Hot news just in from Christmas ’93 now as we don our retrospective glasses of Grig once more, leaving behind all the modern day gaming-tomfoolery and letting it wallow in it’s quagmire of deserved woe! Prompted by a recent stumbling over both an original Sega ad and my drawn-from-memory adaptation of that very commercial, we have a closer look at these segments from a time long forgotten – and as once seen gracing the mighty pages of our old fanzine, CAOS magazine!
These items are practically relics from a bygone era when not only were Sega in some form of meaningful business, but it was also a time when three young amigo’s named Ben, Matt and Wayne pooled their creative resources into creating the aforementioned entertainment/videogame magazine, the like of which the world had never seen before! Mostly because it had a target readership of about 6 girls who neither cared about videogames, nor its writers – or in other words, us. But that wasn’t enough to deter our budding journalistic instincts, no siree!
Whilst the magazines humble beginnings were never meant to amount to anything other than fun (and making Wayne go to get us food – shop boy!), within a couple of issues the proverbial ploop was starting to hit the fan, and as time dragged on, it’s fair to say that the magazine had started to become a paper-based war zone as it’s various contributors started to turn against each other. It was soon recognised to be an act of war if a fellow writer drew characters or wrote articles that had any resemblance to anyone else on the non-existent payroll. It was probably around the time that each of our different magazine segments started to contain disclaimers stating that fellow writers were the carriers of the worst kind of sexual diseases known to man, that the wheezing magazine started to roll over and die a painful death. And as Wayne signed off in aggressive style with an unpublished 130-page assault on his soon to be former journalistic buddies, it was fair to say that the days of CAOS were numbered. But what a ride!
The Grig meets Techno, yesterday.
However, from the ashes of the battle, there were still a few rays of light that emanated from the gloom. Still a few shards of diamond in a hailstorm of woe (what the heck am I going on about?!). Still a few Imodium-infused solids in a sea of diarrhoea (Toilet humour? Fail). For every ten pages of insults, there was maybe one hilarious paragraph of class. For every ten mentions of someone having V.D, there was perhaps one quality joke. And for every tenth promise to Wayne that next time someone else would go to the shop, there was one comic strip of excellence that would transcend the years!
Alas, what I am posting below is not one of them, but hope you enjoyed the irrelevant history lesson!
What we have here are drawings by my 13 year-old self. Yes, they are rubbish – I actually remember the only reason I even made this at all was because I thought the Sega Pirate TV logo I did was ok and didn’t want to waste it, but I digress. Somehow my Sega-obsessed brain managed to capture almost an entire Sega advert despite only seeing it about two or three times at most. However, with the advent of modern computers and the bottomless pit of resources that is the Internet, I can now revisit that which I once could only ever view by the feeble power of my very own grey-matter! Hit that button to see how close my ad really was!
So there you have it. Naturally I doubt any of my fellow classmates of the era were spending their evenings whittling away the hours with such endeavours of awesomeness as this. They were probably all doing stupid real schoolwork or something. And while those very people and their likeminded kin may proclaim a youth misspent, or perhaps just call me another kid of the MTV generation with a head filled up with too much nonsense, I say pah! I spit at thee naysayer! Because if anyone fails to realise otherwise – to be this good takes ages. To be this good takes Sega!
literally every time i say anything even vaguely similar to the phrase “this is the end”, my brain MAKES me say “and THIS is the other end… MEGA CD!”
it’s a psychological impairment