When we think about all the great games and systems we’ve enjoyed over the years, it’s all too easy to forget about the fallen pieces of hardware that lay in our wake. Such as:

SNES Pad: Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior is a great game, and you know how much I love playing it even though I’m terrible at it. But MAN, M. Bison in World Warrior was a cheap little PUNK. He’d pull out the Psycho Crushers at a moment’s notice and that flying head stomp thing would cross me up at every opportunity. And yep, I have to admit that I got so enraged by this continual stream of BS that I threw my SNES controller at the wall, smashing it into pieces in what could only be called “A God damn infantile temper tantrum”. So not only did the game cost me a small fortune to buy in the first place but I was out $40 for another controller too.

Commodore 64: One day I was reading a local gaming magazine and saw this bad boy:

No, not the koala – a real arcade-style joystick for the Commodore 64, with real arcade buttons and everything! Far out, that is seriously hardcore. I can’t remember if they were only available via mail order if they had a local store distribution deal but I do remember being insanely excited when I finally got my own Star Cursor joystick for the C64. Except one little problem: the bloody thing didn’t work.

For some reason that I could never understand plugging a Star Cursor into my C64 completely drove the C64 berserk, spamming the screen with keyboard commands and making every game unplayable. It was the weirdest thing, and then when I took it back to the store (oh, so I guess I did get it from a store then) to get a replacement the replacement fried my C64 so it never booted again. I guess I had faulty joystick ports or something. That’s the last time I bought an Australian-made joystick! 3 year guarantee my big bottom.

Sega MegaDrive: When the MegaDrive first came out there were cheat codes being printed in EGM and the like for games such as AfterBurner and Space Harrier that gave you unlimited lives – but you had to rip the cartridge out of the slot and put another cartridge in its place. (There’s a great list of these cheats here) Now, this seems like utter madness now but I was young and stupid and didn’t really get what I was doing. And yep, you guessed it, I broke a MegaDrive in the process of ripping a cart out. Instead of pulling Altered Beast out of the cartridge slot I ended up flinging the MegaDrive across the room and it never worked right since. What the hell, man? That was just DUMB.

Another Commodore 64: Speaking of cheat codes, the essential item you needed as a Commodore 64 gamer was a reset switch. This handy little gizmo was usually available as part of an Action Replay cartridge or similar, and basically let you jump out of the game back to the BASIC prompt where you could then enter POKE codes to change how many lives you had or whatever. Now, being stuck in the middle of nowhere with no access to an actual reset switch, I had to resort to McGuyvering my own reset switch with a paper clip carefully jammed into the computer’s expansion port. What I didn’t realise then that doing so basically connects the expansion sort with the power supply, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that I fried the machine after a couple of weeks of doing this. I was an idiot who really didn’t deserve to have a computer.

Countless dodgy joysticks: The sticks that came with the Commodore 64 were pure garbage that didn’t even last a day, but they were freebies so who cares. There was a plentiful supply of cheap and cheerful sticks available at the local store, but they too were wrecked by ‘waggle the stick really fast’ games like Decathlon and Combat School. It’s like these games were designed by joystick companies to encourage kids to keep buying more joysticks.

Every pinball machine I ever touched: For some reason every time I go near a pinball machine something happens to it. A brand new machine fresh out of the crate will somehow develop a flipper issue within minutes of me playing it, or something goes wrong with the display, or the coin box stops working, or whatever. Damn it, I want to get into buying pinball machines one day but I guess I’ve fallen afoul of some ancient curse.

The first PlayStation 2 Sony sent me: “Here’s your review PlayStation 2, fresh from Japan” the nice PR person told me, “you can just use your regular PlayStation 1 cables with it”. Well, I promptly hooked it all up and turned it on. A few minutes into Ridge Racer and people around me started asking what the smell was. Oh, it turns out that the PR guy meant I could use all my regular Japanese PlayStation 1 power cables (110 watts) with it, not the over-powered Australian ones (240 watts). One completely fried PlayStation 2 later I was politely informed Sony would not be sending me a replacement. Greedy mongrels!

Guitar Hero Guitar: I was drunk. I was a jerk. I later regretted it. But man oh man did it feel good to finally get a perfect score on Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend” in Guitar Hero 2 and then proceed to smash the living crap out of the guitar in true rock and roll style. I wish there was an achievement I could have unlocked or something.

PC monitors: Did you know that I blame my horrendous eyesight on Commodore’s line of incredibly blurry and bulky PC monitors? I thought they would have been awesome after how good the 1084 was (and still is!) but NOOO they were crap. HOWEVER, did you also know that it feels really, really good to throw Commodore’s line of incredibly blurry and bulky PC monitors into a dam? They’re heavy bastards for sure but make a satisfying CRUNCH against the concrete wall and then a big SPLASH a few seconds later. Wow, thinking back, that was a really dumb thing to do and I probably contaminated the local water supply for weeks. WHOOPS SORRY!

The house’s power supply: I had one (1) power point in my room growing up, and about 16 computers, consoles, computers and televisions all being powered from that thanks to a complex series of power point expanders and extension cables. At some point I decided, what the heck, let’s add some more power points to this mix so I can have an extra Amiga going. All I remember next was a loud bang and flying across the room, and then people being mad at me because apparently electricians are expensive? Pfft whatever I had to go without playing Elite for a while.

Daytona Arcade: Serious Daytona USA players don’t use the brakes to get around the tight corners – they just downshift the car for a second before going back up to regular gear and going on their merry way. Well, for some reason I found it really, really satisfying to wrench the crap out of the gearstick in the local arcade on my daily Daytona session, and then the damn thing broke. The greedy bastards who ran the arcade had the audacity to charge $2 a go, but then I’m the monster for breaking the gear stick? What a world.

My Grandmother’s Television: Christmas 1992. Imagine, if you will, a young me being ferried over to my grandmother’s house for the annual family reunion Christmas booze-up. I HATED these events. I didn’t really fit in with the rest of the family, who were all into sports and being loud and playing cricket in the back yard. All I wanted to do was play video games and read magazines about video games and draw pictures of video games I wanted to make one day. But! I had managed to convince the parents to let me take my SNES and new copy of Super Mario Kart along to play all day while everyone else had their own fun. And it was a great Christmas! Basically my sister, brother and I played Super Mario Kart and Game Boy by ourselves while 50 relatives drank and argued all day. But MAN, ever since then, TO THIS GOD DAMN DAY, my Grandmother STILL complains that plugging a Super Nintendo into her TV somehow broke it. She can’t even see TV any more and she still complains that evil video games destroyed her precious antique TV. IT WAS 22 YEARS AGO GRANDMA LET IT GO ALREADY.

Let’s all pour out a virtual 40 ounce for our fallen gaming hardware. Do you have any hardware failure stories?