I thought it would be interesting to make a thread about how each of us got pulled into PC Gaming. If you have a fun story to take us all down nostalgia lane, please make a post!
For me it started somewhere in the mid 70s. If you're wondering, yes, life was black and white in those days - but it helped make the dinosaurs that still roamed the Earth seem less scary. My grandmother was a house cleaner for rich people living in Beverly Hills, CA. One day she came over and gave me this box and said I could hook it up to a TV and play games. I had no idea what it was, I was only about 8 years old.
It turns out it was the original Magnavox Odyssey videogame system. You stuck these colored overlays on your TV screen to add color and graphics to games that were otherwise just blips similar to old Mattel handheld games. Well, slightly better than those, but not by much.
But I was hooked. And in 1979 when I opened up the main Christmas present from my parents for that year and revealed an Atari 2600, my "nerdom" was set in stone. Of course, I didn't get an actual Atari 2600, but the private labeled Sears brand, Atari VCS. Aside from a few small cosmetic differences, there were no technical differences and the machine ran identical to the true blue Atari 2600. But I do remember an embarrassing moment having that mean kid explain this to me in front of my friends making me look pretty stupid at the time.
Then the Intellivision was released. And after about a year of badgering, harassing, and stalking my parents, they caved and bought me one. Oh how I loved my Intellivision! Too much in fact.
Panic set in with my parents and they bought me a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer with the hopes that I might do something more with this computer revolution other than play games. It worked and I did! I learned how to program in BASIC. But more importantly, I started down the long and complicated road of getting games to work on a computer. I needed a tape drive! So the badgering, harassing, and stalking commenced toward this effort! Eventually, I managed to save up to buy one for myself because this time my parents saw right through my ruse. And getting games to run on that machine was sometimes as difficult as it was get games to work under MS-DOS.
It was right around the time I had spent about a year delivering newspapers for three paper routes to save up enough money for a ColecoVision when my mom countered with an IBM PC Model B. First came King's Quest 1. But then the discovery of the several years old Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress appeared. It was actually a friend I visited only once in a great while (because he lived far away) who showed me the game on his Apple II computer. Once I discovered Ultima II, my world was changed forever.
Ultima II cemented the notion that computers had the "serious" and "complicated" (complicated was not a derogatory description in those days) games while consoles provided a "lighter" alternative.
And that is the brief history of how I became hooked on PC gaming.
For me it started somewhere in the mid 70s. If you're wondering, yes, life was black and white in those days - but it helped make the dinosaurs that still roamed the Earth seem less scary. My grandmother was a house cleaner for rich people living in Beverly Hills, CA. One day she came over and gave me this box and said I could hook it up to a TV and play games. I had no idea what it was, I was only about 8 years old.
It turns out it was the original Magnavox Odyssey videogame system. You stuck these colored overlays on your TV screen to add color and graphics to games that were otherwise just blips similar to old Mattel handheld games. Well, slightly better than those, but not by much.
But I was hooked. And in 1979 when I opened up the main Christmas present from my parents for that year and revealed an Atari 2600, my "nerdom" was set in stone. Of course, I didn't get an actual Atari 2600, but the private labeled Sears brand, Atari VCS. Aside from a few small cosmetic differences, there were no technical differences and the machine ran identical to the true blue Atari 2600. But I do remember an embarrassing moment having that mean kid explain this to me in front of my friends making me look pretty stupid at the time.
Then the Intellivision was released. And after about a year of badgering, harassing, and stalking my parents, they caved and bought me one. Oh how I loved my Intellivision! Too much in fact.
Panic set in with my parents and they bought me a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer with the hopes that I might do something more with this computer revolution other than play games. It worked and I did! I learned how to program in BASIC. But more importantly, I started down the long and complicated road of getting games to work on a computer. I needed a tape drive! So the badgering, harassing, and stalking commenced toward this effort! Eventually, I managed to save up to buy one for myself because this time my parents saw right through my ruse. And getting games to run on that machine was sometimes as difficult as it was get games to work under MS-DOS.
It was right around the time I had spent about a year delivering newspapers for three paper routes to save up enough money for a ColecoVision when my mom countered with an IBM PC Model B. First came King's Quest 1. But then the discovery of the several years old Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress appeared. It was actually a friend I visited only once in a great while (because he lived far away) who showed me the game on his Apple II computer. Once I discovered Ultima II, my world was changed forever.
Ultima II cemented the notion that computers had the "serious" and "complicated" (complicated was not a derogatory description in those days) games while consoles provided a "lighter" alternative.
And that is the brief history of how I became hooked on PC gaming.