My Life on the Net

Commodore 64, Sega Master System II, NES, Game Gear, Game Boy, N64, Playstation, Game Boy Colour, another Playstation, Xbox, DS, DS lite and a Xbox 360. I can’t believe I’ve had so many - and those are only the consoles, I’ve had about 5 PCs, three macs and too many game-enabled phones to count.

I’ve been around the gaming world since 94′ when I got the Commodore for my 5th birthday. Back then games and apps came in floppies and hardly any of them took the massive 1.4Mb you had on the disk. Some did, and you had to make sure you didn’t lose all twelve of the disks while trying to load a game.

Kids today will never have to find out about floppies, and they’ll never imagine anything like the floppies that were around for the BBC computers or that some apps came around on tapes (I remember trying to load Batman Forever on an add-on for the commodore - it took forever!).

They’ll never get frustrated when you put a cartridge in the console only to find that dust, a simple enough thing, is stopping your game from playing. Probably countless hours of my life must have been spent trying to solve all this hell.

They’ll never know the magic of 8 bit music.

If the graphics aren’t perfect, they’ll call it a bad game - we didn’t even have 320 pixels wide back in the day, not even anything close to HD. Try to be fascinated that Samus was a girl in Metroid Prime when her face was less than 8 pixels wide. Exactly.

They’ll take ergonomic controllers and rumble packs as a necessity. I remember sore hands from almost all my old consoles, especially my Sega Master System II and paying extra for a rumble pack for my Nintendo 64 controller and feeling like it was a really large step for gaming. Controllers were made cheaply - it was only Nintendo being nice that they made rounded controllers for the SNES.

I was there when Grand Theft Auto went from 2D to 3D. That was awesome. Now by the time some kids grow up to be my age, if it doesn’t feel like you’re in the game - it’s not a game.

They’ll never believe that some of my favourite games were made by a few people only to be released on a major label later on - they’ll think it all needs level designers, sound managers, 50 coders, 500 testers and a million pounds as a minimum budget. I’m pretty sure that my favourite game of all time (Uplink) was made by three people as a recreation project. I have a copy of the entire project plan too, thanks to owning the CD from 99′.

Don’t forget where you came from…