Yesterday, I said that Super Mario Bros. was probably the first video game I ever played. Today I’m going to discuss the other candidate for that title, Fantasy Zone for the Sega Master System.
Why does it say “SHOOTING” in the corner?
The Master System was Sega’s answer to the NES, and was the beginning of a pattern that would repeat itself until it doomed Sega as a hardware company: make it cheaper and less powerful, because not everyone wants the cutting edge. This was true enough of my parents, who looked at it and the NES next to each other and drew the logical conclusion: cheap out.
Even though it was second-tier, I still remember being able to find and buy (read: beg for) games for it at the local Fred Meyer in the electronics section. In retrospect, I was very good at getting my mom to buy me whatever dumb game, controller, headphones, or whatever else caught my eye there. I didn’t win them all, but I did pretty all right.
Every year until I was 12, we drove across the mountains from western Washington to the east side of the state, a place with a completely different climate, made up mostly of small farm towns and data centers. My mom’s sister Veronica had three kids and one year their parents got them the Sega Master System (abbreviating to SMS feels… wrong) for Christmas.
How the game imagined itself…
Some time thereafter and in within memory I was over there and they showed off their games. One was Fantasy Zone. There was also a golf game and possibly one other, but I’m not totally sure anymore. I do know that the Master System had two different game inputs, the cartridge slot at the top you’d expect and a card slot in front of it for… games in a different form factor? I remember the tennis game was a card, but I don’t think I cared about what the difference was yet. Video games!
I can remember that playing Fantasy Zone was frenetic, and it was the type of game where you died early and often, so mostly I remember being bad at it and taking turns with my cousins.
…and what it was actually like. Even this is a reasonably clean modern image and not the fuzzy garbage we were all putting up with in the 80s
Apparently the game has been re-released regularly, but it’s the kind of rudimentary experience that is diminished by revisiting it. I’m going to leave my memories the way they are, thank you.