Ah, yes. Nostalgia. Scary though it may be, I'm actually old enough to look back wistfully upon my childhood years. Equally scary is the fact that a lot the things I'll mention below are actually coming round again! So much so that links to the re-released videos are included here - see my BlackStar Affiliation page for details. For more obscure videos (and toys, music, games...!), try this site instead:

Computers, and their Games

I've been a computer owner since they first became available for home use. I've moved through the BBC B, BBC Master 128, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200 and finally to my current machine. But it's the BBCs that are relevant here. Those were the days of Repton, of Citadel, of Alien Dropout, and Cylon Attack, one of, if not the, first game I owned. Those were the days when you could type games into your machine out of magazines, when your operating system was on a chip and not on a CD-ROM.

The BBC B was the machine which gave birth to Elite, arguably the forerunner to the modern games in the genre. You flew a Cobra Mk III which you upgraded with more lasers, more missiles, ECMs and Energy Bombs by earning money through trading various goods between friendly and not so friendly star systems. And of course there were the Thargoids. Mysterious aliens with immensely powerful motherships that launched killer drones at you. All this in glorious wireframe, seethrough 3D. Along with its Novella, it captured the imagination of many young minds. Frontier was almost a worthy successor, but Elite will forever be the timeless classic.

The Amiga 500, along with the ill fated Atari ST, heralded the next generation of game biased home machines. I was planning on continuing my BBC line with an Archimedes, when I learnt of the Amiga, a machine half the price with better specs. Despite the waste of my BBC software, my A500 was a worthwhile purchase. Here was a machine with 4 times the memory of my BBC Master as standard, with Windows instead of Text as an interface. With it came many upgrades of BBC games, such as Elite and the less well known but equally involving Exile. Amongst my most played games were Captive and F-19 Stealth Fighter, the first real flight sim I had come across, and others like Thunderhawk and Armour Geddon. Arguably the greatest thing about the Amiga was the demo scene. Hundreds if not thousands of enthusiastic coders exploiting the machine's custom chips to the limit. The Amiga's sound and graphics were a quantum leap from anything that had gone before. It's a shame the Amiga didn't make it beyond the A1200 as the PC became cheap enough to compete. It was a truly capable multitasking machine, not unlike UNIX workstations in some respects, which encouraged efficient coding, and there was truly a feeling of belonging to a community of Amiga owners. May it rest in peace.

Since my last update, I've contributed some reviews of old Amiga games to this site put together by Angus Manwaring. A must-see site for any Amiga gaming veteran.

TV

Yup, the good old goggle box. I think Gerry Anderson shows are amongst my clearest memories from my childhood. Thunderbirds, Stingray, Terrahawks, and the more real life based series like UFO and in particular Space 1999. I still have two Eagle spaceships dating back almost 20 years now. Staying with the puppet theme, there was also Star Fleet which the magazine SFX covered a while back. I'd been searching the Web for references to it for ages and come up blank, although between myself and some others on various newsgroups we patched together the storyline. I've now taken matters into my own hands - hence these pages which have generated an incredible amount of interest from people the world over. Seriously!

Also loads of cartoons. Dogtanian and the Three Muskerhounds. The Sentinels. Transformers (I still have the movie on video!) on the Wacaday and Roland Rat shows, Mask, Centurions (Poweeeeeer Extreme treme treme), Thundercats (Cheetarah - babe!), Mysterious Cities of Gold, He-Man, and so the list goes on. The Transformers were definitely my favourites. There was also Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and Ulysses 31 on Channel 4. Very cool, and top music!

Of the normal human shows there was of course Doctor "run for the sofa" Who, the brilliant Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Battlestar Galactica, original Trek (which I don't think I was really into back then although I have an ancient Klingon Battlecruiser toy which I must have bought way back) and I even dimly remember Blake's Seven. And, of course, there were the ITV Saturday afternoon shows. The classic A-Team, later rolled into one man as MacGyver. Thousands of rounds of ammo fired, cars rolling over left right and centre and not a single scratch on anyone, just dazed expressions! No matter how many times I saw him in Trek, Dwight Schulz was always Howling Mad Murdock, never Barclay! Then there were my real favourites. Knight Rider. Streethawk. Airwolf. The ones that keep on resurfacing. I mean, there's a whole new series called Team Knight Rider now! Some things never die...

You may want to check out the Links page for more detailed reminisces...

Movies

Star Wars, Empire, Return, in the cinema first time round. The Never Ending Story. The Goonies. Flash Gordon. Labyrinth. Krull (my father loves that one!) Gremlins. Silent Running (vaguely). Battle Beyond the Stars. Crocodile Dundee. The Trek movies. The Superman movies. Mad Max. Original Godzilla movies. Batman. Back to the Future. ET (used to make me cry!) Ah yes, those were the days..!

Toys

Lego was big with me. I'd make the models once then scrap them for parts to make my own creations out of. One that I did leave intact was a huge Technic car, with working gears and stuff. That was an impressive beast. As I mentioned earlier I was a bit of a Transformers freak; read the comic, bought the toys, watched the cartoons. Of course, the transformation process was always cooler on the TV, and the damn missile launchers never really lived up to their name. Ah well.

I also had a few motorised bits and pieces. Remember Big Trak? Programmable trucky thing? Very cool. I also has some Robotix, not that that lasted long, and some, I think it was called Capella. Plastic bubbles with 6 connection points, with floats, some engine bubbles, wheels, fans... It was very cool because you could make its battery unit self contained and it was all water proof. Great fun in the bath. There was Polydron that I got from the Science Museum; triangular plastic pieces that linked together. I remember it was great because I could make the spaceships from Elite out of it! And of course I had the Star Wars toys in abundance. AT-AT, X Wing, B Wing, Y Wing, Darth's Tie Fighter. And of course they all got sold for a pittance years back. ARGH. Apart from 3 small die-cast models of the Twin Pod, Slave 1 and a Snowspeeder, that is. Ah well. I hate to think what they'd be worth now. I mean, you buy Star Wars stuff in antique shops these days! Oh, yeah, had a remote controlled Knight Rider car. Very cool. Used to make it do very cool skids on the pond when it was frozen over! What I really wanted was a remote control helicopter that I'd seen in Hamleys, but that wasn't going to happen ;-)

I could probably ramble on for ages. I hope that some of the above has stirred fond memories for someone out there...

Andy Thomas

Last updated 31 January 2002