1999 was a dark period of my youth: my parents had divorced, and that comfortable over-protective bubble of life I had occupied was now absolutely and irretrievably gone. I began a spiral of misery, self-loathing and selfishness that can only be summed up by one of my more serious gaming regrets…

I Sold My N64 for Booze Money.

Alright, so I was technically still only 16 and I shouldn’t have been drinking. But my local town was blighted by a large number of Pubs and bars that just never bothered to ask for ID, the bartenders almost mocking in their welcome of so many underage drinkers, beckoning us with smiles and whispered promises that no-one would be calling the police if we stayed quiet.

My town was also blighted by another den of iniquity and whispered promises…

The Trader.

Yes, that was its name. The Trader was unique among shops in the town in that it had bars over the windows, a security door, an outer grille and a large shutter covering both. It occupied a space behind a seedy set of public toilets a few moments’ walk from the High Street and was therefore virtually devoid of foot traffic. Yet somehow, this place with its broken down-exterior was almost always full, usually of school kids. Why?

 Because they would give you money for your old things.

The unshaven proprietor, often garbed in a faded blue and yellow Hawaiian shirt wouldn’t ask questions, wouldn’t ask for parents’ permission and wouldn’t give you a fair price. But virtually any electronics from the last decade were exchangeable for cash. It was almost criminal to see the Walkman you traded in for a mere five pounds the week before now being offered on sale for four times the price,. And talking of criminal, I remember one instance when I wondered into The Trader not really looking for anything in particular to find that a sobbing woman and a pair of local policeman were standing in front of the unshaven proprietor, who had turned an unhealthy shade of white as the tearful woman pointed out items on sale in the shop that had been stolen from her home a few nights before. A particularly gaudy orange and yellow dotted lamp struck my eye and I knew that she could not have been lying, as no-one in their right mind would claim to own such a a hideous piece of home décor, unless it was truly theirs.

About a month later, The Trader closed down, but not before I had sold my N64 and all its games for a whopping 80 pounds. Considering I had bought the unit and a single game for 180 pounds only two years prior, I should have asked for more. Yet to tell the truth, I had fallen out of love with gaming: it signified a part of my youth that with my familial upheavals was now irretrievably lost. Besides, I had only kept two games after the last sell-off. There was only so much ISS 98 and Extreme G one could stomach, after all.

It would not be until 2002 that I again picked up a controller when I purchased my Gamecube at midnight on its first day of sale. And in that time I missed a lot of gaming greats. If you have read my previous column, then you would know it was unlikely that I would have picked up Majora’s Mask anyway, but at the time I still felt the loss. Gone too was the opportunity to play some of the highest-acclaimed games of the N64 era: Perfect Dark, Paper Mario, Donkey Kong 64, Smash Bros. and the sequel to one of my favourite game to this very day, Banjo Tooie.

Such was my disconnect from gaming as a whole that I completely missed the rise and fall of the Dreamcast, the heady success of the PSOne and even the debut of the PS2. Arguably though, I was more interested in drinking and the lady-types than video games, though for some reason I couldn’t get enough of bad 90’s sci-fi in the form of DS9 and SG-1, so I never truly lost the inner geek.

What this period of games taught me was that all joy is fleeting: I recall the joy when my N64 arrived; the gorgeous sounds of the title screen Waverace 64 playing in the background when I called my bestie to gloat; that first sense of absolute wonder when I played Banjo Kazooie for the first time… those things, however, became meaningless in the face of my changing life and the need in some ways to “grow up”. I would call these my “wilderness years” in terms of my personal video gaming history, but in truth, they were more like my “Didn’t have any damn money for games” years. Which admittedly doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I missed out on three years’ worth of video gaming to enjoy probably less than three weeks’ worth of drinking money… if that doesn’t count as a gaming regret, I really don’t know what does.