The Games of a Lifetime

If you talk to me about computers for more than a few minutes, I’ll inevitably bring up the C64. A key machine from my childhood, it opened up an entire a world for me. Together with my sibling and my father, it’s where I played games for countless hours, typed in BASIC programs, and discovered the world of bulletin board systems.

In the 1980s, print magazines were vitally important as a guide. I was not in the UK, so I did not hear of Zzap!64 until much later. But in the British C64 community, it was legendary for its unvarnished and honest reviews, written by gamers for gamers. And with it, Julian “Jaz” Rignall started his own legend as a games journalist.

Before landing his poorly paid dream job, teenage Jaz made a name for himself by winning arcade tournaments in the early 1980s, racking up unthinkable scores that required absurdly fast reflexes and exploits of a machine’s weaknesses. The three letter nickname is from the high-score tables.

Games journalism at that time was often still a stuffy business: impeccable prose by writers who had no idea what made games fun. When Chris Anderson (who later founded IGN) looked for gamers who could help him launch a C64 magazine that would do things differently, Jaz made the list.

The years Jaz worked at Zzap!64 and, later, Mean Machines are the heart of his games-centric memoir “Games of a Lifetime”. The book inspired me to make my way through old editions of Zzap!64 on my tablet. It’s a fun read—full of wacky illustrations of reviewer reactions to the games, a dedicated section for interactive fiction and RPGs, all in a casual writing style reflecting the young audience.

In addition to many beautiful screenshots, “The Games of a Lifetime” also features a few select photos from the author’s life that relate to the history of games or the magazines he wrote for. (Own photo. License: CC-BY-SA.)

But Jaz is a lifetime gamer, and the book extends all the way into the 2020s. Jaz shares his multi-year love affair with World of Warcraft, his passion for racing games like the Gran Turismo series, and his admiration for indie walking sims like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

This is interspersed with stories from his life: work beyond gaming for corporate giants like Bank of America and Walmart; friendships and relationships; hobbies and accidents. Not all of that is page turner material, but the author refocuses quickly on games he associates with a particular period in his life.

As is typical for Bitmap Books titles, the book has large, gorgeous screenshots of the games it covers, making it a fun coffee table addition. If you’re a huge Nintendo fan, be advised that Jaz doesn’t cover many Nintendo titles after the N64 era — it’s just not his thing. They’re the games of his lifetime, after all.

If we lived forever, I wouldn’t mind dedicating a small percentage of forever to playing every old game for the C64, for the Amiga, for the SNES, and comparing notes. But in the absence of immortality, for any old gamer, books and magazines feel like a pinball racing through your brain, bouncing off old memories, and creating new ones. If you’re one of us, consider taking the plunge.