I noticed a few people were posting in the Hive Gaming community about their memories of gaming and it inspired me to do the same.
I may be a little older than some of the other participants. I mainly grew up in the 70's, but then that was the time of the birth of video games, so I have seen them develop.
My first experience of video games was probably some of the early arcade machines such as Space Invaders and Breakout that started appearing in various places such as pubs and cafes. There were amusement arcades around, but they would previously have had pinball and other mechanical machines.
From Wikipedia
At some point there were three arcades in Midland Road in my hometown of Bedford and I spent a lot of time in those. One game I particularly loved the original Star Wars game that you could sit in. I saw the movie when it came out as an eleven year old and so of course I loved it.
From Wikipedia
Others I remember are Tempest, I Robot, Dragon's Lair, Centipede, Missile Command, Firefox, Donkey Kong. Some of these I did not play so much.
At home there were not many options for gaming to start with. At some point my parents bought us a simple console that had variations of Pong. I think we only ever had the standard cartridge for it and I have no idea who made it.
At around 13 we got access to a computer at school. Some friends had already got hold of things like the Sinclair ZX80, but they were still a lot of money. What we actually had was a Teletype that used an acoustic coupler to connect to a computer at the local college. We had to take turns to use it, but we did go to the college sometimes where there was a room full of Teletypes and even some terminals with screens. As well as our schoolwork we would try to write simple text games. There were some available on the college computer, incluing 'Lunar Lander' where you had to type in values for thrust to avoid crashing. You could end up with a lot of printout from doing this.
From Wikipedia
A friend had various computers that he would let me play on. One was the Video Genie (Tandy/Radio Shack TRS80 clone) and he had a Spectrum later.
In my teens I saved up to get a BBC Micro, which was being used in schools by then. Below is a 3d printed version that can hold a Raspberry Pi. The book is one I got early on and I would try to make the programmes work on the college computer. The BASIC language has lots of variants, so they could need some adaptation. It was all good programming experience.
The 'Beeb' had some pretty good games, but the Sinclair Spectrum tended to have a bigger range, although its graphics were more simple. I used to go to a local computer club that did descend into a copying club. I acquired various games, but also bought some. Some of my favourites were Pacman, Defender and Chuckie Egg. The pinnacle was Elite with its 3d graphics. I spent many hours playing that and it was all done using cassettes as storage. A floppy drive cost almost as much as the computer itself.
From Wikipedia
I used the Beeb for several years, but during my college years I did not play many games. I had use of the mini-computer at Coventry Polytechnic using video terminals. I think there were some simple games on that.
It was some years before I bought another computer in the form of a second hand Amiga 500. That had some great games and I had access to copies of some of them such as Lemmings and Monkey Island. Eventually I upgraded to an Amiga 1200 with a hard drive! I liked the pinball games on that. Around then games like Doom started appearing, but were not available on the Amiga.The nearest we had was Alien Breed 3D. which was crude in comparison.
At that time I was working in an office writing business software. We could get away with playing some games at lunch time and someone got us Duke Nuken 3D. We had lots of fun with that, especially in network mode. I remember one of the guys seemed to play games all day at times and did not get into trouble. I think he was also having an affair with someone in the office, so he got all the fun.
Much as I loved the Amiga the company was going nowhere. I did upgrade mine to the limit with a 68040 processor and 32MB of memory. That did allow me to play the open source clone of Doom when it became available, years after the PC version. I also had a Mac emulator that gave me access to a few more games. I played the Discworld adventure, but tended to get stuck on it.
I had to give in and get a PC in the end. That was a Pentium 3, 350MHz model I think. I played more Lemmings on that too, but the main game I got into was Half-Life 2, which set new standards in gaming.
Since then I have been less into gaming generally. We got a Wii for the kids and I played various games on that. The kids had the Nintendo DS, but I never used those. Now my son has a PS4 that I never use.
I do actually have a Megadrive and a PS2 in my study, but they are rarely used. I could set up the Wii if I fancied some gaming, but I do not find the time.
These days I am a casual gamer with the various Hive games such as Splinterlands, Rising Star and Cryptobrewmaster. I tend to spend my time socialising on Hive, doing online courses and watching TV when I am not making music or running.
It has been interesting to see the evolution of computer games over about 40 years from simple text games to immersive 3d experiences. I just do not feel compelled to spend hours on them now. My PC would not be up the the job of running the latest games anyway.
I know there are other games that I played along the way. It was a big part of my growing up, but it is a different world these days with various options to play on the move. As a kid I would go out fishing or skateboarding. I am not going to preach about what is best for kids, but I think they benefit from a range of experiences, not all of them in front of a screen.
Game on!
