Have You Played... Magic Pockets?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

The Bitmap Brothers made some superb and well-remembered games in the eighties and nineties, including future-sport biff 'em up Speedball, top-down steampunk action game The Chaos Engine and the superbly soundtracked shooter Xenon 2.

So why do I think of Magic Pockets much more often than the rest of them?

Magic Pockets is the story of a kid who is probably radical and awesome and gnarly. He has pockets infinite in size that store all of his many toys, as was common in the early nineties. I'm not entirely sure what happens next but I think he goes inside his own infinite pockets to collect all of his toys when monsters, which also live in his pockets, hide them.

A boy inside his own monster-infested pocket, flipping coins at creatures.

It's one of those games that has lodged itself in my brain so strongly that I can remember specific animations (the bulge of pockets...pockets within pockets?) and sound effects. What I can't remember is whether it was actually any good. As with all games of the period, I played them because I only got one new game every couple of months if I was lucky, so even if it were crap I spent weeks with anything new.