Decades of gaming - years of fun!

[Parris]

I would consider myself extremely fortunate to have witnessed the emergence, if not the actual conception of the gaming industry. Although computer games existed before I was born, they were stuck primarily in science labs, university computer departments or enormous wooden cabinets.

This is no gaming history, but it might as well be because it begins at the point games entered the home. For me, in the 1980â€s living in the United Kingdom it all began with the Spectrum, Commodore & Amstrad computer systems.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=84

For my household, it began one Christmas morning back in 1984. My present that year was an Amstrad CPC. It revolutionised my life! Based around the Z80 microprocessor, it was in my opinion the best machine on the market at the time. We actually traded it in not long after for a better model as my father knew the store keeper. We upgraded to a 128k CPC 6128 which came furnished not with a tape drive, but floppy drive. No more 4min waiting time to load in a game, a mere 45 seconds and you could be playing. The downside was the difference in cost. A game of floppy disc was usually 3 or 4 times more expensive and tapes began at the budget £1.99 price. Iâ€d sit for hours listening to the distinctive noise of an Amstrad cassette loading into the CPC! For me it became the sounds track of my early teens, as eagerly anticipated as your granâ€s cooking, as comfortable as a favourite pair of trainers and as soothing as the first hush of snow in winter.

When it all moved away from cassette to other formats, I regretted the loss of that sound. Something about the essence of gaming disappeared overnight. No more fiddling with the azimuth of your Dadâ€s Binatone tape player, no checking the line level, no more failure to load at the first block and rewinding your tape and dusting the heads down. That disappeared and was never satisfactorily replaced in my view. In those days, the loading screen was as eagerly anticipated as the cover of an LP. Did it faithfully produce the graphics on the cover, had the company supplied only boring text, what colour scheme did them employ and could you recognise the character(s) if it was franchised from a film?

You had to be patient. You had to know the correct settings and sounds. In time you could tell by the sudden change from horizontal lines criss-crossing around the edge of the screen to solid blocks of changing colour whether the game had stalled or whether it was in a silent section of tape. You could go and have a pee, find some extra food, chat to your mates or just go off for several minutes to do something else whilst your game loaded, but you didnâ€t. You waited as you knew the moment the load failed.

At other times the game would appear to be loading perfectly well and then at the very last second there would be a gentle internal click, like a gate shutting somewhere in some processor to stem the flow of data and the screen would freeze. The tape would shuffle on and stop. That was when you grabbed a bottle of ethanol, whisked the tape out and cleaned the contacts. Perhaps youâ€d spin the tape backwards and forwards and press the tape spools between your fingers to press the reel of tape back into line. Longer tapes such as C90 were an absolute no-no for dedicated gamers. You could cram more data onto them, but you just knew your Dadâ€s tape deck would start to slow down after 65mins and then the data would fail.

Those were the days â€" that was gaming! That was when you started on a challenge way before you even nestled into your chair with a joystick.

It moved on from that to NES and SNES with their carts. It was an instant world for an instant generation. No way could you expect people to wait for the game to actually load in, so when they failed it was with utter disgust!

Blowing into the cart, shaking it, inserting it back and pressing reset generally fixed the problem there and then. If not, repeat, repeat & repeat! Eventually youâ€d see your game turn up on the screen, but sometimes it would be accompanied by mixed up graphics, the odd pixel out of place, a flashing cursor or just a frozen screen with Mario endlessly caught in the moment.

Fast forward to CDrom and everything was fine and Dandy. I have very rarely found a Sony Playstation 1 that gave up the ghost. They seem to rattle on and on, turning and loading even when the motor sounds impossibly old.

Looking back on the PS1 it isn't difficult to see why we all got so excited. With so much in my memory to compare it with, I can still see the enormous leap in technology and design that Sony unveiled back in 1994. Almost 10 years to the day and old enough to have purchased my first console with wages I had earned, I bought the original PS1. Well, actually I waited until the UK launch, but even so the excitement got to me and I was all for buying in a Japanese import. I know people who did and they willingly spent several hundred pounds on their 33 Mhz wonders!

Sadly, I still get goose bumps at the Sony PS1 start up graphics or the sound of the Playstation 1 game being initialised.

I think this is one reason why now that I am sitting staring at an Xbox 360 I find it remarkable that I have witnessed an industry bump its way along a rather arduous track. The fall of Atari, Commodore, Amstrad, Spectrum, Sega and many others from their prime spot on the gaming podium ensures that I am not complacent or assured that the success of any particular producer is inevitable despite the money they throw at it.

Iâ€ve gone in those few decades from being perfectly content to game on a Zilog80 based 8bit computer to the stunning 3.2 Ghz tri-cored beauty that is the 360.

This morning I sat comparing two very different pieces of equipment and confirmed that I genuinely must be a pure gamer at heart. Both pieces of machinery (the Amstrad and 360) evoke in me the same gaming passion. Perhaps nobody else sees what I do, but itâ€s akin to picking up a first edition copy of “Wuthering Heightsâ€� and a copy of “Playboyâ€� wet bikini edition. One is for the educated connoisseur of all things fine, whilst the other is looking for sex appeal and excitement â€" but the question is which is which?

[oldengineer]

Nice article.

...Sex appeal and excitement for me everytime.