I was going to buy a Saturn: 20 Years of PlayStation

Do you remember Special Reserve? If you're reading this as someone who barely remembers paper, chances are you won't be familiar with this prominent games retailer from my childhood, some 20 plus years ago. With full-page adverts in many of the magazines of the early 90s (maybe earlier, but my memory doesn't go back that far), and prices better than the rest, Special Reserve was my go-to retailer – you even got a magazine in the post, back when magazines sent through the post weren't a complete waste of ink and recycled paper.

Being a massive SEGA fanboy as a child, having owned a Master System, Mega Drive, and Mega CD (not the 32X, but I desperately wanted one at the time), and reading Mean Machines SEGA religiously, I was hyped for the Saturn. A year or so before the console's pre-order campaign started I'd been on a week-long school trip to the Isle of Wight. Interesting fact: back then me and my brother were so popular (we had flat top spiked hair, enough said) that our teacher had to put us in our own room in order not to disappoint everyone who wanted to share with us. Letting down everyone was deemed preferable to giving one person their wish. If only this popularity had continued beyond primary school!

Anyway, fun times were had by all. We played beach cricket in the mornings. I won a talent competition performing as a ventriloquist, my friend the dummy – good lad, but he was afraid of the Incredible Hulk back when it was a man painted green. It was a simpler time, before I became an arse on Twitter, before mobile phones, before NeoGAF.

Anyway, the point to all this nostalgic waffling is that, aside from the roaring cheers and stupendous rounds of applause I received for my comedy act (in another life I am a modern day Steve Martin), my most vivid memories come from the day I saw Virtua Fighter. Off to one side of the eating area at Blackgang Chine (etched into my memory as the place that had the wonky house and sold some lovely aniseed balls) was a small arcade. It was full of the usual machines, After Burner, Outrun and the like, but stood amongst them, shining like a moment of sanity on an internet message board, was Virtua Fighter. I'd read about it, of course, I read about everything, but to see it in real life... my eyes couldn't quite believe it.

Look at this! It's how we used to live

Fast forward to a day in 1995, a few months after the system launched, (you can pretend it was dreary if you like, it may have been, but equally it might have been a perfectly lovely day – whichever scene works for you is fine) and I clutched Special Reserve in my hands – or maybe my brother James had it. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we'd decided to buy a SEGA Saturn. A paper form, printed alongside every Special Reserve ad and inside each magazine, had been filled in. On it: a SEGA Saturn, an extra controller, a copy of Virtua Fighter, Daytona and (even though it wasn't at launch) Bug had been neatly written into a tiny space (somewhat foreshadowing my later fame on Twitter), an obscene price totaled at the bottom. We just had to post it – and the ensuing squabbling over who would walk 5 minutes down the road to the postbox may well have changed the course of history and potentially the fate of the House of Sonic.

Buying a Saturn when aged 12 going on 13, going on 45, wasn't easy. For one, I'd spent some time (months) budgeting, creating paper documents detailing how much money we'd have and when, based on projected birthday and Christmas income, as well as money from odd jobs (I seem to have worked a lot as a child, almost definitely illegally, but hey, I could buy games), and what we'd get if we sold our Mega Drive and Mega CD. We then had to convince our mum that spending this amount of money was a good idea, and to let us borrow some money until we could pay her back.

Considering she'd previously let us empty our building society account to buy a Mega CD from Dixons, a system that boasted about being able to play music CDs as if it was a big deal and brought little else to the party, I wasn't overly concerned. Plus I'd detailed on the budget docs how much a single go on the Virtua Fighter and Daytona arcade machines would cost, and that by owning them in our home we'd actually end up saving money. I think I was an evil genius – a pre-teen George Osborne that liked to save money and thankfully had a twin brother who always wanted to buy the exact same stuff. The fact that I'd probably rarely have the opportunity to play these games in an arcade was besides the point. Pre-order Saturn was a go!

But then it wasn't. A family friend was a store manager at a Blockbuster and he'd got access to a PlayStation ahead of launch. Sony's console seemed to come out of nowhere, and my blinkered SEGA fanboyism had started to waiver. A crisis of faith was to come to a head when this friend gave us a PlayStation for a week, along with Ridge Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden. On went Ridge Racer and moments later SEGA was dead to me – and more or less to everyone else too. Playing Namco's racer was akin to the first time you put Nutella on toast instead of plain chocolate spread. There was no way back.

Ridge Racer is often looked back on as a great launch title, not only on the PlayStation but for numerous Sony systems that followed, but it was more than that. In 1995 it was a game that single handedly demonstrated what the PlayStation had and the Saturn didn't: an innate coolness, backed up by games that felt fresh, exciting and new. Like myself, SEGA retained some popularity thanks to a strong heritage, but Sony was trendy, lean and as slick as Mark Lamarr's hair. Plus, did you see that fucking dinosaur on the demo disc?

I don't remember what happened to that filled in Special Reserve form, but I do wonder what would have happened had I posted. What would have happened if everyone had posted theirs? A generation of SEGA fans were quick to jump to something prettier and now Sony is top dog while SEGA is, well, lucky not to have gone the same way as the store that rewrote history.

Sorry SEGA. I did buy a Dreamcast at launch, though, and I love Football Manager.