Sammy's PS1 Memories | Push Square

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It’s funny how you don’t realise the significance of things until you look back on them. On a grungy Tuesday in the mid-90s, I was on a train to Birmingham with my family. Hopping on the whirring Class 323s was a regular occurrence for us in those days, as Brum – grimy as it was in that era – was our nearest city.

I was most excited to visit the Toys ‘R’ Us, as they always had good Transformers toys in store. But the real purpose of the visit was to attend some kind of PS1 community event in the upstairs of an HMV; I can picture the scene but I couldn’t tell you exactly what street that shop was on today. It definitely doesn’t exist anymore. (In fact, ironically, HMV’s flagship store is now located where the aforementioned Toys ‘R’ Us once was.)

On the inside, loud dance music was playing and I distinctly remember a giant projector beaming WipEout and Ridge Racer onto a dark wall. There was a table furnished with party snacks and Pepsi bottles which you were supposed to help yourself to. Me, under 10 at the time and for some reason unsupervised, somehow managed to spill my drink all over the carpet. My Dad told me to just pretend it hadn’t happened; apologies to anyone cleaning that night.

Having discussed this with family earlier this week, I had wondered whether I’d simply dreamt about this event and misplaced it in my mind. Apparently, no, it really happened. We’re still not entirely sure why or how we got invited, but that’s my earliest memory of the PS1.

I think I probably did get a new Transformers figurine from Toys ‘R’ Us that same day, and I was almost certainly more excited about it than the cutting-edge PS1 games I’d just seen on a projector screen.

Even though we weren’t particularly well off growing up, I was always extremely lucky in that video games were plentiful in our household. We had tons of Super Nintendo and SEGA Mega Drive cartridges, and even a catalogue of Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum titles. I grew up playing all of these, and they helped