David’s Best of Everything: 1980s

To celebrate this month’s Significant Birthday, I wanted to try to do some kind of special Top Ten list. Except that’s really hard and complicated because of how various dates – such as, y’know, Christmas – have fallen. So then I had the frankly incredible idea to have a series of lists. Except, really, they’re not lists… it’s just the Best of the Best. Year by year, topic by topic, highlighting my most favouritest things that have happened in every year of my life. Starting in 1981 – obviously – and rocketing through the decades – nay, centuries, nay, millennia – to the present day, I’m going to list movies, games, and more. A comprehensive chart of my most beloved.

Obviously this is not only hugely subjective, but it’s also subject to the vagaries of my own memory. There’s a lot of nostalgia going on in here. And also a lot of things I’ve forgotten.

So we start in the eighties. What is there to say about this decade? Some of these things I enjoyed at the time, but a lot of them I came to later (which makes sense as I was literally unborn for most of 1981). Obviously as far as films go, there were some truly epoch-defining movies, from E.T. to Aliens and beyond (1984 was a hell of a year to pick favourites for). Game-wise, most of these were things I wasn’t actually playing at the time – that’ll come next decade, and the same is mostly true for books and songs, really. TV, though; I was watching that at the time. But really the big takeaway for the 1980s is this is some formative stuff for me, really big, important, influential pieces of art and entertainment – but ones that I didn’t, for the most part, catch first time round. These were things I absorbed, that came into me through osmosis, but over time became some of my most adored things of all time. Watchmen! Die Hard! Hallelujah! Nick Cave! Gordon Bennet, who would I be without these?

Also of interest: throughout the decades I think we’ll see some names bubbling up again and again. Already we can see Steven Spielberg has managed to make the list twice. Wonder how often he’s going to be coming back? I think when this is all over I’ll do some kind of tally…