Requiem for a Dreamcast: The Sad Demise of Game

The imminent closure of the computer game retailers Game, and its sister shop Gamestation, marks the end of an era for many of us. (Not that anyone actually buys stuff from there any more, of course. If they did, Game Group might have been able to stump up the £21m in rent money it needed to keep itself out of administration.) The tragedy is not the demise of the beast itself, but the death of the dreams that lied within it. For a pre-teen it was a shop full of intrigue; the games at the front and the heavy duty apparatus at the back. The Tolstoyian cheat code books, memory cards the size of 20 decks and the crappy off-brand controllers that your asshole cousin made you use whenever you went to his for tea.

And whilst it won't have the kind of negative practical impact the death of Woolworths did (where do you buy light bulbs now?), there's still a tragedy to it. I know this is probably gonna make me sound like the worst kind of "CDs just aren't the same" 6 Music puritan, but I guess that's a plate of shit I'm just gonna have to eat: For me, Game and Gamestation harked back to a different time. A pre-internet time when computer games weren't about socialising, they were about solitary escape. You didn't play as some weird avatar version of yourself that you wanted to project to the watching world, you closed the curtains and you became somebody else. If you did play against friends, you did so together as masters of a conquered game – 'Look at us,' we told ourselves, 'we're a gang of gamer maestros, staying up all night learning how to strafe properly on Turok 2, pausing only to stare at Eurotrash.'

I suppose there's the argument that games are more interactive these days. But which elements of the hardcore gaming community are worth interacting with, exactly? The virginal racists pwning "n00bs" and "fags" on CoD all night? Every time I see someone playing those games, I can't help but think they're probably listening to Trivium in a basement flat in Nebraska, biding their time before they have to go and sign the sex offenders register again. How about the sprawling game-worlds nerds like to go wandering around in? The dirty influence of fantasy lit looms large in modern video games, IMO. Sometimes you just have to trust a narrative, otherwise all novels would be like those fantasy books called things like "Citadel Of Chaos" where you need a dice to get past the first chapter.

It may have been swept under the rug of our history like Dresden and the continued existence of A Question of Sport, but there was something fascinating about suburban Britain in the early 00s. Retroactively revolting, yes, but fascinating all the same – somehow, for a brief moment, Jacksonville, Florida seemed to have become the youth culture epicentre of the planet. It was the age when Carson Daly could have run for President, when The Marshall Mathers LP was our Catcher In The Rye, when those kids in "People = Shit" hoodies seemed like the Baader-Meinhof group. And Game, the wheezing old man of the British high street (RIP), was possibly the last remnant of this. If I could choose a game to sum up this era, I'd choose Duke Nukem: Land Of The Babes.

Thanks to word-of-mouth testimonials from our older brothers, its predecessor, Duke Nukem 3D was big news to my friends and I in post-millennial Kingston. Needless to say, the game couldn't live up to its mythology – in fact, it seemed determined to piss all over it. With his blonde flat-top and bright red vest, the Duke looked more like a member of Erasure than somebody who spent most of their time lost in a "land of the babes". The dialogue was a let-down, too: supposedly the rawest shit around, in actuality it sounded like Carry On. So, like a lot of things about the early 00s, it sucked the big one, but in hindsight it did at least have a kind of formative quality to it, setting the precedent for further disappointments in the adult world. Playing Land Of The Babes prepared me for almost every club I've ever been to; diabolical music, two-dimensional women in bikinis and 'roid rage pricks in vests.

Something that bore little resemblance to the adult world, the real world or any other world I've ever encountered was Chris Kamara's Street Soccer. Instead of playing football at the San Siro or San Mamés, the game endorsed by the man who would become the walking meme of British football gave you a ball and plonked you down in Death Valley or on Easter Island. Instead of stumping up the cash so they could use the names of real players, they instead fell back on a series of crude national stereotypes. And when I say stereotypes, I mean racism.

The Scottish players all look like angry, drunk lions in dresses. When you play as Germany and score a goal, the word "Wunderbar!" flashes up on the screen. However, the supervisory design role that Kamara presumably took in the game's production really comes into its own when you look at the female characters. It seems that Kamara has projected his own twisted Pygmalion fantasies onto them, shaping them all like Reggaeton versions of Christina Hendricks:

Chris Kamara's Street Soccer may have been utter shit, but to shoehorn in a Gore Vidal quote: "Shit has its own integrity." It might not have earned Sepp Blatter any money or been blessed with a soundtrack of Vaccines B-sides, but at least Street Soccer was trying something different, whereas now you have swathes of FIFA copycats that will never be as good as FIFA. Where are those strange, off-kilter games going to exist now? Game was full of them: titles that should have been drowned in the bargain box at birth, the kind you wouldn't donate to a Romanian orphanage. They were the Angus Steakhouses of video games, always around but you never met anybody who'd experienced them. Either they were the work of some kind of genius auteur not appreciated in his own time, or a front for an international heroin cartel.

With Game's passing, this haven for a fringe culture has ceased to exist in the physical world, and the pursuit of buying games has now largely been consigned to the net. It's hard to ascertain what caused this: Did video games change, or did we? I think the answer is a bit of both. As gaming and the internet became things that weren't just consigned to shy kids, so gaming and the internet changed to meet the influx of normos more interested in the likes of Farmville and The Sims, which aren't about brave new worlds at all, just shitty extensions of our current one. Since the dawn of the industry computer games were accused of ruining kids' imaginations. But at an age when I was too young to watch anything other than Armageddon and too easily bored to read anything other than the Official PlayStation Magazine, video games were an important stimulant for my inner eye. I wish I could say I was one of those kids who read One Hundred Years Of Solitude when I was 12, and no doubt I would be a better person if I had. But I did unlock the Area 51 level in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and that's something at least.

So, so long, Game. Thanks for pissing away all my pocket money, you useless pricks.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive