, power metal, Gaia theory and nanotech. The game provided grounds for inspiration via easy-to-spot offroads, but the community surrounding it pointed to secret passages, buried libraries and hidden gems.

While school was teaching me things it was presumed you could reasonably get into a teenager’s head, this niche online community was opening up intellectual horizons I’d never previously considered. I’d never made any attempt to read philosophy before. I’d not read books, nor watched films, outside of a fairly confined comfort zone. And I’d thought myself a fairly well-informed guy, who spent time getting into nominally uncool things because I thought they made me look clever. This was a new world which knocked any notions of intellectual superiority out of me, while also telling me where the good stuff was, if I was ready to look for it.

Bearing in mind I grew up in coastal north Wales. That’s not to say the place was an absolute cultural backwater - far from it. But before HMV opened a branch in Llandudno, someone looking for anime or slightly more-than-niche music had to get the train to Chester. Meanwhile, your only access to graphic novels was whatever sparse offering the local Waterstone’s decided to stock (usually comics on which films had been based, leading to the much-vaunted cover sticker boasting that the work you held in your hands was not just a comic book, but was “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE”). The idea that you might come across such things by serendipity alone was unheard of. And even if there was some secret underground nerd scene in Llandudno at which adherents passed on tips and insider insights on sleek films and cool animations, I was but a humble boy in Glan Conwy, removed from it by an hour’s bus journey. Given all of that, I feel pretty blessed that this exciting digital community, accessible from the corner of my bedroom, was waiting for me.

Better still, the fan fiction forum gave me the space and the motivation to practise my own writing regularly, in a half-friendly, half-critical world which could help me make improvements where needed.

I’d join with other members to have a whack at collaborative storylines set in the world of Arcanum, which led to a constantly-rolling churn of output. As we all lived in different parts of the world, it was always exciting for me to write something of my own, then go to bed and head to school before logging back on the following evening and seeing where others had followed up. We didn’t stipulate any particular rules on which writers were in charge of which characters; nor did we sketch out storylines ahead of time, nor particular schedules or systems on who would write what, and when. Stories evolved communally, based on the inclinations of whoever was putting out a post at any one time. And - not to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, here - this was the age of the internet in which the web, crucially, was something you could get away from. It was on a desk, and had to be rationed out in line with the needs of the phone bill. While I’m sure I’d have accessed similarly creative and exciting stuff had I been born twenty years later, it’s difficult to think of teenage-in-the-2020’s Iwan building up a similar sense of anticipation or excitement in an age in which everything’s quickly accessible.

One of the big stories I had a go at early on was called Conflictum - depicting a cross-continental war in the world of Arcanum, as a rising breakaway power threatened to destabilise the burgeoning prosperity of the Unified Kingdom, while also planning a genocidal war against dwarf-kind.

That might sound exciting and well thought-out, but - for my own part - it really wasn’t. I pinched a lot of inspiration from the Star Wars universe, while also looping in the creations of other forum members. But while it might not be all that thrilling for a 38-year-old to read, I remember having a lot of fun being the 16-year-old who wrote it, and look back at it with a degree of charm and warmth.

Here’s an example of the sort of stuff I wrote, kept for posterity’s sake on an old hard drive. I apologise for the formatting, but figured correcting the spelling or punctuation mistakes would take away some of the youthful disregard for things like accuracy or style.

Shakaar surveyed his surroundings. The walls were made up of heavy stone bricks, and each brick was lined a sheet metal of some form. This was truly an odd place indeed

He heard someone coming down the corridor towards him. Shakaar turned himself invisible, in order to evade capture. He wasn’t here to fight. And hopefully, the menace of Saturos was trapped inside his cave. That meant that these complications would be lessened. Now, Shakaar had to find out about this newly assembled army.

He dodged his way down the corridor, past guards and automatons, until he reached a large door. This was where all the commanding happened, Shakaar guessed. He turned into a cloud of dust, flew threw the keyhole, and reformed on the other side.

He then saw a table, and on it were several glasses, three bottles of wine and a large map of Arcanum. The table was surrounded by a group of men. One man in particular stood out (that man being Lord Haku). His chair was larger than the rest, and made of a darker wood. He also wore purple robes, and sported a small blue fez. He had a pipe in his mouth and sported a large, yet well kept grey beard. He began to speak…

Bricks and metal? In one room? Together? Odd (and let’s ignore the fact that given each brick is lined with sheet metal, how does the protagonist know they’re bricks in the first place? Surely they’re just looking at a nondescript metallic wall?). And yes - this character can fly “threw” a keyhole in the form of a cloud of dust.

Each par starts with the protagonist doing something. He spots the villain of the piece, who is already well-known to anyone who has read the story so far, but just to make sure he’s not misidentified as someone else in a robe and fez commanding an army from a secret island fortress (to note - there’s literally no-one else in the story who could even remotely match that description), I have point out it’s him in a bracketed aside. And happily enough, he is able to “sport” two things at the same time (to say he simply “has” a beard isn’t good enough for a kid who’s read Tolkien; if this shit is as important as I think it is, I need to give it an olde-worlde gloss).

Looking back at this and other examples, it’s clear I was someone who based their writing not on reading books, but on watching films. Everything is dynamic; it’s action, event and progression. There’s no need for psychological insight, telling metaphor or descriptions, because they’d get in the way of the robots, wizards and armies. And heck, at the end of the day, this stuff’s just written for the internet - it doesn’t need fancy-ass things like proper spelling or punctuation, because that’ll only get in the way of the creativity.

If that scene wasn’t exciting enough, here’s a later scene from the grand battle crowning the story (which, far from being a swift finale, probably took up a third of the total posts which made up the whole story).

A bullet hit Aratan right in the back. He spun round, to see whom his assailant was.

It was Haku, smiling.

Aratan looked shocked at him. “Yes, it is quite shocking isn’t it General Malay? But I knew you would attempt to befoul my plans at some point. You are a Dark Elf, and it is in your blood to do such things.” Haku fired once more. “My death will be your undoing, technological bastard!” cried Aratan. He fell forward, onto the side of the cabins.

Haku went back in, thinking that Aratan was well and truly dead, and there was no-one who could jeperdise his plan now. But he did not know how true the death cry of Aratan Malay would be.

Outside, Aratan’s arm slumped forwards, the Falchion still in it’s hand. It missed the baloon by a mere inch, but it struck the generator for the magnetic deflection shields. Now, the only defence which the Zepellin had was the magical Shields of Force, which were being maintained by the Tarantian Mages.

Like a lot of 15-year-olds, I wasn’t sure where you were supposed to use “whom” - but if it’s meant to be used anywhere, it’s clearly in stories which feature a dark elf trying to betray a Zeppelin-flying supervillain. All the moreso if said flying machine is being protected by “magnetic deflection shields”. Because at the end of the day, “whom” is just a posher and more dramatic version of “who”, denoting intelligence and high-mindedness on the part of the writer.

And if you’re going to use the word “jeopardise”, it’s not important that you spell it properly - the fact that you know the word and know when to use it is evidence enough of your genius.

I was the sort of kid for whom “Show - don’t tell” got in the way of telling stuff quickly. And after all, real creativity obviously resides in the ability to come up with a good story featuring lots of rapid twists and turns…and airships protected by magnetic inversion fields. Characters could easily be denoted by appearance and by name. You could spend paragraphs telling your reader what someone or something looked like and there was still every chance the version they imagined wouldn’t match the one you head in your head, anyway - so why bother? Far better to have every paragraph used in the service of moving the exciting plot along, preferably at breakneck speed.

As I say, I don’t look back with any particular shame at this work. There’s other things you can be embarrassed about from your teenage years, but for me, this isn’t one of them. While not a sterling example of craft and talent, it’s clearly a sincere creative exercise backed up by genuinely held instincts and feelings. And had I not gone through writing these things, I wouldn’t be the sort of person I am today. There’s every chance I might not have gone to study creative writing at university, nor journalism thereafter.

The original forums went offline a few years after I joined them, probably owing to a change in host servers or publishers - I forget which. It was an early lesson in how the world can sometimes change without much warning, and while a lot of us shifted over to the newer forums, it was never really the same. Especially as a lot of the earlier branding, which gave the forums a shonky, neo-Victorian grace, had disappeared to be replaced by the in-house branding of whoever was running the new forums. More sadly still, it looked as though our work, discussions and changes on the old forums had melted into the aether, without any hope of recoverability

Happily, some bright spark was able to dig out some of the old threads, and passed them on to the few of us who were interested in having another look at them (I had the sense to save them on the aforementioned hard drive).

After time, I even stopped visiting the follow-on forums. My tastes changed and I got interested in other things. I lost the disk, and so stopped playing the game - meaning I wasn’t revisiting the world which fired up all those synapses in the first place. It would take decades before the nostalgia cycle inevitably brought the game back to me, and with it the half-remembered sincerity and energies of my mid-teen self.

But looking back, it’s clear that I owe this game, and everything around it, a rather heady dose of gratitude. I was likely always destined to be a nerd, but the sort of nerd I became - and remain today - is rooted in the inspirations given to me by Arcanum and those who enjoyed it as much as I did.

I’m probably not rare in owing a fair bit of my personality to a game I played more than 20 years ago. As the web has evolved across various iterations of social media, there’s remained a handful of people from that original forum with whom I keep in touch. It’s not very often we talk about Arcanum, if at all, but we still all bear the stamp of that avant-garde nerdiness which brought us together.

In the intervening years, I’ve played a lot of other games. I’ve read stories far beyond what my 15-year-old self might have envisioned. I’ve even, remarkably enough, gone and done things in the real world, with all of its inherent strangeness and upheavals. But all of that owes something, if only in part, to a game my teenaged self started playing because he liked what he found on the demo. And, by extension, I owe a fair bit of thanks to teenaged Iwan, too.