THE QUEST FOR GAMES
OR HOW GETTING SOFTWARE IN A TOWN OF 9,000 PEOPLE WAS AN IMPOSSIBLE MISSION

There was a moment — and everyone who had a Commodore 64 in the 80s knows it well — when you realised that the machine in your hands was fantastic, powerful, with more colours than the competition, a sound chip that was almost obscene compared to what everyone else was doing. The problem was that without games, that machine was little more than a keyboard with delusions of grandeur.

And then the quest began.

Because getting games in the late 80s, when you lived in a small town of no more than 9,000 people, was not something you solved by pressing a button. There was no Amazon, no app store, nothing. Only ingenuity, patience and, if you were lucky, a magazine with an order form tucked in the back.

If this were a video game — and in a certain sense it was — the first levels consisted of discovering, one by one, all the methods that didn't work. Every attempt ended with the same text scrolling on screen: GAME OVER. TRY AGAIN.

And so, with all reasonable options eliminated, there was only one door left untried. One that required paper, a pen, an envelope, a stamp, and a level of faith in the Spanish postal service that, looking back, was quite remarkable for a couple of kids from a small town.

The first issue of Micromanía we bought was a revelation on many levels. There was the content — reviews, cheats, maps, the entire life of the 8-bit world condensed on paper — but something at the back of the magazine turned out to be far more important than any feature article: the price catalogue from Centro Mail.

Centro Mail was a mail-order shop. Today that might sound quaint, but at the time it was a completely serious solution to a very specific problem: thousands of children scattered across Spain with a computer at home and no way whatsoever to buy software. Centro Mail was the bridge between the catalogue and your bedroom.

And here's the curious fact you might not know: Centro Mail didn't disappear. It kept growing, evolving, opening physical stores, and over the years it eventually became what we now know as Game — yes, that chain of video game shops you find in shopping centres. What started as a form at the back of a magazine and an envelope with a stamp ended up becoming one of Spain's main video game retailers. If you've ever bought anything at Game, you've technically been a customer of the grown-up, suited-and-booted version of the very same place that used to post us games when we were kids. History has a way with these things.

The system was elegant in its simplicity: you looked at the Micromanía catalogue, chose your game, filled in the order form printed in the magazine with your name, address and the title you wanted, put everything in an envelope, posted it and waited. Payment was cash on delivery: the postman arrived with the parcel and you handed over the money on the spot. No card, no bank account, no complications. Just an envelope, a stamp and patience.

The Centro Mail catalogue in Micromanía was a list of games with their prices for each platform. If games feel expensive now, take a look at what those titles cost in pesetas to get a sense of what it meant in real terms for a child's economy.

To put those figures in context: in those years, 875 pesetas was a sum that required some saving up — or, as in our case, the combined pocket money of two brothers and the partial, temporary and strategic surrender of a father.

After all the negotiations, after weeks of accumulated insistence, after arguments deployed with the persistence and creativity that only children have when they truly want something, the moment of the final decision arrived. What would we buy?

The answer came from the catalogue itself: the 4-in-1 pack. Four games for the price of... well, four games, but with the moral satisfaction of having maximised the investment. The pack contained Bomb Jack, Frank Bruno's Boxing, Airwolf and Commando. A selection that, in terms of genres, covered practically everything a kid could need to survive the summer.

There was, however, one detail the catalogue didn't explain with sufficient emphasis — one we discovered upon opening the package: the four games did not come on four separate tapes. They all came on a single cassette. One pack, one tape, four games recorded in sequence. This, which on paper might seem like a perfectly reasonable format, turned out to be somewhat frustrating in practice, because one of the great social dynamics of the time was swapping: you lend me Commando, I lend you Frank Bruno. But of course, if Commando and Frank Bruno live on the same tape, there's no swap possible. It was all or nothing. The tape was indivisible, like the custody of an only child.

We filled in the form. Put it in the envelope. Went to the post office. Posted the letter. And then came the hardest part of the whole adventure: waiting.

There was no tracking. No email confirmation. Nothing. Just the certainty that at some point — five days, ten, perhaps more — a postman would appear at the door with a parcel. And every day that passed without it arriving was a day you ran to answer the door every time the bell rang.

When it finally arrived, the moment of opening that package had an intensity that no game downloaded in two minutes can ever reproduce. There it was: a single cassette, with its inlay card, with the manual inside. Four games on one tape. It was real, it was ours, and we had done it ourselves — with our own savings, through a postal system that, miraculously, had actually worked.

From then on, since our father saw that we were playing and studying at the same time — because that was exactly what we were doing, of course, though the studying part had its peaks and valleys — everything became a lot easier. The rest is history.