My first exposure to gaming was two fold, when I was really young my dad still had one of those old Pong consoles, with the two paddles and the switch box for difficulty, it was a clone not one of the originals. From there onwards I played at a friends who had an atari and we played superman for hours and crappy pacman as we called it. I was only allowed to play on the PC in around 1986 when my step-dad got a 286 to replace the old XT, from then onwards we could play games like Battle of Britain, Test Drive, Street Rods and various other classics. The old XT was still used by myself and a friend to play Sopwith, King's Quest and the copy of Leisure Suit Larry he got.
I still fondly remember the 80's as a more magic kind of time for gaming, we once went to a friends house and they were filthy rich, their son had just gotten this new fangled thing for his computer called a soundcard, we knew of them but this was something else. It was a Roland, he put on the ghostbusters game and it sounded like the soundtrack from the movie it was impressive. We also heard "Looks like you hit a tree,Jim" proper speech from the PC not sounding all robotic like. Then he showed us Mean Streets on his SVGA monitor and I was blown away, it was so pretty.
The 90's didn't really change a lot, but tech seemed to slow down in comparison you did get a few leaps and jumps, but nothing like the jumps in the 80s. Yes the introduction of 3D cards was amazing and seeing what a Voodoo could do compared to my ATI Mach64 was like wtf!!! Also getting CD tech and seeing the FMV games and how awesome they looked, it was like wow we are playing movies... Which it turned out we were :-D.
Lived for a while at friends of my parents. They were "rich", or relatively speaking to me and from my perspective as a constantly broke student.
The kid had a Coleco Pac-Man mini arcade. I was constantly playing the game and the books lost out. At some stage, I was playing in my sleep, dreaming the different levels and keeping exact score at each stage.
Wasn't a big fan of Pac-Man, but the concept of a handheld computer game...
He also had a games console, that was referred to as "the computer". I wanted to know how you can program it. Sorely disappointed that you had to buy cartridges and couldn't do your own thing.
Memories, oh memories
