My Love-Hate Relationship with the Consoles

[SvennoJ]

Great write-up. I'll see how much I can remember of my 40 years of gaming.

My first encounter with video games was at my aunt's house. I can't remember what machine it was but it was very basic, just a couple lines. I didn't understand what was going on, I was 4, it was 1978. Other encounters I remember are pit stop and space invaders on the Atari.

At home my dad started building a primitive PC running Basic. He worked at Phillips at the time on business software. He always came home with long printouts, debugging machine code at the dinner table. I still have a 2KB memory module hanging on the wall from that time, it's bigger than the ps5! In his spare time he soldered a computer together, chip by chip with PCBs he got from work. Using leds on the front to display the active memory register, 16 little lights. After months and months of hard work, checking everything over with an oscilloscope he got it to work. I was 6 at the time and often got out of bed at night to watch him work on it.

Once it was working he made a couple basic games on it that me and my sister could play. Just black and white lines, guiding a square (the car) through a maze (the track). You could make your own 'tracks' by editing a path. Speed up, slow down, 90 degree turns. There was also a text adventure which was featured on his birthday with the whole room full of adults participating. It was like having the first television in the neighborhood.

When Phillips decided to also launch an MSX we naturally got one. First games were Konami Land and Pinball on cartridge. We also got a tape deck for it and some books. I learned to code on the MSX. First by copying little programs out of the books, then by designing my own things. I created a pac-man clone on it with a twist, eat a pill and you get 20 seconds in which you can shoot ghosts, spit the dots back out at the ghosts. Next to a bunch of shorter experiments I also made a type of space invaders game on it and later a database program to catalog everything I recorded on VHS, combined with an alarm clock function with my irregular high school start times programmed in. It interfaced with an alarm bell through the printer port. Never got woken up at the wrong time :)

Favorite games on MSX were Lazy Jones and Jet Set Willy II. My parents also got me a keyboard for the MSX to learn to play the piano. But I got more into programming the music in instead of playing it manually.

Working for Phillips at the forefront of PC tech also meant we always had the newest PC hardware at home, including the latest dial-up modem for my dad to work from home. The first one 8080 PC that ran at 0.8 mhz with 2 10MB HDDs in it. First game I played ion that was alley cat. That PC got me into Sierra adventures, starting with the original King's quest, Larry Suit Larry, Space Quest and Police Quest. The idea of age ratings didn't exist yet :)

286, 386, 386dx, 486, 486 DX2-66, they all followed one after another. CGA, EGA, VGA. My first online gaming experience was Flight Simulator 2 through dial-up direct connection with a friend who was playing at his father's docter's office which had a Tandy PC. It worked, but we couldn't talk while flying, just follow each other around. Later I got into browsing BBS and downloading games and walkthroughs from BBS.

My high school years I spend mostly on PC, learning to code in Borland C and playing many many games. All pirated :/ Favorites were Civilization, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Dune 2 and various racing games. I made a graphical editor for Dune 2 to make your own maps and mod them into the game. Then watch my friend play the scenarios I had created. Civilization the same, altering the run-time library with a hex editor to create all kinds of new game modes.

I did play a lot on C64 and Amiga 500 as well, all at a friend's house where I spend many afternoons. He soldered a little circuit together to turn the C64 sound into stereo sound, pretty just separating the low and high tones to left and right. With a different friend we made a sound card for the PC, not sure how it worked but it converted the printer port output into pretty decent sound that mod players could output. Fun times.

After high school I departed for university and not only got busy, no more access to all that tech except at the university. So my play time shifted to after school hours in the computer room at the university. We played a lot of Frontier: Elite 2 there. I saved up for a long time to buy my first PC a Pentium 90. Great times but the Playstation also caught my eye. Wipeout looked awesome. When Tombraider 2 came out I figured to give that a try on Playstation instead of PC (Windows 95 was a pita back then).

My initial impression of TR2 on Playstation was, ouch my eyes. This looks terrible compared to what I was used to on my P90. Pixels the size of houses! I tried to return the Playstation but the store had a no return policy. So I was stuck with the thing. I did eventually finish TR2 on it (awesome game once you look past the giant pixels) and got into a lot more games. Yep it was convenient, and easy to play together on.

After university I got a job as a software programmer with great pay while I was still living in student housing. With all that disposable income I went crazy buying expensive hardware. I spend $4000 on a Pentium 266 right in time for Half-Life to come out. I had my PC hooked up to my brand new high power surround sound system, it was glorious.

Later I bought a second hand CRT projector and mounted that from the ceiling. 72" screen for gaming, PS2, DreamCast, N64 and PC. Nvidea shutter glasses worked wonderfully with it as well. Descent 2 in full 3D, room size, dodging bullets as they floated through my room and beyond the wall I projected on. Unfortunately they didn't work as well on the 17" monitor due to afterglow so once the novelty wore off of playing on the projector from my bed I was back to 2D gaming.

I got hooked on Everquest late 1999 which took over most of my gaming time. Expensive hobby since I was still on dial-up. Monthly subscription plus a huge phone bill every month for all the hours connected to the server. I could afford it so didn't care, but basically spend $150 a month on playing that game.
End 1999 I met a girl on Everquest who is now my wife. She is the one that had me move to Canada from Europe. It took 15 months to get through the application process to get permanent resident status in 2002 when I emigrated. We kept on playing Everquest together, now side by side instead of 6,000 km apart.

Meanwhile we also played on ps2. We started ICO one of the times she was over at my place, I bought it again in Canada where we finished it. Baldur's gate Dark Alliance and Everquest Champions of Norrath were excellent games to play together. The GameCube was also a lot of fun. XBox I bought late during its lifecycle, but still in time to enjoy PGR, Rallisport challenge and others. Halo wasn't doing it for me, being used to the break neck speed of Counter strike, Half-Life death match, Unreal tournament etc, I just couldn't get along with a controller in Halo. It just felt slow and clumsy.

In 2006 I bought a 52" 1080p LCD tv, first game to play on that was Gears of War on the 360. So much more detail, wonderful. That TV still works btw, I use it as a secondary now, sitting next to the 4K 65" tv in the living room. PS3 became my favorite though during that generation. More 1080p games for the graphics whore in me (native res just looks better on an LCD screen) and blu-ray! I build my own home theater when we bought a new house with 1080p LCD projector, 92" screen. The ps3 and 360 made a ton of use of that. My PC not so much, it was always a hassle to move the thing over and windows always had updates to install while shutting down and starting up. But it was still great to play ETS2 on the big screen with internet radio from the countries I was trucking through.

My play time got much less though after the kids arrived. I played Valkyria Chronicles with our firstborn on my lap, turn based no problem. Dark Souls with our second born on my lap. He couldn't sleep laying down due to acid reflux, so it was shifts with my wife, half the night on my lap, early morning hand over to the wife. It's really peaceful gaming with your baby softly snoring on your lap!

The Wii was a hit. Our toddlers were fascinated with it. Wii Sports resort, crashing the plane was the favorite pass time lol. Always a giggle when the pilot jumps out. Zack and Wiki was my favorite (non zelda/mario) game on it. Wii U was also a hit, between the 4 of us we have over 500 hours on Lego City Undercover! Super Mario Maker was a big hit as well, I spend many many hours creating devious levels.

During the 8th generation I mainly played on ps4 and never got around to getting an XBox One. The XBox One S tempted me but MS immediately announced the XBox One X next to it. That wasn't worth the price to me and I didn't want the lesser version knowing the X was around :/ Not smart MS. Instead I went full in on PSVR, including buying a ps4 pro to go with the headset. That brought me back to the innovation of the late 90s. I played PSVR almost exclusively for over a year, so many great new experiences! I ended up with a second headset and played NMS together in co-op with my oldest in VR, amazing. Switch entered the home as well of course, BotW was awesome on the projector. Super Mario Oddeysey great on tv. I'm not fond of the handheld function though and haven't played much more on the Switch. Stick drift didn't help.

On PC I got into Elite Dangerous which consumed 9 months of my life. I had backed Star Citizen before Elite Dangerous but only one delivered. I have backed 17 games total on Kickstarter, only played 4 in the end. Not doing that anymore. Not that the rest all didn't deliver, I simply lost interest in them. Not unlike my backlog sitting on my shelves lol. FS2020 was the next great time consumer helping me through the pandemic. On PS4 GT Sport kept me busy.

This generation started with looking for a PS5 :/ I got one early this year and was well worth the wait. Ratchet and Clank and Horizon Forbidden West are amazing. GT7 wasn't however, quite a disappointment and I went back to GT Sport on the ps4 pro for online racing. My oldest ended up with the PS5 playing mostly Rust on it. I recently bought another PS5 (GoW bundle, got lucky to find one) so we don't have to share. I just went to the shop to pick up God of War and came back with another PS5. Since it was a digital voucher, we could both play the game at the same time.

I got the Series X as well this year, to play Forza 7 after GT7 disappointed me. I also got Quantum break and Sunset Overdrive for it. My youngest enjoys Sunset overdrive but mostly plays Fortnight on the Switch. I got the Halo Infinite edition to play split-screen co-op with my wife (we used to play Halo 2 and other shooters together when split-screen was still a thing) but it got cancelled :( I already played the campaign on PC game pass so basically wasted my money on the special edition. (The Halo themed controller is pretty nice though)

On PC I got into Roblox. My youngest asked me to help me with Factory simulator, which turned out to be very addictive. Next season coming in 2 days lol. Atm I'm playing Syberia The world before on PS5 with my wife and still playing God of War on it while trying to get myself to enjoy GT7. (GT7 is slowly getting better, GT Sport is running out of players :/) Meanwhile waiting for Starfield and Forza 8 to come out.

44 years of gaming to be exact and looking forward to PSVR2.