I had an old ass game called Valhalla on the Amiga back in the day. It was a 2d point n click puzzle adventure thing, mostly riddle based. I lovedddddd this game. I think it was just some indie game that I had a demo on from a demo disc (remember those babies?!) - I bought the game mail order.

These guys would bring out a new installment quite frequently, like I wanna say every year or so, maybe less. Anyway one of the games, I got stumpeddddd. Spent days trying to move past some roadblock in the game. Eventually resorted to reading the box and there was a helpline! So I called it up, and the person on the other end would give me a hint, and I'd progress! It wasn't even a premium number or anything which I thought was cool.

Over the series of games, I'd buy every single one as soon as it was announced, and every time I hit that wall I'd call them up, I remember they were always impressed by how far I'd gotten so quickly.

Skip to maybe a decade or two later. I get all misty eyed remembering how much I enjoyed the game series, and with the advent of the internet, I realise holy crap I can probably find it! So I googled (or more likely asked jeeves) -- and found their website, and indeed they did allow you to download the entire back catalog of games for free on PC. So I signed up to the portal.

Some days later, I get an email from the game company that just says "Is that <my name> from Hillsea Lido?!"

Having never heard of Hillsea Lido I'm like uhhh, no, it's <my name> from <my town>.

The guy responded and explained the company had gone on to make a new game called Hillsea Lido, and they'd included a character in the game, who was named after me, one of their best customers. I was so tickled!

To this day I've never been able to find a copy of the game, seems it just never found its audience. If anyone has a copy, any format, I will pay good money to see my childhood self immortalised in a video game.

It was only after this revelation I realised that when I had been phoning up this game help hotline it wasn't some big corporate contact centre, I was literally phoning up the developers who had only very recently built the game.