Born in 1971, my first exposure to video games would have been the Atari 2600 probably around 1980-ish I would guess when my father borrowed the console from one of his work colleagues who had gone overseas for a few months. Games were very expensive back then and if I recall I had access to two games…. Pac-Man and Adventure. I remember playing both of them over and over for hours on end.
I remember my cousin also got an Atari 2600 around the same time… he had more games and I specifically remember wanting to play Asteroids every time we went to his house which he hated because it got to a point where I got so good at that game I could make a single game last for what must have seemed like hours back at that time.
Probably around the early 1980s I then got a Philips Videopac G7000 (aka Maganvox Odyssey in other parts of the world). I think the reason I got that was because of the touch keyboard and belief of my parents that it was more like a ‘real computer’ and more educational than an Atari 2600… In all honesty I nearly forgot about this console whilst writing this history which shows how memorable it must have been though I do fondly recall the game Satellite Attack (UFO I believe it was called elsewhere).
So after these early consoles I then eventually in 1983, aged 12, got my first real computer… a 48K ZX Spectrum… Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Ah Diddums, Cookie, JetPac, SkoolDaze, Valhalla, Doomdark’s Revenge, Jumping Jack….. the list is never ending of games I enjoyed on this machine. The graphics may look crap now but I think my imagination filled in the gaps backs in the early 80s.
By the late 80s I then switched to an Atari ST. I think at the time this was considered the natural progression as the Commodore Amiga was the upgrade path for those who had the Commodore 64…. the arch rivals of those who owned a ZX Spectrum so there was no way I would buy an Amiga! The Atari ST it was and, although my memory of the ZX Spectrum is probably fonder, I do remember some great games on this machine such as Dungeon Master, Flood and The Secret Of Monkey Island…. damn I wish, like most of the things I owned up until this point, that I still had the original boxed games from this system.
And then it was a switch to the PC….. a 486dx33 then a Pentium and then the continual upgrade of PC to PC every few years. From the days of the 28.8k modem and Doom, bulletin boards, IRC and all the way through to present day. That trip has been a long one!
Over the following years I did dabble with consoles…. I recall having a Gameboy Color when I moved from the UK to Australia in 2000. Mario Bros Deluxe and Tetris helped pass away the hours of that flight. I also recall having a Gameboy Advance SP in the early 2000s too. Both of which I must have sold at some point.
In 2002 I purchased the original Xbox. This surprisingly was the first home console I had ever purchased new with my own money. I had missed out on the likes of the SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Megadrive etc or perhaps had been too busy being part of the PC Master Race during this period of gaming history.
Over the first decade of the 21st century I purchased several other consoles, some of which I still have today, others again long sold. Gamecube, Nintendo DSs, PSPs, Wiis…. I initially chose Xbox 360 and resisted the Playstation until eventually picking up a Playstation 3 back in the era when geohot hacked that console. My gaming collection slowly grew…. even picked up two Arcade machine cabinets that I modified to play Mame over these years.
Over the last few years though my collection has started to accelerate… nowadays it is unusual if there is a console I haven’t purchased and, although collecting old retro games from the cartridge era is too expensive, I have started to become more serious in collecting games from the Xbox 360 generations onward….
So now in 2020, perhaps somewhat spawned from Covid-19 lockdowns and a quiet period of work, I decided it may be a good idea to start a blog dedicated to my obsession…. let’s see where this goes….. welcome!