I guess my first experience of computer gaming came when my grandparents bought us a BBC model B for Christmas one year. I was eight or nine years old at the time.
The BBC was the betamax of home computing – a quality machine made unobtainable by its high price, meaning that it lost out to other cheaper computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum. It owed its longevity to the fact that schools purchased them in scores.
The first game I played may well have been Pong which came bundled with the ‘Welcome’ cassette (no disc drives in those days) or it may have been a game called Kingdom, also on the cassette, which was an early sim-city style game with primitive blocky graphics in which you had to divide your resources between feeding your people and, uh, defending the dyke in order to prevent flooding.
Games were ridiculously cheap in those days. Spotty teenagers used to write them in their bedrooms. I know from the get go we had Super Invaders (Space Invaders), Killer Gorilla (Donkey Kong) and a text adventure called Sphinx Adventure that took ages to load and only accepted a limited number of two word commands which you could only determine through trial and error. We also had a game called Frenzy that initially didn’t work but which I fixed a few days after Christmas by throwing the cassette hard against the wall of the study. After that it loaded perfectly every time and became a personal favourite.
The game which finally hooked me and marked the crossroads where I would squander all the hours that I could have used to become a famous writer or a pioneering scientist was Elite. I obsessed over it for years and actually still play on a PC port, but that’s another story.
