2018-12-19

Rederiet Gamer's Guide

Rederiet is Sweden's longest running soap opera on TV. I lasted 20 seasons from 1992 to 2002. A total of 318 episodes was produced. Every episode was 45 minutes long making it 14 310 minutes or almost 239 hours of pure fun. All episodes are available at SVT Play. The series actually contains some funny moments for gamers. We will here let you know all of them as we watch it all over again.

1992

Season 1, episode 5 (10:30): One of Gustafs monitors are acting weird. This monitor/TV is almost the same as the SABA M 25 that Victor from Revansch! uses.

Season 1, episode ? (??:??): Pirojo's son Esa is playing Game Boy in one of the episodes, forgot which though.

1993

Season 3, episode 1 (4:30): One of the founders and the former general of Retrospelsmässan appears briefly with his grandmother when Uno is falling in the stairs. His name is Kristofer Aspman-Hansson, nowadays a Swedish game collector. Very young in this episode.

Season 3, episode 8 (39:30): A girl is playing the pinball Whirlwind (Williams, 1990) in the ship's arcade hall. And yes, she places here soda on top of the glass. You can also see Electrocoin's Neo Geo cabinet, two SEGA Mega Tech and SEGA's Virtua Racing. There is at least one more pinball in the room, unknown title though. And a exchange machine.

Season 3, episode 12 (30:00): Raspen is playing the pinball Creature from the Black Lagoon (Bally, 1992) when thinking of Kåkå, he is approached by two beautiful women that wants him to join them to the disco. He refuses. You can also see Rollergames (Williams, 1990), two(!) Star Wars (Data East, 1992) and the brand new games White Water (Williams, 1993) and Rocky & Bullwinkle (Data East, 1993). A girl is sitting on one of the Star Wars machine talking to her boyfriend. In the background a racing game is slightly shown, but which game is it?

(34:00) Later in the same episode Raspen plays Super Nintendo among the famous Bergsala plastic mountains, on a Philips CRT TV. A Finnish boy helps him. You can see the Game Boy logo on several places. Kåkå i pregnant, maybe a child would be fun after all he seems to think.

Season 3, episode 15 (32:00): Raspen has multiball on the pinball The Addams Family (Bally, 1992) when Kåkå interrups.

1994

Season 5, episode 4 (36:00): A drunken unpleasant man destroys one of the ship's one-armed bandits. You can clearly see that the owner of the slot machine is Sven-Aage Bengtsson's company Arcadia, who also had arcade games at for example Gröna Lund.

Season 5, episode 9 (29:00): Pehr Silver har turned the restaurant into a western themed one. Without any real reason Siv Svensson is playing Game Boy (probably Tetris, if it is turned on?) in the bar, when her boyfriend Carl is mocking her. You can also see the slot machines again in this episode.

1996

Season 8, episode 9 (33:00): After some seasons without any real gaming references (just lots of gambling) we again meet the Game Boy in the bar. Little girl Blanca loans Jokers gaming device. Tony helps her start the Golf game seen in the scene. The sound is probably from another game though.

1997

Season 11, episode 7 (1:58): Tony is in the hospital with the kid Jonas. He gives the analog Real Hockey game to him as a present. This game by SweGame AB challenged the classic Stiga table hockey in the 90s, but was soon forgotten again.

Season 11, episode 9 (2:25):
 Tony is again in the hospital with Jonas. Jonas has a very nice bed set with classic 90s racing Super Mario! Worth a peak. Can also be seen in episode 11 and 12.

Season 11, episode 12 (31:58): Finally some real video games again! Jonas gets a Game Boy Pocket in silver from his dad. The game cartridge is yellow and probably Donkey Kong Land (Rare, 1995), but the screen is really hard to see. It might be number 2 in the series also, it was released at this time. However number 3 was not.

To be continued...