Nick Thorpe’s 1998 - Part 1
Not only did Nick Thorpe enjoy the 90s and all the amazing games that decade contained, but he now makes a living writing about those and other vintage video games in the long running Retro Gamer magazine.
Retro Gamer has been in publication so long that games that were released during the first issue back in 2004 are now considered retro and covered in the latest issues of the same mag. Nick himself has spent nearly 10 years as a video game journalist, and many more years as an avid games player and collector (Nick is notorious for owning five Sega Master Systems, presumably in case four of them stop working in quick succession and he really, really wants to play an 8-bit Sega game when it happens).
Nick pictured with a recent copy of Retro Gamer, featuring a cover story on Sonic the Hedgehog 3!
But is it the best Sonic game?
Being a fan of Retro Gamer magazine (and a card-carrying subscriber), it was a real treat to get some time to chat with Nick about his experiences with the late nineties and in particular his thoughts on the games of 1998.
Before writing for Retro Gamer, Nick ran a website dedicated to 1998’s Dreamcast console; Nick tells me “So I started a Dreamcast website in 2003… Just as a sort of frustrated fan”.
A frustrated Sega fan? Say it ain’t so!
“You know, the [Dreamcast had] obviously been all but abandoned. I thought, well, there's all these brilliant games on this console, and there's still stuff coming out! Just, you know, not in Europe or North America. So I started importing Japanese games. Stuff like Border Down was I think the first one that got any sort of attention, because there were very few people writing about those games in English.”
Border Down was one of the many great Dreamcast games that sadly didn’t get a wide release.
“So I did that for a few years. And then kind of found that I couldn't really sustain a website on my own. While I was at university, I joined up with Arcade Heroes.” (Arcade Heroes (https://arcadeheroes.com/) is still going strong today). The site gained some notoriety when, during Nick’s time there, they accidentally broke the news of Sega Rally 3 ahead of embargo dates. The team received some “very hurried emails saying ‘Please take the story down! You can come to the official launch event, just please take the story down!’”. Accidental extortion for access to launch events, Nick has done it all. Arcade Heroes got quite a lot of exposure from the event, being linked back to by major sites like Kotaku and CVG. Sometime later in 2013, Nick would apply for a job at Retro Gamer magazine.
It was at Retro Gamer mag that Nick actually would take the reins for a regular feature that was partially the inspiration for this website; the ‘Back to the…’ section. Starting out written by Richard Burton with ‘Back to the Eighties’, the feature ran long enough to become ‘Back to the Nineties’, and finally ‘Back to the Noughties’ which is currently being written by Nick. In this section of the mag, Retro Gamer looks back, month by month, at prior decades of gaming. Not just discussing the games that got released that month, it covers trade shows, looks at the top sales charts for the period, and even has excerpts from magazines at the time. All of this backed up with some context of what was happening in the greater world at the time. You can probably see from this website’s own ‘The Year that Was 1998’ and ‘Gaming in 1998’ features that launched the site that I took a few notes from this running feature.
One of the countless ‘Back to the …’ articles Nick has under his belt. In this case he’s back in July 2003!
Looking at a hypothetical ‘Back to 1998’ column if Nick had to write it, he admits that it would be “very, very difficult” to try and narrow down the sheer amount of games that would have to be covered.
“I think that's something that I've always enjoyed doing (writing about previous eras of gaming). Because I build up very specific memories, sort of where I was at my time of life around the games that I was playing.”
In terms of what Nick was playing in 1998, it was actually a console that might have already been considered ‘Retro’; the Sega Mega Drive! “1998 was kind of a transitional year in my life in general, because it would have been the end of primary school and the start of secondary school. So that was a big adjustment. It was kind of a formative time when you’re really discovering what your gaming tastes are.”
“In terms of what I was actually playing most of that year, I would have actually been playing on the Mega Drive still.” Nick explains that he was generally a step behind the latest and greatest tech, and so lived out a modern collector’s dream of picking up some fantastic deals on Mega Drive in the summer of 1997.
“I spent most of 1998 Picking up older games, which were being cleared out by the video rental place. It was great. Like the first thing I picked up was Virtua Racing for four pounds. Which, given the game had launched at seventy pounds four years earlier, it felt like a bargain!”
While Nick was mostly playing on Sega’s 16-bit war-horse from the previous generation (the Mega Drive having launched way back in 1988 in Japan), he was still keeping up with the latest in gaming tech and software. Nick had a portal into the world of newer machines via a family friend.
“We had a fantastic family friend, a guy named Ron, who was very instrumental in forming my gaming tastes like he was the only adult that I knew who was really hardcore into games”. Ron introduced Nick to more obscure games like Gunstar Heroes, Probotector (AKA Contra), Light Crusader, and Story of Thor (AKA Beyond Oasis).”
Originally released in 1994, Story of Thor was still an excellent title in 1998. Or even in 2023. Do yourself a favour and check it out if you haven’t already!
Ron was also the owner of a PlayStation console, “And so I played the PlayStation whenever I saw him, and he would frequently give me back issues of games magazines to look over.”
As I’ve stated elsewhere on this site, magazines were the undisputed king of gaming news back in the late 90s and Nick would drink in news about PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn via mags like GamesMaster and CVG.
A BBQ in December seems like a strange event to attend for someone in the northern hemisphere, where the weather will undoubtedly be somewhere between moderately cold and ‘it hurts to be outside’. Nevertheless as England approached winter in 1998, Nick was at Ron’s family home for a BBQ. It was here that he received a stack of PlayStation games and demo discs from the family friend. A strange gift for someone who doesn’t actually, you know, own a PlayStation.
Well, it just so happened that the BBQ was held the day before Nick’s birthday, and although he didn’t cotton on to the fact, he was about to receive a PlayStation console of his own as a gift. Now pre-armed with a stack of magazines, games and demo discs, Nick was ready to dive into the 32-bit generation and experience some of 1998’s greatest titles.
Much like the vast majority of Mega Drive owners, it’s notable that Nick picked up a PlayStation rather than Sega’s own follow-up to the Mega Drive, the Sega Saturn. The unfortunate price point of Sega’s new console played a factor; “When [the Sega Saturn] launched, it was 400 pounds, which was 100 pounds more than the PlayStation.” Before he received his gift of a PlayStation console, Nick did consider getting a Saturn in the year 1998, after a compelling article in CVG magazine.
“There hadn't been a big Sonic game to attract me. But there were things like Virtua Fighter 2 or Virtua Cop 2 that I was familiar with from arcades, and I was reading good things about games like Burning Rangers. And there was a specific thing that CVG published in [the ‘Free Play’ section] where they sort of said, ‘you know, the Saturn had as many great games as the [Nintendo 64] this year. It's not really got a future, but it's cheap, and it's got the best games today”.
The Sega Saturn may have been approaching its twilight in 1998, but damn there were some amazing games still coming out for the system. (From CVG #202)
If it hadn’t been for Nick’s parents surprising him with a PlayStation, he might have gone down a different route. This also illustrates that while the Saturn didn’t have much of a future, it had a great library of games, and was even kicking goals in 1998 with some cracking titles like Burning Rangers and Deep Fear, or the western releases for games like Shining Force III.
So Nick became a PlayStation owner, but as discussed earlier, he was probably best known early on for his Dreamcast coverage. We had to talk about the amazing excitement in 1998 for the impending Dreamcast release. But more on that in part 2! Watch this space!
In Part 2 of the interview, we speak to Nick about the Sega Dreamcast, and the hype behind its launch in 1998!