My Most Expensive Video Game

No, It’s not Nintendo World Championships: Gold Edition or a sealed copy of Shadow of the Colossus, but there’s still a twist – the video game I spent the most on in my entire life was one I didn’t technically own. You see, I had only just barely justified to my parents that I should own a video game console by the age of ten, and this was only because of one kid who lived around the corner from me getting one.

Just like any child desperate for interactive video game based entertainment I used this as reasoning that if he could handle one, I could as well – it wasn’t as if I was going to get hooked on them for the rest of my foreseeable life…  ahem. Once I was given my beautiful Playstation, though, I only had two games: Gex – Deep Cover Gecko and Fifa ’98. Neither really supplied good re-playability and I was ten, so if I were to save my £2.50 pocket money a week it’d take me three months to afford just one game which could easily suck eggs. This lead me to suggesting to my friend around the corner that he and I both chip in and rent a new game each week from Blockbusters. He had the princely sum of £3.50 a week, so with our £6 combined we could rent two games a week at £3 a pop. I liked maths as a kid – it did not last into my current stage in life.

He was just as good at maths and concurred that my plan made excellent sense in his book. This lead us to walking to Blockbuster that next available Saturday and renting the first game cover which we thought looked cool: Warhawk. Even with the PS3 version now being around, most people still aren’t aware there was an original version on the Playstation, so imagine how little we’d heard about it at the time. It had planes, it had missiles, it had explosions and the box was made of cardboard… CARDBOARD! When you’re ten and you see a cardboard box among a sea of black plastic cases you’re going to get excited. The clincher was when he mentioned that it reminded him of the old PC game boxes (you know, those ridiculously huge ones from back in the day?) that we used to play when we were six. I was sold, we rented Warhawk.

The game, upon reflection now, was not the greatest of all games which we could have chosen. We dabbled in Bomberman the week after, and I recall we tried ‘Lifeforce Tenka’ after trying it on the original demo disc, but after the first month or so we decided that Warhawk was the best we’d found that far and rented it for a second time. This was our mistake. My friend and I did this every week the entire time we both owned a Playstation as our primary console, three years, and quickly decided to start renting the game twice a week instead of just for the weekends. I’ve now recently worked out that: three years = 156 weeks/ Minus 8 weeks a year for Christmas, holidays, illnesses where we didn’t get a chance, etc. = 132 weeks. 132 x £6 = £792. This is of course assuming the rental price didn’t change, but I know it did – I just can’t remember by how much the price was, it went up though! My friend and I, combined, spent £792 on a single copy of the game, which we didn’t own.

That was more than I’d spent on Command & Conquer: Retaliation! And at least that game had two discs (one each) and system link (and therefore multiplayer!) which easily burned at least eight hours whenever we played it together. Which is stunning considering our setup consisted of him dragging his console to mine, balancing a TV on an old chair I had, pointing it away from my screen and then sitting him on a cushion on the floor which he stole off the chair I was using!

I was only pondering this because it was only today that I finally bought myself a copy of Warhawk on the Playstation 3. I’d been putting it off as I’ve been panicked that it may destroy all the memories which I had of it before, but when I over analysed it I decided that the original ‘Warhawk’ was actually pretty crappy. It was only ever fun because of the madness that my friend and I had actually dedicated a large chunk of our childhood to renting that game over and over together. It was the awful graphics, the near impossible level trying to fly through the battleship before it exploded, and our faithful battle cry every time we locked on a target and fired a barrage of missiles to the tune of a perfectly synced “SWARMERS AWAY!”.

I expect Warhawk on the PS3 will likely suck. In fact, I know in comparison, it’s not going to even come close to the original. However, what I do love is that the entire time I’m going to be playing it I’ll be recalling the fact that on my shelf, tucked between Spyro The Dragon and Crash Bandicoot, in a little cardboard box is a copy of Warhawk. The original, the same we rented for all those years, the copy which cost me £4.99 when my local Blockbuster sold all its PS1 stock in favour of PS2 games. The copy that in total took £796.99 out of mine and my friend’s wallet. My favourite part of the whole story, though? That guy, my Warhawk buddy from all those years gone by, still lives around the corner from me, and we’re still good friends. I’m thinking this Summer should be a nostalgic one…