Tell me about video game history in your part of the world

ubisoft is down the street from my apartment!

yeah, but when did they get there?

late last night!

actually i'm not sure how long they've had offices there, but they added the light-up sign on the building last year.

they also recently opened up a VIDEO GAME SCHOOL.

(where you learn how to make games, not play them. i still think they should call the professors "bosses" tho)

I don't remember the first time I saw a game but the first game I owned in the UK was a handheld Space Invaders clone. That would have been 79ish. I knew by that point what arcade games were. When we drove up to the North of England to see my grandma we'd always make a halfway stop at a service station which had arcade games, my main memory of that was seeing Gauntlet for the first time and thinking OMG OMG but that was a lot later.

Most videogaming in the UK wasn't on consoles until the Sega Megadrive probably, you'd hear of people who had an Atari or a Nintendo or something but it was rare. It was almost all via home computers, it really got big in 82 with the ZX Spectrum and then the C64 (which was big in the US too I guess) and the BBC Micro which was very much the poor relation of the 'big 3' as far as gaming was concerned (it was 'educational' tho so a lot of families bought it, mine included).

The first home computer I saw was a Texas Instruments one a friend's Dad had brought back from the US, he had a Wumpus style game, I was incredibly thrilled. He also had some kind of dial-up Teletext thing (Prestel?) which had an adventure game on but I wasn't allowed to play it, just look at an opening screen, in my mind the possibilities were endless.

My Dad bought a ZX81 (a forerunner to the Spectrum with ONE K of memory!!) in 1981 and helped me program in a couple of games, there was a 'racing' one in which a little inverted 'A' had to steer between two columns of grey blocks. There was one where a letter 'U' would catch some 'O's too. Then we got a 16K add on which you had to solder on to the back, and we bought some more games on cassette, including text adventures which I got hooked on.

This has been a ridiculously long post, I am sure I will bang on about these good old days in many other threads too.

HAHAH PAL SUX U R ALL GAY

NES wasn't big in the UK?

Not huge I don't think, it would have been a cult thing.

i think the 81 had 4k.

TS: never the same colour twice v dot crawl

The 81 totally had 1k. You could get a 4k pack though if you were too pikey for the 16.

u r absolutely right. 8k rom, 1k ram. zx80 had 4k rom 1k ram. remember the screen memory was included in that ram too, which was anything from 24 bytes (nothing) to 740 odd bytes max.

I was first conscious in the mid-seventies, the era of the pinball renaissance, so my first memories of video games, while vague as hell, involve big electronic boxes very slowly shoving flipper-frenzy in all socially-acceptable spaces for quarter-sucking. The first time I saw an arcade game was probably Adventureland during someone's birthday. One fragmentary memory I have is of my oldest brother propping me up to play what might've been a driving game (surely not Death Race, right?) or maybe a shooting game: I've been going through all the era's video games and none of them look remotely familiar, much less like the game in question, which I have no clear of anyway. All I remember is that I sucked at it. Then a memory of leaving Smokey and the Bandit (or maybe it's The Cat From Outer Space) and trying to play one of those Indy 500-style games in the theater lobby even though nobody had inserted any quarters in it.

We got a Magnavox Odyssey for Christmas in what I estimate to be 1977 (weird considering they stopped making them in 1974, but whatever). Couldn't play anything worth a damn but really loved all the extra goodies added with the console to make it look as if you weren't just playing with black & white pixels. In 1979, as my brother and I were waiting for our mother to pick us from a movie, (I think The Muppet Movies) we were ogling the window display of Atari goodies at a local appliance store. A few months later, we've got it along with Combat, Basic Math, Sky Diver, Video Olympics, Brain Games, and Hunt & Score. Next year: Breakout, Canyon Bomber, Casino, Night Driver, Outlaw and Space Invaders. I thoughtfully made an account of this info circa 1980 in an Atari catalog which I still have -- that's how I know. Our electronics store of choice has a little interior room where, amongst all the fridges and washer-dryers and TV sets, they have neat piles of brightly-colored boxes -- representing every available Atari cartridge -- on a high self encircling the room. We go there every couple of months or so, and with every trip we make, the shelves get more crowded, more chromatically dazzling till they have to annex valuable floor space. I got a lot of pleasure from these games even though my brothers regularly woop my ass at them. Eventually I find out about Adventue and the Warren Robinett easter egg; intrigued, I ask my mom to get a copy, and finally, a game of my own to master.

The peak I remember being the Atari 2600 Pac-man, which we get the game the day it comes out but we can't get the Atari to work for something like four hours, by which the family is completely screaming at each other in frustration. The family's interest dies very quickly after that, though I still carry my wee little torch for home video games. In fact, I'm sorta the primary reason why we got a Colecovision for Christmas '82 (which I mainly wanted to play for Smurf Adventure). But in 1981 and 1982 we bought something like thirty to forty cartridges, and in 1983, maybe four. On a October '85 vacation to Philadelphia, there are toy stores selling carts on the streets for 99 cents -- only a few years prior, Toys R Us was selling even the crummy ones for forty-fifty dollars a pop. Eventually Atari regains a slight glimmer of respectability -- the mall Kay-Bee sells interesting ones, even new ones throughout the mid-eighties, but after Activision's Space Shuttle in '84, the family never buys a home video cart again.

By early '84, there's already something quaint about home video games, a touchstone to an earlier era, and for a couple of years I spend the first few days of summer vacation digging out the old Colecovision (effectively mine at this point) and playing everything until I get bored. The old Atari breaks and then disappears. My older brother cajoles me into lending out the whole get-up to his girlfriend's little brother; amazingly, I actually get the set back a year later (amazing because my brothers are almost never that thoughtful). The Colecovision (with the Atari emulator and all the cartridges) I *still* have and probably works, too -- last time I played it was around '95, and back then I had to hook it up to my old portable B&W TV set (which could run on batteries and was the size of an electric typewriter) because no other television I owned had the proper ports for it.

I am familiar with emulators, oh yes.

I haven't really said much about arcade games, 'cause even though I was buying all the how-to-beat-this-and-that game books of the time, I almost never played them in the arcades, basically being way too embarrassed to suck at them in public. In fact, though I had the Pac-man sheets and the Pac-man dolls and the Pac-man fake stained-glass kit, I think I've played a real (non-bootleg) Pac-Man machine only once in my entire life. But I've got plenty of nice memories of noisy arcades at the height of eighties teenage mall sleaze, and I wasted a lot of time on Xevious, Tron and Dig-Dug games in a little hut by our rented villa when we vacationed in Kiawah Island the summer of 1983. After that, the times I play an arcade game I could probably count on one hand.

Maybe I'll say something later about the home computers in my life.

cool, thanks.

I can't remember when I first became aware of games per se, we had a NES in my house but I can't tell you the exact date because I'm sure the NES was around for a little while and so even though it was released in america in '85... given that I was born in 82 I probably didn't get the NES until it must have been the late '80s, a year or two before the arrival of the genesis... I don't remember being too enthralled by it beyond and my memories of it, if there are such things, if I can call them that, are only as some kind of figurative bookmark in my own personal history, my own career - besides my own share of course of the handful of half-remembered anecdotes, diaristic and mythical both, which become crucial and central to every one and every facet of any culture, including video games consoles (for example, the difficult underwater level in TMNT or the fact no blood / sweat in mortal kombat for the SNES)... so I was awake to the fact of video games but it wasn't until the SNES and the dawned of the early mid-90s with the coming of nirvana and the disposable cash heyday (haha) of my nascent teens...

it's probably why to this day street fighter 2 is so ingrained in my mind with sonic youth and nirvana... that whole slew of mall rock... "pumpin' quarters" & plaid shirts, long hair... you know the story by now but my own take is so ingrained with these myths...

I never properly played arcade games in any serious competitive manner, I was never very good at street fighter 2, in fact I was saying just the other day how I have never actually completed it on any difficult above 4 stars and I doubt I have on any difficult below... but it was there throughout my whole teens, the cornerstone of the SNES generation... the kid on my block, the one who got everything first, he pre-ordered it and we'd congregate round his during the week... in fact I'm not even sure to what extent there was a we... round about this time we were all still pretty young and so we weren't allowed more than 1/2 people in at a time... but I'd go around often, and we'd play some SF2... listen to some sepultura, some pantera... (in fact come to think of it, that's a misremembering, the heavy rock didn't come until after the playstation...)... AW had gone off to secondary and so we were temporarily estranged... him becoming more grown up, me remaining me... I remember getting my own SNES, the mario all stars special edition, my mum was working night shift in the nursing home on christmas eve and she brought it in on christmas day... I was so happy.., I think, and I know you only need to think about something three times to imbue it with some form of memorability, nostalgia and... importance... but thinking back I think it was the last christmas where I was genuinely surprised by what I received... anyway...

it all goes blank for a while... I had swapped my NES for a gameboy and accrued some measly collection of not particularly great GB games... on weekends we'd shuffle the change in our pockets out into our palms and decide to go into the neighbouring town, it had an arcade... and we'd go in, not really play much, but it was a good place to hang out, plus the older kids always had more money and so we'd get to watch them play... which was almost as good ("look at the graphics... imagine if...")

the apogee of this, I think, was the month games master aired with the mortal kombat challenge... the local arcade got one in the next week... and wow just wow.... it was street fighter but for kids who were trying to grow up (and here I get to relay the conversation I overheard in game the other day: kid 1 - "ah'm fed up wi my DS, it's pure gay", kid 2 - "aye, pure gay") games were trying to grow up (in however a silly way) with us...

and because memory works like a homonculus: the arcade in my memory, in my history, always only fetches up with the big deals and the almost greats: the pneumatic sega rally cabinet; street fighter 2 (this was obviously back in the period where "arcade perfect" actually meant something remember... it was aspirational); the original outrun; the two simpsons & TMNT games (because it was four player); the weird peripherals (these were the ones I liked best, and it's something I haven't really pursued into adult-hood, I wonder why not... I wouldn't fall for operation wolf now as I did then)... this is just a list now and not useful....

rambling, sorry.

well just skim-reading that back... I can see the seeds of a thread I wanted to start and couldn't really think to phrase in a question form titled 'nostalgia'... I've been thinking and noting recently how (and it's prevalent here on ILG, which is why I've got to thinking about it) big a part nostalgia plays in the formation of the canon of quality... and by formation I mean the retrospective view of history and the introspective view of the present... nostalgia for the not yet over present as it were... I am a very nostalgic person, forever yearning for periods that are now gone and lost and I think this plays a big function in my attitude towards games both old and new and gaming both gamed and yet to game...

First family computer was the Sinclair ZX80 or something very much like it. Dad bought it for kicks, it seems, though I barely remember him using it at all. When he did, every time he'd press a button on it, the TV set's vertical hold would go haywire for a split second. Next year he got an Apple IIe on which he'd use Visicalc (or one of its progeny) to complete the kinds of spreadsheet work he'd ordinarily do with a big Texas Instruments calculator on green & white tabled paper. There were also a few games he'd load from big floppies, all of which I'm very hazy on: maybe a space game, maybe a text adventure, probably a pinball sim. The really notable thing was that he had a modem he'd plug the kitchen phone into and transmit his files to the office. And better yet, he'd occasionally let me use it to access encyclopedia databases and maybe some news sources, can't really remember. I'd feel very guilty about doing this because he'd remind me the costs for access were something like $30 bucks an hour, and I remember looking back at my copy of The Whole Earth Catalog and finding costs for similar services being MUCH worse.

I got my own computer, an Atari 400, on June 21, 1982, the day after my eleventh birthday -- also the same day princess Diana gave birth, which is why I remember it. The aforementioned appliance store had basically no software to speak of except for Asteroids, a game I never cared for but I wanted something to do. The only thing you could do with it without software was "memo pad." So basically what I had was a very pretentious typewriter. Dad surprised me a little later by buying me a BASIC cartridge and maybe the pain in the ass 410 tape drive as well. (A surprise because my dad was largely not the gift-giving parent. The first golden era of video gaming also happened to coincide with the emotional build-up towards my parents' decision to divorce. It was as amicable as these go, but both mom and dad still had guilt issues to work out, and my brothers and I consciously and unconciously milked this to the hilt, which is why we were given an unholy amount of stupid-ass shit during the early eighties, with consumer electronics being the least of it.) I spent the summer typing up programs from Antic magazine, a total utter awful pain in the ass given the membrane keyboard. We also get some other games, like Pac-man (awesome), something called Pogoman (awesome), SCRAM (complicated, and just mysteriously disappeared after I played it once), a few others. That Christmas I got Conversational French, which was great even though I was never able to load any of the cassettes save for one, the bastard tape drive. I go through some awful computer envy thanks to Antic: soon enough, it becomes very clear I've bought a dinosaur for which fewer and fewer games are being made, so I do the stupid thing and force my dad to drive around Long Island looking for 600XL for Christmas '83. Stupid decision -- still the same amount of RAM, "upgradable" but it's not as if we ever took advantage. Other great games: Jumpman Junior, Miner 2049er, Pitfall II (totally excellent! and I beat it!). Plus I got an Atari Touch Tablet maybe that year or the next.

I never learned to program shit. I had all the manuals and even had a programming tutorial in sixth grade, but never learned nothing. There was nothing I could do with my Atari that I thought I could do or *wanted* to do. So I never really bothered.

I don't get another functioning computer until nine years later, when my dad gets me a Mac (w/printer) from work for college. I spend the next four years doing nothing with it except use it, again, as a pretentious typewriter, though the in-built paint program is a lot of fun. No games, except Solitaire. When senior year is finished, I try sending the computer back home thru UPS, and thusly I spend post-college life without a computer of my own until three years later.

What changes my mind is my mom's PC. On a whim she goes on a trial run for Microsoft Network and then a day or two later, America Online. The internet just kills me. Soon enough I'm on her computer all the time and get a few CD-ROM games: Myst, Avalon Hill's Civilization, Microsoft Flight Simulator. And soon enough it's clear I have to get my own computer. Since then I think I've gone through maybe four or five iterations of IBM computers, some of which were hand-me-downs from my mom. Usually I stay with a computer until the thing flat-out dies, upgrading as necesssary to properly run the latest in the Myst, The Sims, Sim City and Grand Theft Auto franchises, which are really the only PC games I've ever really cared about.

I've had this IBM since the spring of 2002, the longest an IBM of mine has lasted. Since they no longer makes personal computers, I'll probably buy something off the shelf at Best Buy when it passes away. Whatever works.

i'd recommend buying a system from a place like magicmicro.com or newegg.com. You can save about $1000 that way.