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Before I kick off proper, one thing I'd like to stress is that I really enjoy conversing with readers, or “users” as you're now known in these fancy future internet times. It's something I've done for years - as anyone who read my old magazines will attest to - and the wonders of the internet now enables it on a level I'd previously never have dreamed of. So, to get to the point, I read the comments posted here, and am genuinely interested in hearing what you have to say, be it feedback, observations, questions of whatever. Point is - let's talk! Whether it's helping you understand the mysteries of the American market, or just talking about games of yore, I'd love to make this weekly article a bit more of an interactive thing where we can chat and share ideas, and a little less of one-way dialog/promo tool for USgamer.Any-hoo. Onto this week's exciting installment of “what's happening in the good ol' You Ess of Ay”. Or not. Actually, before I get to that - earlier this week I realized that exactly 30 years ago I was unwrapping Manic Miner on my ZX Spectrum for the first time, and finessing my wobbly tape deck's head azimuth alignment with a screwdriver so the game would hopefully load.
The point of me mentioning Manic Miner is because I can say it here, and people know exactly what I'm talking about. Mention it to 99.9% of Americans, and they draw a blank. This is because while us Brits were enjoying the delights of Manic Miner and other such games of the emergent British 8-bit micro computer market of the mid-early-to-mid 80s, Americans were watching their games industry collapse in on itself under the weight of its own effluence. Yeah, 30 years ago, the great US Gaming Crash of '83 was well underway, caused by an over-saturated market that had no less than 12 (count 'em) different consoles available at the time, and was being hideously over-supplied by shovelware stinkers like ET: The Extra Terrestrial, and millions of copies of the crappiest version of Pac-Man known to mankind.
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