I never owned an 8-bit console - the very idea of me owning a
NES was so far beyond reality (we were very poor when I was young) that I never even entertained the notion. I wasn't even jealous - it was just something other kids had, not for the likes of me.
My friend Andy had a
BBC Micro, and we used to spend many happy hours on that playing
Repton,
Elixir,
Citadel and the like (this would have been long after the Micro's heyday).
I didn't really have any proper experience of videogames until my Dad got a better job and bought an
Amstrad PC, first an EGA, then later a VGA. So that was my formative gaming experience.
First off we had the Sierra adventure games like the
King's Quest series, though I don't think we ever managed to get too far in them even with the aid of a guidebook as they were so insanely hard and unfair. My dad also bought me the
Leisure Suit Larry boxset (he thought it was funny so let me play it even though I was very young, rightly assuming a lot of the humour would go over my head). I used to love the Apogee Shareware games that used to come on the covermounted
PC Format demo disks -
Secret Agent,
Crystal Caverns... and also those wonderful Lucasarts adventures -
Monkey Island,
Loom,
Day of the Tentacle and onwards (though we only ever got them to run on Andy's PC as my dad had some weird memory expansion software on ours that meant it refused to run most games.
I lived in Germany at the time and actually bought a Lucasarts box set of
Zak McKraken,
Maniac Mansion and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and attempted to play through them in German language - and with insane perseverance I actually got quite far! Ah, great days. And then later,
Wolfenstein 3d, which had a
huge impact on me. I pined after
Doom when it was released but didn't have access to a machine capable of running it until many years after it came out.
The arcades were also a big deal - the one game I remember always hoping to see at an arcade was Capcom's
Final Fight. I adored that game.
I remember desperately wanting a
Game Boy, but them being out of stock everywhere on my birthday and having to settle for a
Game Gear instead, which promptly broke after a couple of weeks of use. Come to think of it, I think that experience might go some way to explain my lifelong distaste for all things Sega (have always considered them vastly overrated and nowhere near as good as Nintendo)
!
Then one Christmas my dad, out of the blue, bought us a
SNES and
Super Mario World. Best Christmas Ever. After that I had a Playstation and
N64 (N64 would probably be my all time favourite console), then jumped ship to the original
Xbox (mainly for
Halo), and by the next generation was able to afford all three of the main consoles, though I obviously I don't have much time to actually play any of them.
