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Growing Up Gaming in the 90s and 00s

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By: Flandrew
Narrated by: Flandrew
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About this listen

Loading Screens and Memory Cards is a nostalgic journey through the golden age of gaming — from Christmas mornings spent unwrapping new consoles to late-night sleepovers lit by the glow of CRTs.

If you remember blowing on cartridges, swapping cheat codes in the schoolyard, or fighting over who got the “good” controller, this audiobook is for you.

Join Flandrew, known for his YouTube channel celebrating classic games, to look back at the consoles, games, and memories that defined a generation — the PlayStation 2 era, the GameCube’s weird charm, the chaos of birthday party split-screen, and the pure joy of discovering new worlds before microtransactions and day-one patches.

Funny, heartfelt, and packed with stories any 90s or 00s gamer will relate to, this is a love letter to the days when “please wait…” meant you had a moment to dream.

©2025 Flandrew (P)2025 Flandrew Art Heartfelt Funny
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I enjoy Flandrew's videos and found this to be a really fun dive into the past. Being a similarly 30-something-year-old Brit, a lot of this felt very familiar, from the events to the games to the social experiences. Flandrew manages to capture the feeling of what it was like living through these times and the feeling videogames gave us when we were younger, which left me feeling rather nostalgic. I would recommend to other 30-something-year-olds who grew up with - and still love (if not quite the same way we used to) - videogames for a nice evening trip down memory lane.

A nostalgic journey

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Not only do I get enjoyment out of the familiarity of these tales of growing up in the late 90s to late 2000’s. But also a fascinating look into the areas that I skipped when it came to videos games. It’s written so well that it like hearing memories of an alternative version of myself. Extremely relatable and enough here to listen too more than once,

Also the performance can’t be ignored! Flandrew goes into voicing other characters with several fun impersonations that make me picture relatives and friends I had growing up. Really adds to the whole enjoyment of an audiobook. I also found myself getting a little misty eyes at one point in which he ponders selling a console for an electric guitar. Enough to say I was really impressed with this one. Can’t wait for more if we get so lucky.

A charming tale of growing up with games.

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Flandrew's book is largely what his YT audience would expect, read with the same inflections and showcasing the familiar sense of humor of the content creator. What makes it stand out from his regular videos is how in the book he provides a full perspective into his gaming childhood, complete with all sorts of nostalgic anecdotes, something that he sometimes does hint at in his videos, but only now can properly elaborate on. That being said, the book does suffer whenever he pivots away from recounting his own past and instead focuses on the larger market picture, which admittedly is necessary in such instances as introducing a new console, but for example the chapter on the movie tie-in games felt very derivative of his YT output. Such detours are, however, few and far between.

The whole thing reads (and listens) like a breeze of course and certainly does provide a glimpse into Britain's '90s/2000s gaming scene. And while myself, the author's two years senior born some 600 kilometers further east I can hardly call relatable an account of a childhood in which "everybody had a PS2", nobody needed to resort to piracy and PC gaming was nonexistent, I did crack a smile or two at Flandrew's frantic attemps at covering up his act of violenece against a beloved Nintendo DS in front of his parents and other cute childhood memories of the sort.

Good listen for Flandrew' fana and those interested in old British gaming

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