Moments in Gaming is where we look back on gaming experiences that have left a particularly strong impression on us over the years: mainly for good reasons, but sometimes for bad ones.

I’m not really sure if demos are a thing anymore; I basically haven’t been short of games to play for a long time, but the last time I saw one for a new game that I was interested in, it had disappeared from Steam before I had the chance to download it. (Apparently, demos that are available for a limited time are a thing).

I’d possibly argue that the 90s were the peak demo era, once we got past the cassette tape days (infrequently released and often annoying to get working) and to the floppy disks that came attached to the front of most 16-bit computer magazines back then. (The CDs and DVDs, of multiple different demos, patches and bits of software, were also good, at least until the internet rendered the whole enterprise rather pointless and they only persisted out of a stubborn notion that readers would view their removal as a downgrade).

But there was something special about those days of the covermount that featured one or two ‘headline’ demos, offering a chance to taste a forthcoming full-price game and build some excitement for it. This, they often did, mainly by virtue of being so short that you couldn’t help but wonder what the full thing had in store. At least, this was the experience of an enthusiasm-rich but cash-poor child, and risked being immediately undermined if the magazine itself contained an underwhelming review of the game in question within its pages.

Looking back, it now feels vaguely shameful that in a household that was always furnished with a decent selection of games, they were frequently ignored in favour of a series of 10-minute samplers that arrived free of charge. I can’t remember my Dad ever being swayed even slightly by my desperate entreaties to get excited about whatever was on the cover disk that month, and he would studiously rebuff them using the logic, reason and world-weariness of a tired adult: there’s no sound on this, how can you tell from the first short level, the review gave it 51% etc.

For a period in the early 90s, we would be invited to a neighbourhood Christmas party held by the parents of one of Jo’s friends. As the other attendees were either girls that were a few years’ younger than me or adults drinking wine, I was given free reign to go upstairs and play on the Dad’s Amiga for the duration. Unfortunately, he didn’t actually have any games.

What he did have, though, is demos: an absolute shit-ton of demos. “I love demos,” he would chuckle. “I don’t know why anyone would pay 30-odd quid for a full game when you get all these demos for free.”

I don’t know how many demo disks he actually had: it felt like hundreds, and certainly more than could be sustained by a single monthly purchase of an Amiga magazine (in which case, the financial outlay involved would probably have funded a few decent full-price or budget games instead).

But still, I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store, cycling through dozens of Amiga demos over a few hours, getting a little taste of all those games that the Atari ST couldn’t quite pull off, and to which the DOS PC was not particularly well-suited. [Is that a belated first compliment for the Amiga on this site? – Ed.]

And while it struck me as odd at the time, and even more so the more I thought about it over the years, to not have your interest sufficiently piqued by any of these hundreds of demos to make a commitment to a complete game, the fact is that I don’t recall ever coming away from my annual demo sugar-rush with a concrete suggestion for a purchase of my own. (There was a tennis game… Passing Shot? Tie Break? I can’t remember, but I think it didn’t work on the Atari STE and we either didn’t buy it or had to take it back).

Most likely, as a full-time arrangement, frustration and boredom would have overtaken me as a kid, but as an adult, I can now imagine sitting down to blast through a couple of demos on a weekday evening for half an hour. However, with a large backlog to work through and this site’s legions of loyal readers clamouring for new content, the process of choosing the next game for review has arguably become a little too serious and self-important: once the choice is made, Rik, you must push through.

This is probably itself an overreaction to my early gaming flightiness, a hangover from the demo days, which involved me too frequently playing little more than demo-length portions of some new games and swapping between them instead of getting my teeth into any one of them properly.

But, staring down the barrel of a lot of old games (and some new ones), there’s no harm in embracing a slightly more fickle, surface-level assessment: flicking through some possibilities and rejecting them if they don’t really grab me. (It was the idea behind 2022’s Unreviewed feature, even if that did still represent an attempt to squeeze some new #content out of not very much gaming at all).

A few weeks ago, I spent a couple of hours picking out some possible games and firing them up: the one that I didn’t enjoy, I abandoned and uninstalled; the one that didn’t work, I didn’t spend hours trying to fix. It was all rather liberating. And when I eventually landed on something that I did like, it felt as if a positive choice had been made.

I’m hardly describing an epiphany heralding a radical change in approach here, but as I cheerfully rejected the two losing candidates, I couldn’t help but think back to those frenzied winter evenings trying as many Amiga demos as possible. Then – as now, and always – time is limited: best not to waste too much, if you can help it.

(Images sourced from Amiga Magazine Rack (https://amr.abime.net/)