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Gaming: a Personal History
In which I am young
Lets' get this out of the way: I'm an old man. When I was still at school, the latest tech the school could buy was a Research Machines 380Z. And it cost £2000. Computing was a new subject, and it started the same time I went into the Sixth Form. We learned BASIC, which was done by writing code on to special paper forms where it was sent to the local college to be run on their (IIRC) PDP11. Or, more usually, not run. It dawned on me years later that our teacher really didn't know a lot about programming. I say all this, to put the rest of this nostalgia trip into perspective.When I left school, I did more "serious" work on computers at University, where I wrote some fairly simple code in Fortran77. We did a few lectures in the thing, but that was about it. It gave me an interest in computers, but not the money to actually buy one, so I would gaze longinly at the ZX81s, Vic20s etc, and try to play the text input games that demo machines always seemed to have running. You may or may not be old enough to remember these: "You are standing in a clearing in a forest. To the north there is a path." Etc. Half the fun was trying to work out what commands the game would actually accept. But as I said, playing these in a shop was all I could do.
In which I code a game
In the mid-eighties I went on a City and Guilds course in BASIC programming, using the wonderful old BBC B. Most of the time we were supposed to be doing serious things with these (my project was a magazine indexing system), but as an exercise I did write a program which played tic-tac-toe (aka "Naughts and Crosses"). This is very popular target for simple program writing because the rules are very simple, and the "AI" needed is less than that needed to program a robot to get a round a maze. My program could not be beaten, but I never did get rid of one odd bug: it didn't know it had won until you tried to move again. There was clearly something up with the timing of when it tested for a winning condition, but I never did fix it.But that was really the last time I ever did programming. A few years later I tried to learn C, and I've summoned up an idea to learn other things, like Visual Basic, but each time the idea tends to fall on the basic point of: what on earth am i going to use this skill for? So the most I ever do now is poke around in Linux .conf files and the like.
In which I discover that the old ones are the best
A year after playing with BASIC, I went to work for a company in Cambridge which had a proper mainframe computer. The one there when I started was very much a business engine, but the successor Unix machine had a game on it: Hack. This is one of the early "Rogue-likes", named after Rogue. We only had this for a few months, and I spent a bit of time playing it, but then the company went one better: the new machine had Nethack on it. It had a LAN flight simulator as well, but who cares? Nethack is Hack with a lot of extra content, and resulting in a lot of extra complexity. For any Nethack players, we had 3.0 when I started, later upgraded to 3.1. I'm not going to talk about the game itself much, because it's in my Top Ten, but this was the first time that I found out how addictive games can be. Anyone who says that they aren't addictive just hasn't found the right one yet. There were about five of us playing this game seriously, and competition was fierce. For a while scores seldom went above 10,000 because none of us knew the game well enough. Then I hit a winning streak to 22k before YASD - in this case I still remember it: I hit Medusa while hallucinating and not knowing who/what she was. Later on I was the first to over 100k, and then first to break the one million mark - when I was made redundant and had to quit the game whilst still not dead. For those who haven't played, Nethack is a "dead-is-dead" game, although you can scum-save the PC version.In which I play some other old classics
After I left, the only computer I could afford was an old Epson 286/12. "Afford" being a slightly misleading, as I was given it - but I couldn't afford to replace it. At this time, 486s were just hitting the market, so I was a fair way behind the Bleeding Edge. Now, while I certainly spent most of my gaming time playing Nethack (yes, I was job-hunting as well) I did get to play a couple of other classics. One was Lemmings, one of the very few truly original games ever: to this day the idea of trying to keep things alive rather than killing them is still a rarity. I never finished though, and it was the first game, on the very long list of them, that I never played to the end. Another was the original Microsoft Flight Simulator. I still play flight sims on rare occasions, but unless there's stuff to blow up, I don't play often. The last game of that time was the first Sim City, with an early and very annoying DRM system: every now and again it would pop a question up on the screen which you needed to answer with a value from a table, or the game would lock up. This usually happened when Godzilla was rampaging, or at some other time when you really had better things to do. I should also point out that I'm not the only person who struggles with end-game condition testing: it was possible to get your city to state where further progress was impossible: for instance, by destroying it, and driving the population out of it. At this point you can't attract new people, and have no money to fix anything. So you're stalled. But the game simply doesn't understand this, and doesn't offer to quit. It just carries on doing nothing at all, forever.Nethack I did get finished, in 3.0 and 3.1 versions. I still occasionally play 3.3, but the game has been nerfed so much that I find it far too hard - and it takes hundreds of hours to get even average at playing it.
In which I update the hardware
I did get an old 386 in about 1996, to replace my now-ancient 286 (even Nethack struggles on a 286), but Nethack was about all I could play, still. The most important upgrade came in 1998, when i was stuck at home with a broken ankle after falling down two steps at work. Yes, you can stop laughing now. I bought - wait for it - a 486/66! But that wasn't the most important part. The most important part was that it came with the freeware part of Doom. Those people who never lived through the Doom Revolution (even those who, like me, came fairly late to it) cannot begin to realise how much that game changed the whole of gaming. And letting out part of it as freeware was a master-stroke. It wasn't the first of the First-Person Shooters, but it was the first many people encountered, and it invented almost all the basics for that genre. And most of all, it was great fun. And no, Keith Vaz, it did not teach violence to a generation: please read up on Third-Cause Fallacy.But there was not only Doom, because now I had hardware that could play games that were only a little out of date (Pentiums were out by now, and Pentium IIs arrived soon after). So I now hit the games scene and start to work out what sort of games I liked.
In which I slap my minions (some of whom like it)
I have a feeling the first game I bought after a full version of Ultimate Doom (all the Doom games together) was a flight sim based around the A10. There you do get to blow sh*t up, which is far more fun than just wandering around the sky, and doing circuits and bumps. But around then I moved from the joys of MS-DOS 5.0 ad Windows 3.1 to Windows95. And soon after that, I bought Dungeon Keeper. I can't remember why I bought it, and to this day it's really the only "God-Sim" that I've ever enjoyed (I tried Populous and gave up quickly, for instance). But what a game - this really was Peter Moyneaux's finest moment. Not Black & White, not Fable; this was. I later got the Deeper Dungeons Expansion, and later still Dungeon Keeper 2. But even now I still sometimes go back to the original. Which is hard to do as it doesn't work on Windows 7, which I use now, and I usually have to resort to running it on a Windows XP Virtual Machine. There's a fan-modified version about which does run under Win7, but the coder has modified the game files to change things - and I like the original. But the original DK is still the game which is the most fun.It wans't all smooth running though - literally. My 486 had an early ATI 3D card which really couldn't handle even Dungeon Keeper, especially the last game in the original pack. Time after time I'd get to some crucial part and the game would crash, and not be recoverable. I think it was well over a year from starting before I finally finished. So I started upgrading hardware piece by piece - which I've never stopped doing since.
In which I see 3D graphics for the first time
Still using the 2D ATI card, I bought a copy of Quake 2 at around this point. In anything other than 640x480 screen resolution that game was a slide-show, and I decided that I needed a proper 3D graphics card. This being 1999, it meant 3dfx. So I splashed out on a Voodoo2. For the youngsters here, I should point out that the Voodoo2 was a pass-through card, which added 3D graphics to the 2D output from another card, along with various hardware incompatibility problems. But what a difference it made to games. People nowadays have always had 3D cards, so simply have no comprehension of the effect of seeing 3D graphics for the first time. Every gamer who went through this will tell you that it's one of their top three gaming moments, and I'll bet they can still remember which game they first saw it on. But it meant that I could now play at 800x600 resolution! I should point out that my old 15" colour monitor wouldn't go any higher than that.For a while I was a 3dfx fanboi, and even a member of 3dfxgames.com, and I soon upgraded to a Voodoo3, one of the great graphics cards of all time. After that I got a Voodoo5 5500 (which I broke) and then another 5500 (which I burnt out, and then up). After that 3dfx went down the toilet for various well-documented reasons, and I now mostly buy nVidia. But the Voodoo3 brought another important moment: I was finally able to finish Dungeon Keeper.
In which I do a lot of killing
Let's face it, much of video gaming is about killing things - which is why people like Keith Vaz, think that it must lead to violence. Not because there's any real evidence, but because a) new forms of entertainment always lead to violence, and b) everyone knows this. Every time a new form of purveying fun tot he masses hits the big time, the middle classes become convinced it will lead to an orgy of slaughter. But only from the plebs - the middle classes will obviously be immune to the effects because they are better. And so it is with video games. Mind you, the tendency of video game makers to play into the hands of the Moral Guardians cannot be under-estimated: play Soldier of Fortune and you'll quickly see what I mean. And if you are easily offended, under no circumstances play Postal 2.Of course the main games associated with violence are First Person Shooters, which include the infamous Doom amongst others. And because I had pretty much started proper gaming with Doom, for a while I mostly played FPS games. But I had, after all, really started with a Hack'n'Slash, just one with no proper graphics - and in these games the deaths run into the thousands. Then, one day, I was filling in time lurking around PC World (don't worry, I wasn't about to buy any of their over-priced hardware), when I saw a demo of Diablo2, and I spent a couple of minutes playing. That was enough to convince me that here was something close to a version of Nethack with 3D (albeit sprite) graphics. I should point out that Blizzard are quite happy to acknowledge that link. And to RPGs, in form or another, became another favourite. I did try the original Diablo, but the murky grpahics put me right off it, and I quickly gave up. But Diablo 2 joined my all-time favourites.
In which I discover a sandbox
To this day I can't really remember why I bought Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls game from Bethesda. I was getting bored with Diablo 2, but fancied another RPG. I'd tried a couple of the more hard-core Role-Playing Games, like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, but the constant micro-management required quickly got tedious, so I was looking for a more action-oriented game. I think I just liked the graphics on the box. But it was my first "sand-box" game, and it made those games my favourite.Now I have to say that it took a long time to get the hang of Morrowind. I'll talk about it in more detail when I discuss my top ten games, but the whole "practice makes you better" was hard to get used to after dozens of games where experience (and thus higher levels) came from killing things and doing quests. Here you could gain experience by allowing things to hit you. The very complexity of the character system also took a while to understand: I had to abandon my first character after a couple of weeks when I realised that I had joined the wrong Great House. But a lot of reading about on the official forums gave me the clues I needed to play it properly, and for about two and a half years I played almost nothing else. Oh, a few games came and went (Like Half Life...), but the sheer variety of game-playing that was possible in Morrowind kept bringing me back.
ANd as well as making me a big fan of sand-box games, it made me a big fan of Bethesda, who does them better than anyone else. After Morrowind I have played them all: Oblivion, Fallout 3 (and New Vegas, which is not properly Bethesda), and finally, Skyrim.