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1995 – Janeil Harricharan

1995

Over the ages, people have followed toy trends, always wanting certain ones, or brands, or the hottest thing that was out that season. I remember in 2001, the biggest thing was scooters. Call of Duty 4 was the biggest thing when I was at Walters State. I don’t remember a lot of the other store rushes, though.

One was a big thing back when I was about 9 was collecting Hess trucks. My family had never gotten any period, but a cousin or two would get one every year. Each were released every year as sort of a collector’s edition, having a different frame and even a date stamp. May of them were play-quality, having features such as lights and rubber tires.

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**Backdated for historical purposes**

 

Remember that spiffy game called Descent? With the ship flying around in the cavern shooting robots? I got a whiff of it and thought it was intoxicating. While I couldn’t play it at home, the memory stuck with me long after. And while I had barely been drawing things in MSPaint, one night I did drum this up on my parent’s IBM 65sx PS/2 system, and had forgotten about it till a diskette dump I did in 2014; a BMP fanart of Descent.

 

I had seen the game briefly in action at a relative’s house in Charlotte. And while I would die within ten minutes of starting Level 1, those gray hallways and that Spider Bot in the menu always stuck to me. While I’m pretty sure I might’ve drawn something on paper, I apparently did this in MSPaint as well. Why, I don’t know; but I did, and I did write and save it to a floppy disk to uncover all these years later.

 

As you can see, the imagination of a kid holds a lot of potential. They can remember certain things very well and vividly in those times. The cockpit may be well off, but I certainly remembered that double ring HUD. And I even got the ship design right in the shield window to some degree. Looking back at it decades later, I can’t believe it myself that I did ‘fanart’.

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