Over the years I have allocated an inordinate amount of time to games. Mostly PC, plus various console games, Atari ST games, boardgames, cardgames, and table-top RPG's. My first game ever was Pong, on this monster!

The Teleng Colourstars! I remember it absolutely blowing my mind for an hour or so when I was about five or six years old! Thinking about it, this is one of my earliest memories! Another early one is watching Tom Baker's "Doctor Who" transition into Peter Davison's on the same tiny black and white television I played pong on - I remember a sense of belwilderment and disappointment - I wanted the crazy-clown looking guy back, not this boring looking new guy!

Playing a game on a T.V was the beginning of a new paradigm, however the Teleng was just too basic, and pong gets old real fast! Fast forward several years and this staggering wonderbox entered my life! The Atari 520ST. A thing of beauty!

The way its grey moulded plastic faded to beige over time still fills my heart with a nostalgic revelry I can barely contain! The 80s were beige - our corduroy trousers were beige, the nicotine stained walls were beige, our food was beige, the inside of our leaded-petrol infused lungs were beige! Beautiful beige, wonderous, wonderous

b e i g e !

I think my folks delayed getting a computer because they wanted a machine that wasn't just a gaming device, or just a workhorse, and the Atari was the first machine that could do both for a reasonable-ish price. Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore (and now the owner of Atari Corporation) had specifically designed and marketed the ST as just such a computer "We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes.". Anyway... Some of the games on this thing absolutely rocked; possibly the first immersive sim game ever made was released solely on this little beige-grey monkey - Dungeon Master by FTL..... Holy fiddlesticks Batman, what a game! I still play it from time to time!

 

In '88 this was cutting edge, it put the shits up me as a kid! And it was fucking tough - the monsters, puzzles and pitfalls were the "easy" part, inventory and resource management was a must or you'd just starve to death before you left the first few levels! You'd find yourself hiding in safe areas, then pummeling the walls with fireballs till you levelled up your fighter (who needed to learn them spells or be dead weight!), creating strategic caches of food and water, making your own maps, marking where you'd been with your old boots and underwear! Realtime combat, respawning monsters haunting your every step - this game wanted you dead!

And these little green bastards - "You can eat 'em, but they taste like shit!"

And you will eat them, a shit-ton of them!

Initially I watched my old man play it, then plucked up courage to have a pop... I've still never beaten it!

Run Away!

I played loads of the classics on this baby; Speedball, the earlier Ultima games, Xenon 2 Megablast, Captive, Barbarian, BSS Jane Seymore, Midwinter, Megalomania, Sid Meiers Pirates, Onslaught, Robocop, Carrier Command, Monkey Island, Stunt Car Racer, International Karate+. Oh scores of games!

 

I also used it to do some sampling with TCB Tracker, a 4 track sampler, I remember using the ST they had in the music room at school to run some tunes through a guitar amp via midi out, we cranked it up and nearly blew the roof off! Me and a couple of mates kinda had carte-blanche to do what we liked from the music teacher, so we often locked ourselves in the storage room with all the synthesisers, amps and other gadgets and just went mental - a few of the girls joined us and we kinda had mini-raves. The one time She had to go fetch the Headmaster to get us out because he was the only person in the school loud enough to shout over the music! He was like "We can hear this on the other side of the school, I apprectiate your enthusiam for making music, but turn it the fuck down!" he didn't say "the fuck", but he nearly did!

♜ PC "Master Race" ♜

Then along came this honking contraption, an IBM 386!

The poor old Atari was shuffled into retirement, as playing Westwoods Dune 2 occupied all our gaming time. It was a bit of a shit computer, borderline obsolescent when we got it circa 1993. PC gaming was an awkward affair back then as they were work-horses, not games machines. Having to dick around setting up the audio to function correctly was one thing that springs to mind, IRQ channels or something - there was no plug and play in them days! I think my first foray onto the internet happened on this thing, I'm pretty sure there were no British internet providers, so it was a 28k modem connection to the States, most likely AOL. I think my folks canned the idea as it was catastrophically expensive!

Anyway... Let's go back to Dune II. An absolutely seminal game, so seminal I need new underpants. This was the proto-RTS that got the whole Command and Conquer schtick on the road.

 

Countless hours spent (not wasted. Spent... Wisely) staring at these various screens, planning and plotting...

 

...With this obsequious little goblin; I mostly played house Ordos, the duplicitous, sneaky Faction.

Although I did have a bit of a soft spot for twinkly blue eyed Fremen babe!

This machine would've been our first DOOM-box as well - suck on my barely playable frame-rates Cacodemon! We revisted it later on our better PC's!

⛤ Don't Satanic Panic! ⛤

Here I will backstep a bit, because during my mid Atari era, circa '91, along came Gary Gygax, and these two beauties - my cup runneth over!

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons! Second Edition! The Forgotten Realms! All encompassed in the dank basement of one of my Dad's younger workmates, Steve!

That basement rocked, it smelled like a fucking dungeon, it had an alchove with skulls, a big fucking sword on the wall, candles, a big map, and four older ne'er-do-wells who were all insane in their own very different ways; Paul, the butcher with the sinister eyebrows. Lee, who looked like a Vulcan and always played a thief. Big Jules, who looked like a young Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski (and acted like him!), and Dave, who looked like 80s Pete Burns (before all the surgery!).

Steve was the DM, the wrangler of all these disturbed young adults, and me and my buddy Mark - two schoolboys! Steve did a good job of keeping the darkness at bay, he was older, mid 20s, so he could crack the whip! But good lord those boys were wrong-uns! We had some cool adventures, mostly because they were wrong-uns!

You could tell they wanted to do evil shit in the game, I think that's why Steve got us in, so they'd have to tone it down (I think he'd got a bollocking of Jule's mum, he'd got a shrine to Myrkul or something in his bedroom, it freaked her out!). So they all "attempted" to keep it PG13, with varied success. My memories are vague unfortunately, but I remember that when we first started Mark was playing a hobbit thief, he screwed something up, drank a dodgy potion or something, and ended up 7 foot tall! Everyone had a good laugh at the idea of him slapping round trying to sneak with massive oversize hobbit feet like fucking sasquatch! Best days of my life - I've had a hell of a lot of good times doing other stuff, but Sundays at Steve's were the days you can never replicate!

PC... Upgrade?

Here I will return to computers, and this dirty fecker - the TIME Pentium 66!

Oooh, I remember that little losenge-shaped power button!

This PC was a right box of farts! 2 grand it cost back in xmas '95 - two THOUSAND
funking pounds! "B-b-but it's got a math co-processor!", well whoop-dee-diddly-doo! This PC was everyone in the family's; birthday, christmas, and holiday for the next 12 months!! We got it to do shool and office work on, play games, print stuff on the swanky Epson stylus 400 inkjet printer (which was a great bit of kit), and to
"surf the internet"... but the modem was borked... (massive sad face)...

My folks returned it a few times, to no avail. I remember my Dad marking the components with UV marker because he was convinced they were swapping out other components for worse ones, we checked, and he was right - they were using our PC like an organ donor! Hawwk Twah 🫟, there you go TIME, have some spittle!

It was a crap PC, but it ran many of the games that were good at the time - Oof, Command and Conquer, don't mind if I do! Get some of that Kane, you baldy, beardy, bastard! After the excellent Dune 2, Westwood had done it again! C&C needs no introduction or review, the battle between GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod is well documented in the annals of gaming!

Warcraft 2 was another stonker, as was Full Throttle, Quake, Unreal, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Star Wars: Dark Forces; and one of my faves at the time -
Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares! This was one of the first "just one more turn"
4X games... wait... what's that weird noise, birdsong? Oh, it's 8am the following day!

I also bought the beautiful abomination that was Ecstatica 2 - good lord it was a heinous game to actually play - you entered each room at a different angle and perspective, but with the same character-relative movement controls - so you had to reconfigure your brain every time you changed area just to be able to walk about... Resident Evil also had this style of play, but it was nowhere near as frustrating!

Definitely not gonna fall off there repeatedly!

Dark Earth was another game I enjoyed that has disappeared into the mists of time, probably cos it was weird, the protagonist was some ugly dude, and everyone else was too busy looking at Lara Croft's polygon titties!

 

Dark Earth, by French developers Kalisto Entertainment, was a weird one - like Ecstatica 2 it also had a character-relative movement control system that made it a bit difficult to play; but it was more narrative oriented, so it could get away with it - kind of a "point and click plus". I seem to remember really liking it, it had a "Nameless One" style angsty protagonist a few years before Planescape Torment did it - in fact there is a very distinct similarity between the two games - maybe Chris Avellone was also a fan! I have no doubt in my mind that other devs looked at Dark Earth and went "oooh... I fucking like that!" - yet again the French were leading the way, like they always do; if you look closely at art, music and culture!

Sony Playstation!

Back in my day this is what Playstation controllers looked like, and they ran on steam!

Here I will take a slight backstep, because another little grey bundle of virtual joy entered our house in xmas '96 - The Sony Playstation! We were late to the PS scene, but it didn't really matter - back then most consoles had a bare bones games selection for the first 6 months or so after release - which meant coming late to the party just wasn't an issue! It was loads cheaper by the end of '96, and came bundled with Destruction Derby 2 and Tekken 2. I had already played the first Tekken loads round a mates house during the year, so I hadn't been totally out of the loop - but now it was time to get my ass whooped by my younger brother with his ninja reflexes and idactic memory for Yoshimitsu moves! Nina Williams and Lei Wulong were my go-to characters, mmmm... leggy Nina with those leggy legs!

So now we had double the computers - and double the shouty! I mostly liked to shout at Tekken 2, because I was a bit shit at it... I did less shouting at Time Crisis, because I have an innate "shoot from the hip" talent that meant I was pretty fucking good at it! Then, at the end of '97, Final Fantasy VII released in the UK, and everyones minds were blown, it could get a bit shouty at times - the random battles where you couldn't save (and might lose an hours play if you fucked up) had the potential to get very shouty, but it was such an amazing game that all was forgiven!

Think big, think TINY!

'97 had been a good year for gaming, but our next aquisition was a TINY Pentium II 300mhz for Christmas, and it was a helluva machine - a massive step up from the TIME box-o-farts. Like every PC in those days "Moore’s law" came along and rendered it almost obsolete in a couple of years; but for a score of months it was the Daddy (and our PS1 was the Mommy). God, '98 was the game-ularity! The sheer fucking amount of awesome games I played pretty much ruined the rest of my life -
how could reality ever hope to compete!

Couldn't find an actual picture of it, this is the P III 500 mhz, very similar case though!

Time for some Half-Life you say, damn right! Grim Fandango? Alrighty then....
PC-gaming heyday ahoy! We were now bona-fide members of the "PC master race" great times were ahead - PC Format magazine, Virgin Megastores, MVC, Electronics Boutique, Gamestation, FTP servers and Warez - if a game was any good we begged,
borrowed, bought, swapped, or stole it - your Grand Theft Auto's, your Star Craft's, your Baldurs Gate's - they all need no introduction...

Thief: The Dark Project may need one though - it has had great influence, unfortunately Looking Glass Studios went under years ago; however, you may have met the game's spirtual sucessor, Dishonored.

Oooh, a bit of "creepy roundy in the darky!" yes please! The protagonist, Garrett, was a cool operator, he needed no special powers, just stealth, some water arrows, and his trusty blackjack! His voice actor, Stephen Russell, has graced many a game since; you may have heard his gravelly tones in Skyrim, the Captital Wastelands, you may have even inhabited his skin in Dishonored 2!

"Some may call this junk. I call them treasures!"

Thief was a pioneering game, and along with Looking Glass's other masterpiece, System Shock 2, they helped put the immersive sim on the map - multiple ways to move through the environment to complete your heist, smart enemy AI, great graphics, cool music and atmosphere, and Garrett was smoother than greased teflon! Screw Batman, it was Garrett's cloak I wanted to inhabit!

It didn't stop there! We still had the PS1, and the jungle drums were bangin' loud about an awesome game that had just been released in Japan - Metal Gear Solid... Aaand unfortunately it wouldn't be hitting our stores for months! By autumn the wait was gnawing at us, so in the end I got it imported from America when it released in October '98 instead of having to grizz it out for another four months till the European release in February 99! I wasn't 100% sure I actually did this, but now I am, because thinking back I remember being pissed off at getting stung for import tax on it! I think we also had to get an NTSC adapter lead to connect it to the t.v, and maybe even a modchip as well to get it to run region free.

We definitely got a modchip at some point, because region-locked timed releases fucking sucked - we were PS1 second class citizens in the UK - so if you knew someone who could do it, you got your Playstation modded! Yarr ha har matey!

Yup, it was like the Atari days all over again; but if companies are gonna go and put up arbitrary regional barriers stopping people being able to buy their product, they can go and get fucked! We still bought the games we liked though, it was just nice to have the option, game rentals were pretty cheap by this stage, and swap shops like Gamestation where on the highstreet - so piracy wasn't really as rife and heinous as people made out.

The name's James Bond... Jaaaaaames Bond!

Time for another re-re-wind! Around March '98 my brother bought a Nintendo 64,
so it was time for some Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64! I was never particularly "into" the N64 stuff - I didn't really like the controller, nor was I interested in Mario, or any of the other classic Nintendo "kiddy" games. I hadn't played them much as a kid - we never owned a NES or SNES, so they held no nostalgia for me.

Goldeneye just didn't hit the same for me as it did for other console-players at the time either - I'd been spoiled - I'd already played Quake, DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D and most of the other classic first person shooters on the PC - and the "new-fangled" N64 analogue thumbstick was no match for mouse and keyboard! I don't think we got that many games for it either, 'cos they were so fucking expensive!

Zelda: Ocarina of Time was one of them though, and my bro loved it! I never played it much myself - being in my early 20s I was more into gritty stuff, so I kinda bounced off it; though I did play Wind Waker a few years later on the Gamecube. Not sure why, but Wind Waker just appealed to me more - I think I'd recently read (or re-read) Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, and the maritime nature of Wind Waker reminded me of Ged's travels in his boat. I revisited Ocarina years later on PC emulator, but I don't think I got very far with it.

Haz you got, WAREZ???

Mmmm... t'internet - I wonder what secret places lurk within you...

Hoist the Jolly Roger, it was time to set-sail into the blistering headwinds of 56k cyberspace! With a Yo ho Ho, and a bottle of questionable internet actvities...

Nothing to see here, move along!

The Warez scene was a game in itself - me and my folks initially pronounced it
Wa-Rez, because we were too fucking dumb for leet speak! It was like virtual geocaching - you were scouring message boards and newsgroups for clues as to where you could find treasure in the form of illicit software! It was like a little pirate quest, with a map, a riddle, an "X marks the spot" and a "Here be Dragons"!

OOOOh... you've just found a juicy clue on alt.warez.uk. Oh Lordy - it's 0‑day - fresh as a daisy and still likely up! You were on the clock, and the timer was ticking down until the system admin noticed the spike in network traffic and deleted the folder with the beautiful WAREZ!!

T'was off to the good ship cuteFTP to haul some swag!

File Transfer Protocol clients were how you accessed the folders on the server where the files had been uploaded. Most of the time they were on university servers with fast connections that had an overworked Admin, and a compromised file structure. The files were placed inside nested folders to obscure their existance on the system - they rarely lasted more than a few days before being spotted! It was definitely a buzz, because there was no real public knowledge of this stuff at the time, so it was like being a secret agent or something - you could definitely have used the skills to do something really naughty, but we never did, we just wanted to play some games!

Well that's all the romantic rememberings my neurons have got left - you often left with sweet F.A; because the Admin had locked down the file system before you had downloaded all the zips; or they were corrupt; or missing the sound;
or totally borked in some other way!

Now before anyone reaches for the harness of their High-Horse - we did this on a 56k modem - the absolute maximum download rate you could hope to achieve was 7kb per second, that's roughly one megabyte every 3 minutes! Realistically it was much slower, more like 5 mins per megabyte - so it could literally take days to download whatever it was you were after; a game rip, some low quality mp3's, or a garbled VCD of some obscure Golden Harvest martial arts film from the 70s!

It really wasn't worth our time, or our bandwidth!

It was the buzz of doing something illicit that was the fun part, not the rewards (which were often pretty crap!) - it was L33t, it was hacker, it was cool! I know it was morally wrong (and illegal), but I will say this; I have spent fucking thousands on software, hardware, magazines, CD's, DVD's and other media over the decades, so I've more than made up for whatever scraps I downloaded at the time (while I was earning 3 quid an hour washing dishes in a local pub kitchen). I'm putting this up here as a bit of internet history; I was considering deleting it, but it was a long time ago, and things were different back then...