30 years of gaming in a nutshell

Isn’t it great how far the gaming industry has come since the 90’s? I was once a firm believer that gaming would be the same and pixelated as it was back then. I had no idea we would even come close to what we have now.

My first ever computer was the ZX spectrum, which I played mostly for the sports games. I don’t think in my opinion there was another system that quite measured up to the sports selection of the Spectrum. They had it down to a fine art, mixing competitiveness with repetitiveness.

I remember playing sports games on the C64 and although those were good, they just took far too long. Sometimes you would end up playing those types for days, perhaps months compared to the spectrums days. But in all honesty the C64 had quicker loading times and was far superior in other genres, not to mention graphics and gameplay.

Anyone remember Spy vs Spy? That was my favourite C64 game. A cult classic in my opinion

Ah the Atari, I was only fond of one game on the Atari and that was because my friend had it. Prince of Persia. Sometimes we would spend days trying to complete that game, it was super hard and I only think we were able to reach the fat guard. Anyone remember the fat guard? The one that would hit you on the parry? We had to learn to parry! Such fun.

And the Amiga. The Amiga for me was the first big step into power computing. I was given my Amiga as a Christmas present from Santa Claus (of course!), I can remember the day that I opened the packet and danced around the room like a mad bastard. The Amiga, for me was a complete cut above the rest when it came to games and I left no friend untold at school. My favourite from that system had to have been the shoot em up platform games. Those were what sold it for me.

And after that came the PC. By the time I had my PC my friends all had Amigas and I was told how Amiga was the future of computing and blah blah. Perhaps they were right but as far as I knew Amiga died a slow and horrible death. I haven’t heard anything from them in almost 20 years.

The early years of the PC were littered with flavoured and colourful games such as Doom, Hexen, Wolfenstein 3D. These games were the first to have me skipping nights out with the friends to ‘complete another level’. To say that my skipping nights out with friends made them angry was an understatement, but they’d have laughed if they knew it was to play games. I’m a bit of a fantasist at heart.

And from there gaming took a BIG leap into the unknown, you can see it now. 16 years later we have virtual reality, and I shit you not, virtual sex. Crazy, huh?