Wherever you are now sir, I hope you’re having a lovely day. I played an array of games, that my parents otherwise couldn’t have afforded, thanks to that wizard in the bungalow. It felt like a gem that only I knew about, though this bubble was popped a few years later. It’s also the first time I stumbled upon the best game I had ever played at the time: Fable.

I spent the entire weekend trying everything on offer: Ninja Gaiden, Jet Set Radio Future, Bloodrayne (secretly) and even the Playboy Mansion game (also secretly). It may be standard now, but back then I didn’t know games could exist digitally. We plugged in the console back home and I was greeted with a different interface than my normal Xbox offered: the startup screen was gone, the background was dynamic, there was music playing on the start screen and, as I navigated the complicated new screen to ‘games’, I found my library was full - a child’s dream. What he had done was something that - I now know - was revolutionized my gaming experience (though illegally). It looked the same, so what had this sweaty wizard actually done with it? After getting teary over a rubber chicken - he recently lost his dog - we returned to dad’s house with the console sitting on my lap like a newborn. The bungalow was strewn with gadgets, wires and monitors, and oddly dark, the kind of geeky stereotype that you didn’t think was actually real. After disappearing with my console for what seemed like a decade in child years, during one of our weekend visits, he took me to the bungalow of a man I had never seen before.

My dad, however, had a solution: “I know a guy”. I got my Xbox as a birthday/Christmas present one year and was over the moon, but didn’t have much in the way of games to actually play.

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