The Dawn of Gaming…

Gaming is something that we take for granted these days, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry, a pass time that millions of people engage in and something that is now considered to be a lot cooler than it was just a few short years ago. In fact for some people it might seem as if gaming was and has been around forever in its current form.

While it may be true that gaming has been around along time, it was very different from it’s current form. The first games or at least something resembling games, were actually created in the 1950’s. At the time though, it wasn’t something that you would be playing at home, these were mostly technology demonstrations and ways for scientists to learn programming and study how people interacted with machines. So most of the games were simple at the time, due to the technology constraints and the fact that we, were still learning. The games themselves were in the vein of Draughts (Checkers), the oldie but goldie Chess, Naughts and Crosses (OXO) and so on but you never got to play or try them unless you worked at a research institute.

The first time that a game was actually available outside of an institute was 1962’s SpaceWar! It wasn’t until the 70’s though, that games began to be widely available to the general public. One of the reasons for this was the falling costs of the technology, that made it possible that people or companies could actually purchase the hardware to run games on and that programming languages were being developed that allowed people to write software and games to run on the hardware.

Still this wasn’t as prevalent as it is today and was really limited to people that had an interest in technology and were willing to experiment and learn, remember there was no internet to look things up on, so a lot of information was shared by word of mouth. So development continued but at a slower pace than today.

Gaming really only began to capture the attention of the general population in 1971, when the first arcade machines started to be produced, followed not long later by the first gaming console, the Magnavox Odyssey. The Atari console didn’t actually come along until 1977 with pong, a strange name for a game that was essentially a basic form of tennis, something which led to Magnavox suing Atari.

Still consoles weren’t as widespread then as they are now, the Atari was probably the first to really capture people’s attention but it wasn’t something that was a must-have. Attitudes were different then and games were considered to be something of a fad, something that would pass in time or just as a waste of time in general.

This is pretty much where I come into the story, I was born in 1974, so I missed the fun of the early arcade games but I have memories of when my parents would go to the pub on a weekend afternoon and take my brother and I with them. This was always a treat for us because they bought us snacks and gave us money to go play on the arcade machines in one of the rooms in the pub. There were two machines there that I remember, one of them was the classic Space Invaders but the other was called something like Dr Do and was a platformer, were you had a big hammer and essentially ran around hitting creatures on the head with it to knock them down to the lower levels. At least that’s how I remember it :)

Still this was something of a rare treat for us and as fledging gamers we knew nothing about the game or its rules and so our turns were short and money for additional goes was in short supply. So while it was interesting for us for a short while, we soon ran out of money and ended up doing other things.

My first really introduction to gaming was in about 1981-2 with a game called Astro Wars, which was a small, “laptop”/table-top console that played one single game, basically a version of Space Invaders. My Dad brought it home as a present for my Mom (never realised until then that Mom liked games too) but my brother and I got to play on it sometimes too. It was fun and frustrating at the same time but we learned quickly and started trying to beat each other’s high scores, however it was only something that really came out of the closet during the winter months. During the summer we were expected to be outside.

The next thing my Dad brought home was an/the Atari console with Pong and another cartridge, I forget the name but I think it was the one were you have two cowboys shooting each other and a carriage drives up and down between them. This really captured my attention and my parents noticed.

This was also around the time that hardware and software had advanced a lot more and became more affordable for homes and brought about the birth of the computer industry. I remember when we would go shopping there was a computer shop in town that had computers in the window that I would always go and look at. I didn’t quite know what it was or did but I was sure that I wanted one :)

Then in 1983 a film came out that captured everyones attention, it was called WarGames, if you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a great film and it’s also interesting from a technology perspective, especially in terms of how you connected a computer to “the internet” back in the day. Of course the internet didn’t really exist then, you were dialling in directly to a server, that you had to find by yourself… just go watch the film, it will make more sense :)

Anyway, we saw this film, we being my family and although my brother and I enjoyed it, we didn’t think anything else of it, except that it was cool. My parent's however had a different view of things, after the films, they realised that computers were the future and the direction that the world was generally moving toward. They also remembered my interest in the Atari console and the computer shop in town, so putting all of this together, they decided to nudge me in the direction of computing/programming, whatever you wanted to call it back then. This was an interesting stance from them because at the time, my greatest passion was actually art and I loved drawing.

So I was surprised on my birthday when I received a brand new Commodore Vic 20. I couldn’t believe it but it was a wonderful present and opened my eyes to so many things. I started to learn Basic and create crude programs. Then I discovered computer magazines with free games in them (in those days, the games were literally the code printed across a couple of pages that you typed in yourself. Good luck debugging it if it didn’t run :) ).

But and this is where we start to get back to gaming I promise, I discovered that there were games I could by for the Vic20. I had Lander on cartridge and a couple of others on cassette tape, that were fun, anyone remember Blitz? My mom loved that game. However in one of the magazines that I bought, I saw that there was a new Commodore, the C64 and wow did it look amazing. The graphics on it were the best I’d ever seen. So I started to beg, badger and cajole my parents to what seemed to no avail, at least until one Christmas morning when it appeared under the tree.

I remember the first game that I loved playing on there was Renegade, I can still here the music in my head today and it was one of the first games in my life that I completed. The next one that stands out for me is Last Ninja 2. When I saw the graphics on that game, I didn’t think that things could get any better.

I think this is also a good time to try to explain how games (and computers) worked back then. These days, you play a game and it saves, either to disk or to the cloud. In those days, every time you switched the computer off, you lost everything. You went back to square completely. Some games tried to help by letting you save to a cassette tape but these were few and far between and my personal experience was that they never really worked. So basically if you were playing a game and you got somewhere, you didn’t switch the computer off.

This was a constant source of friction between my parents and I, who thought it was wasting electricity to leave it on, so in the end I remember that I would just switch the portable black and white TV I had off and tape over the power light to hide it. I thought I was so clever at the time.

Anyway, the reason that I was doing this, was because I had managed to get quite far in Last Ninja 2, I don’t remember how I knew it at the time but I was sure that I was close to the end. Not only that I managed to get there with three or four lives, which going into what I knew in my bones was a boss encounter was unbelievable. So I was sure that I could beat the game. Now for those of you that have never played Last Ninja 2 or any of the series, it’s an isometric style game, with very wonky controls, it was incredibly difficult to line up jumps and complete them successfully.

Towards the end of the game, there is this one section, where you need to grab onto a ladder beneath a helicopter (you can see it here), no matter how I tried, every time I jumped I missed. I remember I was down to my last life and really frustrated because it had taken me ages to get here and I was about to have to repeat the whole thing. So I took a deep breath and jumped for the final time… and I missed. I missed it. I was so frustrated that I started trying to crash the game (you could do this back then by pressing runstop, it sometimes dropped you into the code), in the hope I could find the section for lives and give myself another life. However and this is where my memory is a little cloudy so it may not be correct, runstop didn’t work and for whatever reason I hit F4.

What happened next was that my Ninja disintegrated and I thought that was it but then the next screen came up and I was alive. I had my last life but I was alive. I was so happy and getting through the rest of that level and beating the boss was one of the tensest moments of my life but when I finally beat the boss with a little sliver of health left. One of the greatest. I ran to my friends house (no email or mobiles), to try and persuade him to come with me and see the final screen. Unfortunately he wasn’t home and so I copied the screen by hand onto paper and took it to school the next day to show everyone. No one believed me that I had finished the game :(

Still that and Renegade are two games that still stand out for to this day. When you go back to them now, in one sense they don’t look like anything special, which is something that I think you could say of a lot of games from that era, at least graphically but what did stand out was the gameplay. Developers in those days really learned how to squeeze every last drop out of a machine and create games that you wanted to play. In a sense they were like a precursor to mobile gaming today, they were simple, addictive games that you could easily get into but were challenging to beat.

Of course this whole time development on games and computer hardware kept improving, more and more homes were getting a computer of some kind, at the time the biggest I think were the BBC Micro, the Amstrad CPC, the Commodore C64 and the ZX Spectrum. But then something came along that changed all of that.

The architecture and processors that computers used grew more complex, complicated and powerful. Suddenly a whole world of possibilities opened up and software and games grew more advanced to match it. Titles like Prince of Persia and Wing Commander on the PC absolutely blew me away. I didn’t think that the graphics on Wing Commander could ever be beaten at the time but I only got to play it on a friend’s PC.

So as is always the case when you taste forbidden fruit you want more of it and my C64 wasn’t cutting it anymore. The games just felt old and dated to me, graphically at least and although at the time I had over 200 titles, I didn’t want to play any of them. As always though, a computer magazine showed me the way forward when they did a review of the Commodore Amiga 500.

This was like the Mac of it’s time and for me was way ahead of current PC’s. For example all PC’s at the time were DOS-based, Windows wasn’t out or didn’t exist yet. But the Amiga had a GUI a desktop, with icons and windows. It could play games and the graphics and sound on it were amazing. I knew I had to have one but they cost 400 GBP at the time, which was huge. So I did what I could to raise the money, I did a paper-round, I worked a couple of part-time jobs and saved any money I was given. Then finally two things happened, Commodore lowered the price to 300 GBP and I got some money for my birthday that pushed me over the 300 GBP barrier, which was a happy accident at the time. Needless to say, I was soon in possession of an Amiga.

Honestly to this day it has been one of the best computers I have ever owned in terms of working on it and gaming on it. And the games, the graphics were just fantastic, I played Last Ninja 3 on the Amiga, Speedball 2, pretty much anything from the Bitmap Brothers, Shadow of the Beast with its parallax scrolling, Batman, Populous and I’m just scratching the surface.

For me it was the first time that I felt I had a computer at home that had graphics like an arcade machine. In hindsight it also seems like it was a “golden-age” of gaming as gaming itself had become a fairly established hobby by then. It still hadn’t broken into popular culture as it has today, it was still the domain of geeks and nerds but it was on the cusp of breaking through.

I remember that there were so many great games out then, plus at least in my social circle, most of my friends had Amiga’s too and the ones that didn’t after spending some time with one of us who had an Amiga, quickly bought one. So there was always someone to trade games with or play some couch co-op with. I remember many passionate games of Sensible Soccer or Speedball 2, that usually ended up wearing out joysticks very quickly. I remember spending hours playing games like Turrican, where the levels felt like they would never end or fighting off waves in R-Type II.

An interesting thing here was I don’t ever recall having any conversations with anyone or reading in a magazine, that something was too hard or that someone would say to you “git gud”. Instead it was more like if you died, you felt like it was your fault more than the game and usually with some practice you could beat it, or a friend would come round and help you beat it. I think as gamers we tended to support each other more than we do today. Whether that was a sign of the times or because we were a bunch of nerds that were basically shunned at school and so on, so we were a tight-knit group who knows. All I do know is that it was a different time for sure.

Compared to today’s games, one of the biggest advantages was that there was no internet requirement for games (especially as the internet was essentially in its infancy back then, this was pre-Google. ), so you could play “offline”.

Probably the most troubling aspect at the time was that game piracy was rampant, it was very easy to copy a game disk, so developers started thinking up ways to protect their games that involved everything from trying to make the disks harder to copy, to dongles you needed to connect to the computer, to asking you for a specific word from pages of the manual. None of these things ever really made a difference and so were short-lived but at the time they were annoying for gamers. I do understand why developers were protecting their work though.

This is where my gaming life stopped for a short while for me, I was at university at this stage and so was studying more than gaming but I was partial to some Wolfenstein 3D on the LAN at university and it was here that I made one of the decisions that I still regret today and that was selling my Amiga to raise money for a flight ticket to America.

So the next couple of years were a gaming hiatus for me, however of course, technology and gaming continued to move on at a rapid pace. Windows came out and got updated, then updated again and during this time a little thing called a Sony Playstation came out.

At this point, I’d finished uni, spent some time travelling around America and on my way back home, I decided to stop in Europe, specifically the Czech Republic. Mainly because during my travels I’d made some Czech friends and I thought it would be nice to visit.

Long story short I ended up moving there and as soon as I got kind of settled and had some spare cash, I bought myself a Playstation with Tekken, Diablo, Tenchu and Tomb Raider.