Everyone remembers their first console – I remember waking up on my 6th birthday and my parents had set up a Sega Master System II on the TV in mine and my brothers room, so the first thing I saw on the January morning was the demo screen of Sonic the Hedgehog dancing across the screen. After abusing my older brother’s Vectrex – I now had a console of my own.

From then on, I was hooked on platformers. After being confined to one screen by Minestorm & Bedlam, I was released to levels that felt like they’d never end! I devoured Sonic, me and my dad used to stay up ‘late’ and take it in turns playing Sonic and Alex the Kidd in Miracle World, until Match of the Day came on pretty much every Saturday night.

But there was another game that came with the system, an odd curiosity that must have gone untouched for months until I peeled off the little white and blue ‘Sega’ sticker and prised open the notoriously stiff Master System cartridge box, and game was Global Gladiators.



Global Gladiators was a game that was chock full of McDonald’s advertising, sporting the Golden Arches logo on the ‘Press Start’ screen and a story that in some way involved Ronald McDonald (it was 16 years ago, some details might be vague) – but cast your mind back to when you were 6 years old, before you were a jaded cynic, before the thought of ads in games made you scared and angry. Chances are you didn’t care, or if you were like me – the fact that the heroes of the game started their adventure in a McDonalds restaurant, like the ones you’d go to for birthday parties or for a treat; that was fucking cool.



The game itself wasn’t bad either, and the first level was a masterstroke by the developers (which I now know was a team lead by Dave Perry, of the ‘Shiny’ fame). Whilst it was, yes, another platformer; you could tell there was something different about from that first level; ‘Slime World’ (Okay, they were obviously running low on creativity when it came to naming levels)

.

The graphics were like nothing in any Sonic the Hedgehog or Psycho Fox; all blocky and bright. This was dark, with organic looking textures, even the ground looked like it was gooey and soft. Where Sonic’s world was all chequered and stylised, Global Gladiators had concentrated more time and love into the art of its 4 levels.

Alex the Kidd had offered me something more than just jumping on enemies – I could punch them with a fist the size of my character and occasionally play Paper, Scissors, Stone with them. Yet here was a game I could fire projectiles from a super soaker-style gun to beat my foes.

I was all just so…different.

I’m fairly sure that if many were to go back and play it now they’d rubbish the game as a horrible little slice of corporate marketing, that’s unforgivably short with unimaginative characters (Mick & Mack, anyone?) a non-existent storyline and worst of all, “Not as good as the Mega Drive version”.

But at the time it was a game of ‘firsts’ for me – the first time I’d seen real-life advertising in games, such an unorthodox graphical style and taking down bad guys with a ‘gun’ and that’s why I think this game should be one of The Remembered.

(And if anyone says I could’ve got a similar experience with Cool Spot. That wasn’t Forgotten now, was it?)