Joy

Sitting on a blue couch in Coventry, thinking about a tattoo parlour in Exeter.

Funny how the more time I spend on music, the more it makes me want to do other things. Except that I suppose it isn’t. Music is meant to have that effect on people. So it makes sense that it has that effect on me, my own captive audience.

The last time we visited said tattoo parlour was in December 2001, around 23½ years ago. It wasn’t a tattoo parlour then - it was a retro games shop. By the ages of 16 and 14, my brother and I had spent £345.00 at this shop, with only 11 Saturn games and a memory cartridge to show for it. Now, of course, that collection is worth considerably more. More importantly, though, my brother and I got hundreds of hours of enjoyment from those games. It would be a little sad to think that today, people would seemingly rather spend their money on beautifying themselves, rather than indulge in the creative act of retro gaming. But thinking about it, that isn’t true - it’s just that competition from online retailers has made it all but impossible for shops like I.T. Games to survive. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s progress, in one sense of the word. All the same, I still remember playing Metal Slug on the AVS machine they had in the corner, thanks to a generous soul who gave me his last credit. One blast to end them all!

That was the joy of I.T. Games - you never knew what you would find there. You also had the very real experience of going to a shop in a town about 50 miles away, and of being surprised to find a physical copy of a game you had read about in a physical magazine there inside a glass cabinet, or stacked neatly on a shelf, for you to physically hold, open, examine, and, potentially, buy. For a teenage me, this was intoxicating. I don’t have this kind of experience as an adult, but get vague pretensions of it when viewing Locke and England or Warwick Auctions catalogues. Come the auction proper, my heart racing, my finger hovers nervously over the “BID NOW” button - but the overall sensation is akin to a battle between guilt and excitement. There, that word, “guilt”. I never felt that at I.T. Games. 

Guilt because I have so much of this stuff already, but very rarely play any of it. On eBay, I’ve sold thousands of pounds’ worth over the last few years, but have barely scratched the surface of our vast collection. The reason it’s hard to part with it is because I don’t really want to or need to.

Joy. That is what I felt at I.T. Games.

I once read in Mari Kondo’s book “Spark Joy” that one of her clients, when asked to say which of her possessions made her feel joy, replied that she didn’t know what “joy” felt like. I must now confess to thinking about this passage a while back, and not feeling sure that I knew, either. But I do. It was a long time ago, but I remember!

Phew!