Weekends in Hell

Hell - a cyberpunk thriller and a really unusual game - both then and now.

Characters like Gideon Ashante and the demons Asmodeus and Mr Beautiful stick in the mind to this day. There might have been a Sanguinarius somewhere there, too.

When I was a kid, my oldest cousin used to come and stay with us during the week. He actually lived in Farnham, but he had a contract at Pfizer, and as we lived in a large, rambling house in Ramsgate, it made sense for him to stay over while he was working on site.

This was an odd situation for me. After growing up with no male role model (my dad wasn’t around, and I was an only child raised by my mother and grandmother), it was a bit strange having another guy in the house, especially since this particular guy felt very much like an older brother at the time. We shared a lot of the same interests: he had an amazing sense of humour, read funny fantasy books and had even given me his first computer (a Dragon 32 that became my gateway drug to the Commodores I ended up loving so much, growing up).

So, suddenly, there’s a guy in the house who brings with him a really powerful - at the time - PC and a load of cool clothes. Occasionally, he even stays over at weekends and brings the odd friend with him, and they spend the occasional night drinking down at Nero’s Nightclub on the seafront (though it might have been called First Impressions at the time).

In any case, my cousin isn’t the problem: the problem is his computer. During his stays with us, he shows me some of the games he’s playing, and they’re literally a world away from the sort of stuff I’m messing around with on my clunk of a computer.

Sometime around 1994, when I was either fifteen or sixteen, he showed me this really odd game called Hell. It was a cyberpunk thriller starring Dennis Hopper and a few other big names doing voice roles, and I remember being absolutely enthralled by it….

…enthralled to the point where, on more than one occasion, I would sneak up to his room and attempt to hack into his computer during the weekends when he went back home to Farnham. At first, I was too scared to make multiple guesses at the passwords because I was convinced that the computer would tell him that I’d been trying to get into it when he finally logged back in (yes, I know, but I was fifteen and cybersecurity was very different then). In any case, at some point, I actually got into the computer and into the game…and as I’m no hacker, I can only assume that my cousin had at some level guessed what was happening and decided to let me play it out of pity. Either that or he’d decided that he lived with an entirely trustworthy family and had taken his passwords off from a heightened sense of personal safety.

In any case, I went back to play Hell recently and discovered that it’s arguably the worst game in the history of civilisation. In fact, it’s so bad that it’s borderline unplayable: the characters are unconvincing, the storyline is confusing, the plot arcs are contrived, and the graphics are painful…and yet….

…and yet…

…it still had some of the magic about it.

The bittersweet truth about childhood nostalgia is that you can never go back, and it’s often shocking how bad the truly great things were when we re-explore them now …but - quite often - the magic is still there. It’s why I can watch the CITV fantasy gameshow Knightmare and pretend I don’t know that it’s just a kid with a box over his head wandering around in a big empty garage with a few crappy props on hand.

Nevertheless, it turns out that Hell….really is a punishment.