The Nomadic Gamer In The 80s

 The 80s again you say?

Well, yes, that's sort of a given, here. You can go elsewhere if you wish, but most of you are of that golden vintage, when Marillion had a Scots front man, Rush were singing about concentration camps and Tempole Tudor were coming over a nearby hill with the swords of a thousand men - but where were the men they belonged to?

These were days when broadly speaking, people were too busy with real politics to be worrying about the which changing room they could use, or being offended because the tofu was on display next to a prime steak in Fine Fare. Wimpy was big, MacDonalds were unheard of and KFC was not yet ghetto-ised. In fact KFC was bloody expensive and a treat until the mid-80s, when the first mass influx of doner kebabs were heralded on kids TV on the BBC by none other than the late great David Bellamy of all people as 'healthy' fast food.

Art was truly edgy and so radically Left that today's theatre scene eactually looks like a weak assed parody. And before you write a pithy retort about me being a Right Wing Fascist carniverous bastard, I am a product of one of the most radical Left school experiments of the 70s and early 80s (best school experience I ever had without a doubt and it made me very politically savvy at age 9), love edgy and challenging theatre and actually enjoy a bit of tofu with my dead cow, so stand down trooper...

In fact, it was this exposure to the world that got me interested in Brutalist architecture, radical modern design and abstract art, which in turn led me to embrace the radical subculture which was gaming. Remember, when I started, this was a young and very much underground hobby where you aften felt that you needed a secret handshake to get into a game store, and that surely there was a concrete tablet into which were carved certain knowledge which, would enable you to be allowed to actually take down a copy of White Dwarf or The Space Gamer from the shelf in Games Workshop, or work out what those funny shaped plastic trinkets with numbers actually were.

A trip to Sheffield Town Hall in the 80s could give you some great ideas for sci-fi scenarios:

It was absolutely fucking fantastic to be young in a time when there was so much turmoil and upheaval in the world. A time in which you could - once you had found it by whatever means possible - take a step through the looking glass into a genuinely underground world of obscure games, fanzines, tiny metal figures and groups of adults who, if you read the signs and gave the right vibes, may - and it was in no was assured, let me tell you - allow you to speak to them, and then, after a few months, may suggest you turned up to this or that dark little pub in a less than salubrious, more often blatantly lugubrious, part of town, where your parents would drop you off with more than a fair amount of fear for your safety, crossing the 6 feet from car to doorway.

The hobby was a splendid concatenation of misfits, dreamers and true academics, who did not care about who or what their fellow travellers on gaming's highway were in the mundane world. It was not the seemingly saccharine, asinine, cloying echo chamber it is today, because, unless it was in some way related to playing games with dice and lead dollies, it wasn't given the time of day.

As most will know, there were not gaming stores on every street corner. True, Sheffield had several, but that was because like London and the bad lands of Nottinghamshire, it was a hotbed of small game companies and had a LOT of gamers, who oddly kept together in tight groups and many of whom/which were not aware of those not in their immediate ccircle. There were exceptions of course as Sheffield Wargames Society was one of the largest wargames groups in the UK at the time, and it's members were also spread through other groups in the city like a recreational Carbonari, picking off the choice candidadtes to be 'enlightened' .

The sense of walking into a new club for the first time was amazing. I remember joining the SWS 'feeder' club at my old junior school, then being taken by Steve Roberts to SWS proper, then later, gettying an invite to Sheffield Runelords after Pete Armstrong who worked in GW had decided to take a chance on this young and over-zealous idiot being, if not 'of the cut', at least some entertainment for the harsh, scar inducing with which in the next four decades would become known as the 'Armstrong/Gibride Method' of youth outreach.

Those of us who went through that ritual meat grinder came out of it mentally stronger than anyone in our age group at school. I am sure of it. Some of those affected, still bear mental scar and grudges from those years, but let me tell you, they are some of the most interesting and 'colourful' people I know, and their passing will be ignored by the whey -aced youth of today, but noted with solemn respect and sadness by those who were there in the trenches with them in those dark and brooding days.

We live in a time of 'Helicopter Parents', the world being seen as so much more dangerous, but it's not... We lived in bloody dangerous times when we were kids, but our parents allowed us to spread our wings with the certainty that they had done their duty as parents to make it very clear, in fact, absolutely ficking crystal, the consequences of not doing so. Strong parenting does not diminish the child, and properly applied it can lead to greater freedom for the kid who undertstands the Invisible Rule Book Of Life. You stifle your kids and they have no inbuilt survival instincts and then, when threatened, lash out in a waterfall of andrenaline.

Common sense and a pair of good pair of running shoes were all we needed - quite literally, one time in Manchester in - I think - 1982.

In South Yorkshire, kids could travel anywhere for a maximum of 2p per Journey. We could get from Sheffield to Doncaster and back for between 4p and 8p  depending on the route and the drivers enforcing the 'this bus changes number so it's another 2p son' rule.

Thus, we could go all over the UK's greatest county for literally nothing. And we did...

We found every shop, from the late Terry Wise's 'Athena Books' and 'Wargamer's Attic' (Saturdays only and a great day out) to The Stamp Corner , which in addition to stamps (the clue is in the name) sold Osprey books, Hinchcliffe Miniatures and second hand figures.

Parents would be coerced into over filling a car with excited teenage boys and taking them for 'a day at the seaside', only to have them all disappear for three hours on arrival to visit the genial Dave Hoyles in his Q.T (Quayside Treasures) store, reappearing like the shopkeeper in Mr Ben, for the obligatory fish and chip lunch before going back to plague the long suffering Dave for another 3 hours, thence to the car for the return trip, having probably not even seen the see a few yards from Q.T.

Leeds had a branch of Games Of Liverpool, a satellite really, not having the same space or stock - nor the allure for that matter, but there were a couple of other places. The problem was that Leeds was truly considered to be the Bad Lands back then (watch an Alan Plater serial and you'll see what it was like back then) and could have been a location for the filming of 'Threads'; because it made Sheffield look like the Emerald City. The first time we went 'mob handed' up to Leeds on the X32, we all had to report back on arrival, from a telephone  box (happy days) to assorted mothers, that we were safe and had not been killed on the way there.

Nottingham, oddly was not seen as a problem, despite all of the kerfuffle of the miner's strike being in full swing. In Nottingham, aside from that little business called Games Workshop and Citadel Miniatures, there was the Tabletop Games shop, overseen by the rough diamond which was the late Bob Connor, another forgotten hero of the hobby. Oh my lord, did we spend a lot of money back then with Bob, either at shows or at the store. He was irascible and gruff, but, would aften cut an unexpected deal for an enthusiastic kid. The uncertainty of an encounter with Bob always added a frisson of danger.

For me, the gold standard was of course Games Of Liverpool, with it's series of converted cellars in the basement, beginning with a bright and stupidly well stocked roleplaying department, and then rooms full of display cabinets, which got gradually dimmer to the point that a pocket torch could and was handy to see what was in the room. This was where you went if you wanted to see the entire range of Grenadier Miniatures boxed sets in all their glory with those Andrew Chernak covers. GLORIOUS. 

My dad was at the time an auditor for a furniture company, so I used to travel all over with him and got to see the sights of many towns and cities all over the country. Due to the thieving levels , he was often in Manchester and Liverpool, so I made the most of it. In 1984, I was paid £50 for a one day painting commission, a veritable goldmine back then and more than I earned in my first week at work some months later. I was in Games, a few days later with my £50 plus whatever else I'd saved/made and, in addition to picking up stuff gor the gang, I bought everything I needded for 20mm Vietnam gaming (still a contentious subject at the time) with enough change to buy a rather fetching grey, parachute material jacket with cargo pockets and bat-wing sleeves, being even then a snappy dresser.

I always felt more at risk in Manchester, oddly enough. Whether it's an ancestral memory of the whol Wars Of The Roses thing I don't know, but I do know that on the day I bought my Ral Partha Wyvern and Citadel suit of armour from Games Workshop, I was chased through the shopping centre by skinheads. Remember the comment about good running shoes?

I don't think kids will ever experience the world as we did, and that's a shame, but it would have been a bigger shame not to have been involved in the hobby and seen the wider world through it's particular distorted lense. I'm glad I had that opportunity...

TTFN