Video Game History

My first exposure to gaming came when I was 3 or 4 years old. My dad owned a BBC computer with several games on old 5¼-inch floppy disks. Literally floppy mind. My favourite game on it was called Repton! A game where the player mined through dirt, avoiding boulders and collecting gems. Gameplay and graphics-wise it was very simple, but I loved it. It was the fact I had input, I controlled the character that I loved. It was a feeling of immersion that turned me on to games.

So cool

A year later the household gained a Sega Megadrive. It was a christmas present to my mum but it was played by everyone in the house. It was the megadrive that really showed me how much deeper gameplay could be compared to the old BBC.

With the console came Sonic The Hedgehog, this was the first time I saw 16bit graphics. I was immediately blown away by the colour and the speed of the game. The music and style of the game meshed so well for me and it became the one game I played over and over. I was never any good though. I had trouble in my youth wrestling with a controller and the speed of the game made it even harder for me. It wasn't until I was 12 I could finally beat the game.

A couple of years later my dad bought himself a game for the megadrive. Dune 2: Battle for Arrakis this was a whole new game for me. The only games we'd had up until then were side-scrolling platformers. This real-time-strategy was not just new for me, it was new for most of the game-playing community as it is widely considered the first of a genre.

I loved this game, again it was the art direction and music that sold it to me. The alien background music playing as these brightly coloured tanks battled it out over a suprisingly detailed desert really appealed to me. It felt immersive and I wanted to know more about the story behind the game.
Again, I was terrible at it, I would watch my dad play all the way through instead. I couldn't get past the third level. The problem was I didn't feel connected enough through the controller. It was also the first game that got me to extensively read the manual for the background story and unit descriptions. I wanted to know as much as I could about the game-world.