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Frank Meeuwsen wrote about the classic children's movie The Neverending Story ¹ and noted that it influenced the, equally classic, arcade game Space Harrier.

Reading his post I was immediately transported back to my teens spending all my time (and money) in the arcades.

I grew up on The Isle of Wight having moved there from South East London when I was 6. With a relatively small populations and tourism dominating the local economy, like other typical sea-side destinations, there was very little for local kids to do — especially during 'off season' from October to April. That meant we usually spent most of our time in the arcades.

Not to blow my own trumpet, I was good at video games. Very good. I guess that what comes from virtually living in the arcades. During school holidays and at weekends I would leave the house in the morning, spend all day there with my friends, and come home in the evening. A classic 80's misspent youth. All this time playing meant I was the best at a lot of classic games like Gauntlet, 1942, Tron, R-Type and others.

I remember when Space Harrier came out – there were two main arcades we used to play games in and only one of them had it. The moving cockpit-style cabinet was so cool that everyone wanted to play it and the queues would get quite long. They were usually waiting for me! 🤣

It didn't take long for me to finish the game after which it became about achieving perfection: getting as high a score as possible and finishing it without losing a life. Achievement unlocked!

As with many games of the time, the difficulty could be altered by changing dip switches. The arcade owner would regularly call in an engineer from the company supplying the games to tweak the difficulty. Whenever the engineer was in the owner used to call me over to test the game:

Owner: we've made it harder

Me: finished it...

Owner: we've tweaked it again

Me: finished it...

Owner: it's as hard as it can go!

Me: finished it...

Owner: I give up

At the other arcade on Sandown Pier, decisions were made on whether to keep new games based on how quickly they could be completed. If a game was too easy the kids would get bored and stop playing meaning the arcade wouldn't earn any money off it.

I remember when a new game was brought in called Darius – a huge upright cabinet that was three times wider than a normal game. It had three screens side by side, which appeared seamlessly joined because you actually looked at a reflection of them – the angle of the mirrors merged the screens together making it seem like a single wide display.

Darius was great, I loved it and the music was fantastic. The only problem was that I finished it three days. Yep, three days! The arcade owner said he wasn't going to keep the game if it was that easy. He actually kept it around for a while as others couldn't finish it so I think it earned enough to warrant it. 😉

Those were the days, when playability was the most important thing about a game. The limitations on graphics and audio technology in the 80's meant that you couldn't disguise poor game play with flashy visuals.

Someone else has started testing hyblog, my hybrid blogging system, but found a number of problems with it. Nothing has changed with the code since a couple of others installed it (as far as i can recall) so I'm not sure what's going on.

I did a test install and, sure enough, there were issues – a number of them.

I've, therefore, been doing a re-write as it appears the code was making far too many assumptions about installation and folder path, etc. A couple of test installs under different scenarios seem to be okay so 🤞

hyblog was only ever intended as an experiment but it's flattering people want to try it. As such, it should at least work.