My Computer Gaming History
I first became interested in computers when my aunt, a teacher for Minnesota's Department of Corrections, brought home an Apple II on which to practice and with which to become familiar. It was love at first sight with many hours spent playing The Oregon Trail, Lemonade, and Odell Lake & Odell Woods. At about the same time, I got a Sears Video Arcade System (i.e., a repackaged Atari 2600 from the era when Sears didn't sell non-Sears brands) and, a little bit later, a brand, spanking new Atari 5200.
My first real computer, though, was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Just the computer part, mind you, no disk drive, no monitor, not even any joysticks. I had a keyboard and a cartridge slot and was in heaven. My games for it were Hunt the Wumpus and The Chisholm Trail. True classics, huh? :-)
That was followed by an Atari 800XL complete with 1050 disk drive. I loved its keyboard, but hated its disk drive-not to mention the numerous bugs in that notorious "Revision B" Atari BASIC/OS. When I got a daisy wheel printer that refused to work (which I later discovered was due to the aforementioned buggy Revision B), so I traded it in on a Commodore 64 and, a few months later, got a disk drive and a printer that worked.
Although I played some fun cartridge games on my 800XL (like the conversion of Popeye), it was the Commodore 64 that was my true introduction to computing and my true introduction to computer gaming. I am fortunate to have played many true classics on that machine. SSI's Rails West!, Cartels & Cutthroats, Colonial Conquest, President Elect, andWargame Construction Set; Accolade's PSI-5 Trading Company, Law of the West, Comics, and Killed Until Dead; Telarium's illustrated text adventures; Activision's Little Computer People Research Project, Murder on the Mississippi, and The Great American Cross Country Road Race; and Electronic Arts' Seven Cities of Gold, M.U.L.E., Adventure Construction Set, Pinball Construction Set, Movie Maker, and Racing Destruction Set-EA has never recaptured the magic it exhibited during that era.
For quite a while as a C64 owner, my dream machine was an Atari 520ST. I finally got one in November 1987. Wow. I bought The Pawn (Magnetic Scrolls/Rainbird) at the same time and, I must say, it was jaw-dropping when I saw the graphics and, even more cool, saw that I could move the window they were in. My ST found many great hours playing games by SSI, Activision, and Sierra. My word processor (ST Writer of course) found even more hours writing nasty letters to Electronic Arts for not supporting the machine (although the ST conversion of Lords of Conquest was competently done). My 520ST later died and was replaced with a 1040ST. I will always feel that if any format deserved to succeed in computing's history it was the Atari ST series. If properly nurtured, it could have been something truly extraordinary in whatever iteration was on the market today. Thinking of its demise still saddens me. Perhaps it always will.
As the ST was dying, the Amiga 500 was taking off. My first Amiga games were SimCity, Gold of the Americas, and Starflight, classics all. SSI's Amiga coverage was always very fluid; one moment they were converting everything in sight and the next they were cancelling everything. The Amiga games I did play, though, I loved. I missed out on the "first generation" of SSI Amiga titles (Computer Baseball, Kampfgruppe, Gettysburg: The Turning Point), but I did play most of the rest, including nearly all of the Gold Box AD&D games and the later wargame conversions. I still remember buying my first hard disk drive (an external one, of course) to add to my A500. I believe it was a huge 40MB. How scary that computers today have more RAM built-in than hard disks had storage space less than a decade ago. I later got an Amiga 3000, which I adored, and still do.
When the Amiga's death became certain (as far as game developers went; it has appeared that it might revive and I had high hopes a few months ago, but I believe that Jim Collas' departure has marked the final death knell), I, sadly, moved to the IBM world. I have had 3 PC systems: a 486 DX4/100, a Pentium MMX 200, and, my current system, a Pentium II 450. I have played some great games on the PC, but the sense of wonder found on my other machines is missing usually. Part of that, I'm sure is me, but another part is development which is increasingly derivative and increasingly indistinguishable from console gaming. Oh, well. Perhaps it will re-emerge some day.