My First Gaming Memory: A Famiclone, What's Yours?
I was around eight years old, maybe a little younger, growing up in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa. My friend David lived two houses down, which made visiting easy. After school, on weekends, most days really, I would just show up. His house was comfortable and familiar, in the way only a childhood friend's home can be. A small room, comfy carpet on the floor, a single bed, and a few magazines scattered around. I recall a large wooden display unit along the wall with family photos and some action figures. Some of these had seen better days, missing a limb here and there, and the accessories were always missing. These toys had clearly lived a full life.
Sometimes the room had a particular smell. David had a sausage dog with a habit of sometimes pooping indoors. It was just part of the atmosphere. You mostly stopped noticing after a while.
One day, I arrived at David's room, and I walked in, and something was different. Not the poop situation, but something else.
David was sitting on the carpet, cross-legged, holding a small controller, eyes fixed on the television. I stopped in the doorway. On the screen, Pac-Man was moving through some kind of maze, eating dots and running away from ghosts, while chirpy 8-bit sounds filled the room. Connected to the TV was a console, something I had never seen before. A Famiclone, a pirate console known as the Golden China, a knock-off of the Japanese Famicom that was incredibly common in South Africa at the time. For most kids, this was a popular and affordable gift.
I couldn't believe my eyes and ears.
In that moment, without fully understanding it, I knew something had shifted. The days of action figures and toy cars were over. I'm sorry Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I'm sorry Lego. It was done. A lifelong enthusiasm had just quietly begun.
A few weeks later, David and I were playing Super Mario Bros and my favourite, Contra.
Contra became the most played game. A co-op run-and-gun, fast, crisp controls and pretty challenging in the way only 8-bit games could be. We spent a lot of time on that opening bridge level alone, trying to make the jump without falling into the water. Something about the timing always caught me off guard, and I never quite got it right. David was usually better at it than I was, which made me a little jealous.
We were always chasing the S power-up, the spread gun. Getting it felt like the game suddenly became fair. Losing it a few seconds later because of a bad jump always felt infuriating.
The waterfall stage caused its own particular kind of frustration. If one of us pushed ahead too fast, the other would get left behind at the bottom of the screen and die instantly. It required a patience that two eight year olds didn't always have. We argued. We kept playing anyway.
We never would have beaten the game without the famous Konami code. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. and bam! You now have thirty lives. An absolute lifeline. We had no shame in using it whatsoever.
One small thing worth mentioning: the Golden China controllers had built-in turbo buttons by default. For most games this was fine, actually useful. However, using it for the laser power-up in Contra wasn't the best. The turbo fired so rapidly that the laser lost all its range and became almost useless. We learned quickly to avoid it. Small things like that you just figured out as you went.
Between gaming sessions we raided David's kitchen with no shame. Thick slices of white bread. Polony. Jam. Whatever was available. His mom must have wondered whether my mother ever fed me at home. I was just a hungry little monster with no sense of embarrassment about it.
I also had a friend, Chris, who was pretty damn good at Super Mario Bros. He had this trick, jumping on a Goomba against a block in just the right way, that produced pretty much infinite lives. I watched him do it many times and could never replicate it at home. We also played a lot of Circus Charlie together, a game that will make you develop a very specific hatred for monkeys.
At home, gaming time was a negotiation.
We had one television shared by the whole family. Two siblings with their own opinions about what to watch, parents with their programmes in the evening, and me trying to find a gap somewhere in between. It was genuinely pretty annoying. Eventually, I was lucky enough to get a small monochrome television. No colour, tiny screen, and absolutely perfect as far as I was concerned.
There were rules of course. No games until homework was done. In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to homework.
Some of the best cartridges came from the flea market.
I used to go regularly with my parents on weekends. The stalls had a particular atmosphere, tables covered in yellow Famicom cartridges, most of them compilation carts. 76-in-1. 999999-in-1. Yes, those existed, and yes, most of the listed games were just duplicates with small differences like starting on a different stage or with a different power-up. Nobody cared. You were getting a pile of games for a pretty affordable price, and that felt like an enormous deal.
The flea market smelled like boerewors rolls. Alongside the game stalls there were electronics tables with cassette deck players, cheap small headphones with thin metal bands, boxes of blank tapes, and those funny electrical toys that made zapping spaceship sounds when you pressed a button. Laser pointers were everywhere, usually sold with a bag of interchangeable tops for different shapes and symbols. It was a very specific kind of Sunday ritual, and I loved every bit of it.
It was also common to visit other kids and see what cartridges they had. Most households had the standard compilations: Super Mario, Pac-Man, Contra, and Adventure Island. But occasionally, you would come across someone with something more exotic. A friend with G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. Or Batman: Return of the Joker. Batman especially stood out. The music in that game is genuinely remarkable, rich, atmospheric, and almost cinematic. If you compare it to earlier Famicom titles, you would never guess it came from the same hardware. Sunsoft did something special with that game. Something that still holds up.
The Golden China itself was never built to last. The power adapters ran hot during long sessions, which made sense since most games had no save function; you simply left the machine on. Some cheap adapters turned out to be genuine fire hazards. The cables tend to fray where they enter the controller. The controllers broke fairly easily if not handled with care. It was common to visit someone's house and find stripped wires held together with tape or a controller with a sticky button that had been that way for months. Some clone machines were better quality than others, but overall, the build was poor. Most of them eventually gave up entirely.
I think about those afternoons a lot these days.
There's a particular kind of nostalgia that doesn't feel entirely warm. It feels more like something pressing gently on your chest. Ice cold around the edges. Good memories that somehow ache and hurt. I notice it especially now that my dad is getting older. I find myself wondering whether these small moments, the lightgun, the carpet, the coin sounds, are going to feel different one day. I think that's just what time does.
David isn't around anymore. I think about him when these memories surface.
I didn't know any of that then. I just knew I was sitting on a carpet next to my friend, watching a little yellow circle eat dots, thinking that this was just about the most incredible thing I had ever seen.
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