Super Hang-On

That was, of course, until they went back to work and university respectively.

Build it up

As often as possible during our playthrough – when we finished a stage, upgraded our bike or got a new mechanic – we feverishly wrote down passwords to pick up where we left off. This being a super-early Mega Drive game, there were no save states; it was all about the long, 28-symbol code to jump back in where we left off.

It was exhausting, but it was the only real way to guarantee a jumping-in point for all possible bike spec and race combinations. The difference between the bottom and top specs of the bike was insane too, not least in the frame and engine departments. You started with what felt like a lead body and a lawnmower engine but, for the eventual princely sum of $16 million, you’d get the top-spec parts (but not before buying plenty of in-betweens along the way).

Money was regularly spent fixing a bike (which literally wouldn’t leave the starting line if you didn’t), draining precious race winnings if we crashed a few times along the way. Because of this drawn-out affair, we never got to complete Super Hang-On but god, did we get close. Well, I say “we”. My brothers did every single bit of the heavy lifting, across long late-summer afternoons and occasional Sunday late-evening spells. I sat back, behind them, in quiet awe.

Eventually, they ran out of time. One went back to London to work; the other went back to East Yorkshire to study. They gave me their scribbled passwords as recompense, which felt good – I’d been handed the baton.

Entering the passwords, however, was another matter.

Get knocked down

There was a massive, ridiculous issue with Sega’s password planning. It decided, in its infinite wisdom, that it would use the full keyboard – including numbers – to generate its codes. It also applied a weird, nonsensical colour scheme to it. Only years later did I realise why.

Blown up in huge, pixel-perfect HD, it’s easy to see the difference between zero and the letter O – but even then, there’s only two pixels in it, making the zero symmetrical and slimming down the right-hand side of the capital letter. Sega purposefully put them in green and red respectively for a reason, much as they did 1 (green) and capital I (yellow).

Yet in my brothers’ minds, Super Hang On’s O-shaped password symbols were all the same one; no colour or difference was considered. And so, through trial and ALWAYS error, I discovered that I couldn’t get to their highest level; the old passwords, seen as surplus to requirement, had been binned as soon as they wrote a new one. My mum, ever the efficient housewife, ensured bins were emptied on a regular basis.

Never forget

So, over minutes and, on two occasions, full hours, I had to listen to the same ten-second Password ditty on repeat. It was cute at first. Now, it’s tattooed on my brain. You’ll soon understand why:

It haunted me to such an extent that now, Password is always there, in the back of my head, waiting to return. It’s just ready to play on low volume, taunting my very soul, assuming I have one. When I’m frustrated when writing, or lost on my way to a specific place, or trying to remember something that I’m SO CLOSE to recollecting, the Super Hang-On Password song is fucking playing in my head.

I’ve never been able to stop it, but it’s effectively become a musical version of Stockholm syndrome. I’ve learned to love it and, if anything, it’s the perfect motivation to get the answers I’m looking for, whether it be the right phrase, direction or memory.

One true positive that arose from Super Hang-On, however, is that I’ve always written my zeroes with a line through them ever since: ∅. Eleven-year-old me ensured I’d never make the same mistake as my brothers once did.

I later learned that, much like Metroid, the game’s ending did the whole “oh my god, it was a woman the whole time!” reveal, which was genuinely cool. Even better was the fact a fangirl went up to the winning rider assuming it was a bloke; the triumphing cyclist raised their helmet to reveal they were also female, before seemingly flicking a very British reverse V-sign at the adoring fan, making her storm off in disgust.

And so, I never completed Super Hang-On. Even now, instead of succeeding, I’m usually too busy spending half my races in mid-air, suffering one of many clearly lethal crashes but just managing to survive each race – but dying inside after failing to progress yet again.