Fact >= Fiction: Nostalgia, the brilliance of the 1980s/early 1990s

Hello all

I trust everyone is well?

In most last blog I talked about the origins of my love of rock music and how I had gone to watch Blink 182 in concert, two days after that I went to see my friend Jenna (and her 11 month year old daughter, Niamh), who I hadn't seen since 2001. Out of all my friends, I have known Jenna the longest after we met when we were four years old and we have always got on. Even though we were in considerably different groups at various schools, we have never had a falling out and maybe that's because I don't see her that often.

It got me thinking about the old days and how awesome things used to be back in the day. I personally think that the early part of the 1980s was the best time to be born in the modern generations. At age 27 I have already lived in two millenniums and four different decades, I grew up as computer systems evolved. I grew up with the Atari, Amiga, Megadrive and all the other little systems that the youngsters of today know precisely nothing about. I feel sorry for modern kids as they don't know of games from when there was more than it simply looking stunning, it was about the storyline, characters, value, and so much more, whereas now it's all about looks.

Then there's not to forget as times moved on and things started to look a lot better, it seems almost strange looking at them now because they have dated really badly, but at the time they were state of the art and looked amazing, which again I think is one of the reasons I pity the youngsters of today, they will generally look at the games that were around then and automatically write them off because they look terrible.

Here is a selection of some of my favourite computer games during my youth

COWBOY/OUTLAW

QUITE POSSIBLY THE FIRST GAME I EVER PLAYED

RELEASED IN THE MID 1980S

RAINBOW ISLANDS

I USED TO BE BLOODY AWESOME AT THIS GAME

RELEASED IN THE 1980S

THE CURSE OF MONKEY ISLAND

MY DAD BOUGHT ME A BRAND NEW COMPUTER SPECIFICALLY TO PLAY THIS GAME AS THE OLD ONE WAS ONLY CAPABLE OF HOLDING 12MB WORTH OF INFORMATION

RELEASED IN 1997

RESIDENT EVIL

MY BROTHER GAVE ME THIS AND WITHIN TWO HOURS I GOT FURTHER THAN HE EVER HAD. IT'S THE ONLY RESIDENT EVIL GAME THAT I HAVE NEVER COMPLETED.

RELEASED IN 1996

POPULOUS THE BEGINNING

ONE OF THE FEW GAMES I CAN PLAY OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

RELEASED IN THE LATE 1990S

Music was also a lot better back then. Now you know that there is a heavy chance that the voice on the radio has been touched up by a computer so much that it probably sounds nothing like that originally came out of the mouth. 20 years ago you knew that it was the case that the person could genuinely sing and there were some very unique voices back then, Limahl, Pet Shop Boys, Phil Oakley and many others. It's just a shame now that so many artists can't actually sing, and whilst I hate the X-Factor, I do respect that they can seemingly sing live.

It's the same with children's TV shows. I look at the TV shows when I grew up and still watch one or two of them today, not on a regular basis though. Doing cartoons these days is easy because you know they've done most of it on a computer, but back in the late 80s/early 90s, they didn't have that. You knew that what you were watching took a hell of a lot of time and effort to do.

Some of the shows were epic as well, or at least had epic introductions. You look now and there's nothing that compares in terms of first time impact than Visionaries, Mysterious Cities of Gold, and many others that I could name.

Because I have a fair few friends with children now, I see them and their kids on a regular basis and occasionally I go around and they are watching the modern day TV shows, and dear lord do they look awesome. It seems to be just a case of making sure that it's more colourful than anything else on TV and just letting the script-writers get away with murder.

And finally, talking of nostalgia, a lot of my favourite movies came out towards the late 1980s/early 90s and they were films that were fun. You could just sit and watch them, they could make you laugh, cry, get angry or smile, they just had everything, and there were very few special effects like there are in films today. You used to look at these films and wonder how they managed to execute what they did, whereas now you're like "oh, it's just a computer".

Iconic scenes from Willow, The Thing, The Fly and many others were made to look realistic and achieved it, without that much involvement from anything else other than make up and prosthetics. You knew that someone took time and care with all of these, rather than just letting a computer do most of the work.

FROM "WILLOW" - THE ARMY ARE TRANSFORMED INTO PIGS

RELEASED IN 1988

FROM "THE THING"

RELEASED IN THE EARLY 1980S

FROM "THE FLY" - THE FINAL PART OF JEFF GOLDBLUM'S TRANSFORMATION

RELEASED IN 1986ish

It does make me wonder if, in 20 years, the youngsters will look back on the films, games and tv shows of today and feel about them how I feel about stuff from my youth. It also makes me wonder if people who were from the generation before mine, feel about my generation like I do about the generation after me?

As I say, I feel lucky to have been born in the 1980s and to have experienced these things, watching them grow, rather than them already being here waiting for me when I was born.

To end this blog, I'm going to share some other points of nostalgia from my youth, with some more films and games that I enjoyed that wouldn't be allowed to be sold these days.

THEME HOSPITAL - HORRENDOUSLY ADDICTIVE