Pang

I loved Geography at school. Granted, I was sent to a good school and we had some great teachers, but my love of it was just not rational. I vaguely wondered why, but it wasn’t the sort of thing a twelve-year-old dwelt on. I was, naturally, more interested in playing games and beating up my younger brother.

I got my GCSEs and ‘A’ Levels and went on to university. Time passed, technology changed, and our family Atari ST was replaced by a family PC – so we could do homework more easily.

Around the summer of 1997 I was doing what everybody does when they first discover the Internet - searching for anything that popped into my head (my favourite musicians, current and past interests)… Then, one hot summer day I discovered PaCifiST – an Atari ST emulator. It blew my mind - my PC could pretend to be an ST!

A fairly gratuitous picture of the mighty Llamatron. If only someone would
remake it or do a sequel or something…

I managed to load some old favourites like Hunter, Lotus Turbo Challenge, E-Motion and, of course, Llamatron. I caught up on reading some scroll texts I had long forgotten and immersed myself in a period of my life I thought had gone forever. Games were loaded and tested, I made screen dump after screen dump of all the old compilation discs I had - eventually putting them up as a web page.

During all of this, I spotted a game I had all but forgotten but found instantly recognisable - from the graphics and music on the compilation menu screen to the way the game titles sounded when read one after the other – PangPuzznicWelltris. There it was - PANG! Like a dam-burst, the memories came flooding back, along with a bizarre mix of grief and happiness – a feeling I've only felt a few times since, when meeting old flames by accident. My heart had sat idle for far too long…

Yes. It’s there. Pang. Southampton fans – look away, now.

I loaded up the game and found that I could remember everything about it - graphics, music, the simplistic but captivating gameplay… Even the structure of every level. I remembered how my Dad and I had struggled in two-player mode to travel across the globe, discovering new lands, wondering where the next level might take us…

From Japan's glorious Mount Fuji past Cambodia's Temple of Ankor Wat, through India's Taj Mahal and Barcelona's Sagrada Familia, and over to the bright lights of Paris' Champs Élysées… Those places were the wonders of my world at age eleven.

Presumably, it’s the noise made when a harpoon bursts a balloon. Or it’s
Japanese for something really filthy…

And that's when I realised – the puzzle finally clicked together in my mind… My love of Geography came from my love of Pang – the game that gave me and my Dad lots of fun, and helped me through school.

It’s also made me a demon at pub quizzes, too.

MATT, April 2004.

Comment Here.