About me — how Start2Replay began

Hi, I’m Jan Jaap. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve been mad about games. Like you, probably. But growing up, money was tight. When little Jan Jaap got his hands on a game, it was Duck Hunt on a neighbour’s Nintendo, or Lingo on my aunt’s 286.

The first console in our house was an Atari 2600. No, I’m not that old. But in the late nineties there was a deal at the toy shop in Kampen: an Atari 2600 with ten games for the equivalent of about twenty euros. Those were the days. The world around me was playing on Super Nintendos, Mega Drives and cautiously some Nintendo 64s and PlayStations. But that Atari — that was ours. Our first real console.

Well, I say ours. But the device wasn’t exactly shared equally. Because the biggest fan of the Atari wasn’t me, or even my younger sisters. It was my mother, who had the joystick in her hands for hours on end, a fresh cigarette always between her fingers. Her mission: reach the end of Commando. Dodging machine gun fire and grenades, she finally reached the end of the game after months of practice. And then simply started again, going for an even higher score.

And she stayed the centre of gravity for every console that came into the house after that. The 2600 was followed by an Atari 800XE (again for next to nothing, if I remember right), where she drove us mad with hours of Moon Patrol’s bleeping. Through connections we got an old Amiga, where she cleared every room in The Addams Family. And occasionally we could spare the money to rent a PlayStation from the video shop for a weekend, and play Spyro the Dragon.

My part-time jobs in the greenhouses of IJsselmuiden and delivering newspapers eventually earned enough for a current-generation console: a Nintendo 64. With those first steps into 3D, a whole world literally opened up before me. Around every corner was a new discovery. Every painting opened a new world, every new enemy called for a different approach. Gaming had peaked, I thought. The summit had been reached, nothing more to do.

And how she enjoyed it, sitting at the kitchen table, washing away the taste of cigarettes with jet-black coffee. Her favourite was Ocarina of Time. The world bathed in golden light at your feet, the dreamy tunes you had to play on your ocarina. “Don’t you want to play a bit more Zelda?” she’d sometimes ask when I got home. “No, I want to go outside for a bit.”

My appetite for gaming was insatiable. I wanted to experience everything, even if I couldn’t afford it. Second-hand marketplaces were becoming a thing, and suddenly much more was within reach. I’d trade one console with a bit of extra cash for another. A lot of consoles passed through my hands that way. A probably incomplete list of consoles I’ve owned:

• Sega Mega Drive II
• Nintendo 64
• Sony PlayStation
• Sony PlayStation 2
• Game Boy Light
• Atari 2600
• Atari 800XE
• Amiga
• Nintendo DS
• Nintendo DS Lite
• Sega Saturn
• Sega Dreamcast
• Xbox
• Xbox 360
• Nintendo Wii
• Nintendo Wii U
• Nintendo Switch
• Nintendo Switch OLED
• PlayStation 4
• Xbox Series S

And now? Now I’m well along in my career, I have a mortgage and two kids. In many ways perhaps richer than ever. At the same time, life hasn’t got any simpler. And time is worth more than money.

That sometimes makes you long for simpler days. It does for me, anyway. In many ways: performance reviews, tax returns, parent-teacher meetings, mortgage applications, sorting out health insurance… You can’t complain, but I can’t imagine anyone actually enjoys that stuff.

So it’s nice to be able to reach back to simpler times occasionally. When you’d come home, dump your bag in the corner, pull your favourite game out of its box, push it into the console and play all Wednesday afternoon. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends on the sofa. That feeling is still right there within reach.

I experienced that recently. In a free hour from work, I drove to the thrift store in Deventer. I know my route there: as a fan of analogue cameras I have a nose for the best spots. In the corner I found the cabinet with more interesting items. No Leica this time, unfortunately, but I did spot an old friend: a silver-grey Nintendo DS Lite. Grubby, with a tangled charger and a pink stylus. But it still worked. At home I cleaned it up, ordered Tetris DS and just like that I had my time machine: before I knew it, I was back in my parents’ attic room in 2006.

Even if your life has changed enormously over the past years, those consoles are still there. Maybe you still have them in the attic or in a dusty box at your parents’ place — those Ataris, Nintendos and Segas of years gone by. They were surprisingly robust and probably still work. Still, they often need a bit of attention before you can enjoy them properly today. My DS, for example, needed a thorough clean, a fresh battery, and new rubber membranes under the buttons to get it working well again. These are small repairs that anyone can do — including you. And if you want to know how, this site is for you.

At Start2Replay I want to help you relive your best gaming memories. Your old device (or that second-hand one you picked up out of nostalgia) can be brought back to life by you, with your own hands. Before you know it, you’ll be sitting in your own personal time machine, back to the best gaming moments of your life.

So why wait? Let’s start to replay!