Our buddy Nick puts us on to this version of the Star Wars theme tune as played by two floppy disk drives. Now I know that sounds like the ultimate nerdery, but if like me you sometimes have a fondness for low-quality jarring bleeps in your music then have a listen as it’s surprisingly catchy.
Please can someone do a floppy disk cover of Sir Mixalot’s ‘Baby Got Back’? Or get a Spectrum ZX to play ‘Ice Ice Baby’ with those weird tape loading noises that seemingly went on for ever and ever? Ah, I’m getting old… Though while I’m in coffee-fueled-old-man-rant mode, I might as well mention that I believe the speed and reliability of computer game loading may have an inverse correlation with the decline of our nation’s youth. Back in the day we had to wait for what seemed like about half an hour while the Spectrum tried to load a game from a tape (a tape). If you got to the point where the loading picture started appearing, you considered yourself lucky. And if the game itself loaded after that without the whole thing crashing, you were luckier than a unicorn’s balls sprinkled with four-leafed clovers on a horseshoe.
Since then we’ve had floppy disks, CD-Roms and now the internet or lasers or whatever kids use to play games these days, and we no longer have any patience. Kids expect instant gratification and are not prepared either to wait for what they want or to accept not getting it with a zen-like calm. Even I, veteran of the old Spectrum ZX days, am fucking livid if my computer is not on and running all sorts of stuff within half a second of me pressing the power button. We expect everything and will wait for nothing. Now I’m not saying that the death of the floppy disk directly caused the recent spate of looting and the accelerated advent of the Apocalypse… Oh maybe I am. Oh well, at least my computer switched on pretty quickly this morning.
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