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Post by kerr9000 on Aug 13, 2023 13:44:13 GMT
So simply what was it like when you were growing up, which systems did you see a lot of and which didn't you see at all, what was the common machine to have in your area or friend group
In my social group like 8 out of 10 kids had Spectrums and 9 out of 10 had Amiga's so I really did think this was the norm, then the Internet comes about and I see all this C64 and Atari ST love and realise I was only kind of conscious of my own little bubble. My cousin did have a Dragon 32 at some point and my older brother had a BBC something id normally only see in schools not houses.
As for consoles I was the only one of my friends to have an Atari VCS probably as I had older brothers. You would find the occasional Master System in the odd household but only one kid I knew actually had a NES when they were current. One lad had a GX4000/CPC with like only ever 2 games, one was burning rubber.
When it comes to the Great MegaDrive VS SNES days it seemed like a 50 50 split in my neck of the woods with me being one of very few people to own both. I never saw a PC Engine, I briefly had a Neo Geo at the end of the 16bit days but got it cheap and couldnt really afford anything for it so sold it...
I will talk about more newer things and handhelds later.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 13, 2023 17:00:26 GMT
Console-wise, that's easy - my neighbour had an Atari 2600 and that's it. No-one else I knew had a console of any kind, it was computers all the way. Obviously the parents in my town bought into that idea that computers would help with the schoolwork (To be fair, mine did, to a limited degree).
The friend I spent most time with on the computer when I was a kid owned an Amstrad CPC. We didn't play on it much - it was a green screen monitor version. While being a sensible budget option I'm sure, it really did nerf a computer that was configured with such a vibrant colour palette. Plus, of course the CPC was often neglected when it came to ports. I don't think he ever established a particularly large collection - I think I remember playing Roland in the Caves, which was quite a fun game, albeit not one you'd spend that long with. So more often than not, he'd come round to mine and we'd play C64 games.
We also spent a lot of time at school on the BBCs and later Archimedes - there was an Archimedes in the history office that no-one else used, so it was a bit of a safe haven for us unpopular dorks. So we played a lot of Twin World and Terramex. Not great games, perhaps, but you weren't exactly spoilt for choice on the Archie.
Another friend I had started out on a ZX Spectrum - not a rubber key version, probably the 128K Spectrum+. We played a lot of Gauntlet II on that - it was a really good conversion on the Speccy, so much so that I later found the C64 version somewhat underwhelming. Eventually he got hold of an Amiga 500, several years before I bought my 1200. The go to game was Pinball Dreams, possibly Pinball Fantasies, but more likely both. I suspect we played quite a bit of Lotus as well, but I'm not absolutely sure.
Had a couple of friends who owned STs, as I posted on the other thread. Overall then, nothing outlandish at all - all dominated by the big 3 8-bit machines and the 2 16-bit machines.
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Post by mattb on Aug 14, 2023 3:33:25 GMT
Consoles weren't that big round our way either. A few people had Pong clones in the 70s or the VCS, but after that there wasn't really anything until the early 90s when I was well and truly into adulthood. Throughout the eighties it seemed far more likely to come across someone with a Game and Watch than anything you'd plug into a TV.
So far as home computers went, a lot of friends had different machines in the early 80s. Acorns, Apples, Dragons, Orics, Tandys and some of the lesser known Commodore and Sinclair machines were all in evidence. Once it was clear that the Spectrum and C64 were going to be the ones that kept getting software though, almost everyone gravitated to those. The only thing getting much of a look-in was the Amstrad CPC although it was markedly less common.
The Amiga and ST were the computers of choice when I went to university. PCs weren't unknown but they were either cheap and mostly for serious work, or expensive beyond the realms of grant money or a summer job.
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Post by icemann on Aug 14, 2023 12:16:52 GMT
Back when I was little in the 80s it was mostly all Commodore 64's and Atari 2600 stuff for a very long time. Eventually the Sega Master System and NES arrived, but even then the Atari 2600 was super popular here (in Australia) for many years.
PC's and Amiga's were around but I only had 1 friend who had a PC, and another who had an Amiga. Both back then just seemed like other worldly machines, with mysterious games on them, as the games on both were completely unlike anything on consoles. After that things were fairly typical of everywhere else in the world, but for the 80s it was a super unique time.
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Post by lupogtiboy on Aug 15, 2023 8:34:25 GMT
At middle school, my best friend had a Commodore 64 with a disc drive, though we usually only played the cartridge football game or Chase HQ! He even had the midi keyboard, all set-up in the corner of the front room.
Another friend, Mark, also had a C64, so after riding around for hours on our bikes, we'd go and play American Warewolf in London or Ghostbusters.
Another Mark(!) had an Atari 7800, so I'd go round his before school and play Centipede or Space Invaders.
There was a kid on the estate where I live called Lenny (he was small and half-Irish!), his parent's bought him a 386 PC, so we'd play Doom for ages with all of the other kids crowded around!
There was a sweetshop/games shop called Sweethaven that used to have all the latest consoles on display. That's where I first saw the Philips CD-I, which was developed in the Philip's labs about 15 minutes away from where I live!
I didn't get any games consoles or computers until I was in secondary school. My parent's bought my brother and myself an Amiga 500+ (Cartoon's Classic pack), many many hours spent playing the hell out of that! The first game I booted up was Bart Simpson vs the Space Mutants, I remember being blown away by the intro movie.
After that, a cheap find Mega Drive is what stirred up the whole love for gaming. I bought it at an antiques fair for £30 with a load of games, and it's all gone mad since then.
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Post by rednoggy on Aug 15, 2023 13:40:01 GMT
I'm a little young to fully appreciate the speccy etc but they were around. A mate had a ZX, another had a c64 but that was it. Two of us had a nes, one a master system. Again, it wasn't really big amongst my friends. That cganged when we started comp and everyone was getting consoles at Xmas and they were all getting the mega drive. I got a snes which was great because I regularly swapped consoles for a few weeks at a time with a mate. I also met my best friend because he was the only other SNES owner in the school. Then the school went PS1 mad.
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Post by AlexH on Aug 18, 2023 11:15:56 GMT
Me and my bro' had an Amstrad CPC. An uncle worked in a place where they were sold off cheaply every 6 months. Initially we had a green screen then colour. I'm not aware of any other friends my age (I'm the elder sibling) who had a computer and friends were excited to come around. It seemed at the expense of the kitchen being so small, our little 2-bedroomed terraced house even had a games room where we had a little snooker table. Sometimes Mum gave us pocket money and we'd excitedly pop around to the paper shop to check the game cassette racks, and sometimes the bigger displays in town.
We played Oh Mummy! and Chase HQ often because they were on floppy disk, but most of our games were cassettes, including a fair few compilations. I liked the Codemasters Simulator games (especially Grand Prix and Skiing), World Soccer League, Treble Champions, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Dizzy, Starquake, Operation Gunship, Knight Lore (our mum made us a map of all the locations), Beach Head, Feud, Dynamite Dan, Smash TV, Daley Thompson, The Way of the Exploding Fist, some of the text adventures, and all sorts. I remember seeing Olli & Lissa 3 and being amazed by the graphics. One memory is that Sooty and Sweep always crashed when you went into the bathroom.
An uncle had a ZX Spectrum. I remember chat-type software that's of course very primitive compared to today's generative text like ChatGPT.
When we were a bit older, a friend had an Atari ST, and all I remember about that is a football manager game where you were able to expand the stadium. It was amazing compared to the text-based manager games I loved on the Amstrad.
I feel I've written a lot already so will move onto consoles later!
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Post by rossi46 on Aug 18, 2023 14:50:50 GMT
My dad brought home a TV Games-type machine with Pong and tennis type games on it when I was really young but I didn't have much interest in it.
I got an Astro Wars mini console thing when I was about 12 but I was always too much into outdoor biking and stuff. It wasn't til I got a Master System in 1988 that my gaming fascination took off. I was 20 then. I had spent years in the arcades before that but only when it was too wet for BMX racing. I was a really early adopter of mountain biking in the late 80s too as well as skateboarding and that took up 90% of my time. My pal used to code games on his BBC but I always though that a waste of time. As soon as the Megadrive hit though, well it was all go after that. I had to juggle hobbies but somehow I managed and turned into a games obsessive. Still do all of the above apart from BMX.
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Post by Markopoloman on Aug 18, 2023 18:39:07 GMT
Mine started with the Atari 2600 when my dad picked one up. It was probably around 1979, I was 9 and have very fond memories of it, although I don't think we became slaves to it and it was quite time restricted due to sharing with normal TV. 1982 was the next event, where my brother borrowed a friends ZX81. By this time he had a TV in his room (he was just over a year older than me, so seemed to get what he wanted). We spent hours and hours writing in listings for 'games' out of some magazine - none of them did much! 1984, again my brother turned up with a friends computer. This time it was a Spectrum. This was much better! Manic Miner was played pretty much all night. This sparked my interest in gaming and from that moment I could be found with my head in the many catalogues my mum had. Not only was I looking at the lingerie sections, I was dribbling (mouth) over the Home Computer section with a special eye for the Atari 600xl and Atari 800xl - and my order for Christmas was put in... That Atari 600xl was going to be mine! I think I chose it because it had shiny silver keys down the side, a real keyboard and the 2600 was a happy memory of Atari. Christmas day arrived and I ripped open my huge box to see my................................................. Commodore 64 What was THIS! It's not what I asked for!!!!! I then found out that my brother had told my mum the Atari was rubbish and the C64 was going to be HUGE! To this day, that is still the best thing my brother has ever done for me. Imagine how grim my life would have been stuck with an Atari?! I could have become 'The Laird' The C64 to me is still the best computer I ever owned. 1988 arrived with all the hype of the Amiga. So I sold my C64 (with thousands of original games and many many more 'backups') And purchased an Amiga A500 (no special pack, there was no such thing!) Feck my boots! This was AMAZING... the biggest disappointment for me though was the music in games! Yeah it was great with loads of sampled sounds, but it just wasn't SID music. Aaaaaaanyway,this was my gaming nirvana through to around 1994 when I shifted over to PC gaming and the first Pentium machines. God, they were hard work to get stuff running This was obviously followed up every 4 or 5 months upgrading the graphics card and then the CPU. I constant cycle that must have cost me an absolute fortune - but became an addiction, just to get that one up on my mates PC's and in all honesty, that only stopped about 5 years ago. Somewhere in between all of this I owned a Master System on release - thought it was rubbish because the sound was terrible compared to my C64, sold that and got a NES... that was also rubbish so got rid of that. Skipped everything else until the Dreamcast - that was brilliant. Also had a Gamecube (brilliant) a PS2 (brilliant) Nintendo Wii - still the best family gaming system ever released! A Xbox360 (brilliant), A Wii-U (WTF was that all about) and a Wii - errrrr Switch (brilliant). But none of those were even close to the C64, Amiga and PC. All 3 of my boys are PC gamers. All 3 of my girls are mainly console gamers, although all do PC game. I forgot to add in the Oculus Quest that happened over lockdowns. Some of the best money ever spent! I'm eagerly awaiting Quest 3
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Post by flatapex on Aug 18, 2023 23:13:15 GMT
We had some kind of pong machine but I don’t remember it.
Then 1989 rolled around and we got a pc, that was awesome.
1992 I started high school, mega drive for Christmas. Sega vs Nintendo was in full swing
1994 I think it was I got a game gear, didn’t have much for it as the games were nearly as expensive as md games
1997 we got another pc
2002? Whenever vice city came out- got a ps2, still have it
2003 bought a snes second hand, sold in 2009
2010 bought a second hand 360, didn’t have much for it
2010 also bought a second hand Wii
2013 started buying retro- a master system turned into about 16 consoles in various states from near immaculate to non working
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Post by kerr9000 on Aug 19, 2023 18:43:23 GMT
I thought id let some of you tell me a bit about your experience and then id go into mine in a bit more detail. Like I said In my social group like 8 out of 10 kids had Spectrum's back in the day. For me it all started with a set of 2 hand me downs a hand me down Atari VCS the old woody type which I still have with a lot of the original carts from back then as well as some I have picked up over the years, I used to play on this a lot during my very early years, particularly while my other hand me down loaded. My other hand me down was a 48k Spectrum that had belonged to my older brothers.... my first memory of every playing a game was on the spectrum it was a Spectrum game called First Steps with the Mr Men and my Dad had me sat on his knee playing it super super early like when i was 2 or 3 it was all stuff to help you work out your colors and such, I still have this somewere as well although I dont think I have that particular Spectrum anymore though, I think my mum gave it away to someone less well off when I got a 128K Spectrum +2 for Christmas along side a Matsui 14 inch Portable TV. The TV was a massive improvement as before this id been playing my Atari and Spectrum on a 4inch black and white.. I still have this Spectrum and all my games plus others I have grabbed along the way...
I played a lot of Commadore 64 growing up as well because my best friend Andrew had one and a whole bunch of games, I have lots of memories of his grandma walking me and him to his house after school getting us sausage rolls from the bakery on the way and then us playing loads of C64 games at his house they are really happy memories, we would watch things like Visionaries and other cartoons or play darts or play board games while the C64 loaded... I found a lot of my fave games on the Spectrum through first playing them on his C64 and deciding I wanted to be able to play them at home. I rememeber him having this cool game Fernandez must Die or something like that and then I saw it a bit later on a Spectrum Magazine cover tape and had to buy that magazine to get it.... Cover tapes where such a huge bit of my gaming life back then as were budget £1.99 titles.#
my older brohter had a BBC I ocassionally got a go on as well as school having one, A cousin had a Dragon 32 or 64 not totally sure which and then one friend had an Amstrad but it was mostly Spectrum after Spectrum in every kids house with the odd C64 thrown in... The only game I remember playing on the Amstrad was Prince of Persia
to be continued.....
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Post by AlexH on Aug 19, 2023 19:44:28 GMT
I forgot to mention we typed in a few games too...or usually our mum typed the most, including Lawnmower Simulator. It was well into my thirties when I found out that was an April Fool and inspired the crap games competition.
To the Amstrad, we added a NES and a few games at some point (RC Pro AM, Snake Rattle n Roll, and Mario 3 being favourites). I remember Mario 3 being crazily expensive at £59.99. I think most friends had a NES if any console, with one or two having a Master System.
A friend and his bro' loaned us their SNES for 2 weeks a couple of times a year when they went on holiday, which was always very exciting. We couldn't wait to play Super Mario World.
Mum eventually bought us a used SNES out of the local paper, probably one Christmas. Another couple of friends had a SNES and a cousin a Mega Drive. Gameboys seemed most popular, but I was never interested. A couple of friends had gaming PCs by this point.
I remember a few of us spending much of one long hot summer holiday holed up in a friend's tiny bedroom (painted black, with the blackout curtains closed) playing SNES, mostly Olympic Summer Games which with hindsight wasn't one of the best multiplayer games on the console. Maybe it was one that everyone could compete at given my bro' and I played games like Unirally and Tetris Attack a lot, making us virtually unbeatable on those two.
Some at school played Quake or Doom on the networks, but I don't think I was all that interested, especially a couple of years later when we got hold of GoldenEye then especially Perfect Dark. The N64 was the first console we had close to release - only a couple of days after. I lived close to school and friends would come at lunch just to watch Mario 64 and Turok. The first few seconds of Mario 64 will probably forever be my biggest wow moment in gaming, though BotW has been the closest since.
N64-wise, we (usually my brother and two of his friends) had plenty of very loooong nights playing Perfect Dark and WWF No Mercy (unbeaten in tag team on the latter against my bro' and his other friend - my brother started winning at most games, so I still savour the wins). The PlayStation was most popular ownership-wise with friends at this point, but most time was spent playing our N64!
I never really got into PC gaming, preferring gaming on a dedicated device. The Curse of Monkey Island, Age of Empires, and Championship Manager were favourites though, and of course the latter whiled away lots of hours.
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Post by kerr9000 on Aug 20, 2023 12:58:02 GMT
So onto the Second phase
I never at the time owned a Master System 1 or 2 although I did see a few and would actually continue to see them for years past there prime... when they came out my Cousin Lee had one and I loved playing on his when I went to his house, I dont remember him having a lot of games for it though. He had a Master System original although what I remember seeing the most was the model 2. I saw loads of Model 2's most of them at the houses of people my Middle brother was dating... My main memory of the Master System 2 is being in strange homes and my brother playing on them with me for like 5 minutes and then dissapering and me playing on it on my own for ages.... I now realize essentially this was him having booty calls when he was supposed to be looking after me and knowing stick me in front of a console and I wouldn't care or realize. I eventually got a Master System 2 second hand near the end of the Megadrives life in order to be able to play it when I wanted for peanuts.
I only ever saw one single NES back in the day and it belonged to a friend of mine Paul, I only actually remember him having Super Mario Bros and that was it, we spent far more time on his Amstrad and we didn't even spend much time on that as he had like 100 board games and a truly massive back yard, so my times with him at that age were more about water gun fights and twister and such. I didn't get a NES till the N64 was announced, it was out of a newspaper from the adds part and came for very little money less than a new SNES game and had about 8 games with it, one of them was Punch Out and I totally fell in love with that game and tried my best to collect as many carts for it as I could.. I think I now have around 100 Nes games and the same for Master System games with videos showing them on my YouTube.
I think I had my Amiga 500 before consoles... my main memories of it are spending a lot of time playing Stunt Car Racer, Shuffle Puck Cafe, A Rockstar Ate My Hamster, Moonstone and Elvira Mistress of the Dark. I also have a lot of memories of copying stuff and of public domain discs including stuff like a video where it showed pictures of the Adams Family and did a midi version of the Adams family theme which I used to love clicking along to. I remember one other friend having an Amiga and my Cousin having an Amiga, and I was hardly even aware of the Atari ST's existence.
With the Megadrive my first ever experiance was one of my middle brothers friends bringing a Japanese one around to our house before it was out here, it was cool but all he had was Altered Beast and Rambo 3.. this wet my appetite though and after they were out a local Video rental place called Cabin Home Video rented a Megadrive out and my mum got it me for a weekend to see if id like one for Christmas. I rented Buck Rogers alongside it and this is the game which basically made me really need a megadrive
about half of my friends ended up with the megadrive as well as a cousin and my middle brother so it was a very common system to see, the other half of my friends had Super Nintendo's though... 2 things sold me on begging my mum for a SNES one was F-Zero which I used to play in a gaming kiosk in my local CO-OP I used to play it on the way home from school until the staff kicked me out. Then my friend who had a SNES quiet early doors had Super Mario World and I loved that. My mum openly told me I could have one and she would start saving like half way through the year... so I started spending my pocket money buying Import games and a convertor, I got whatever I could get my hands on cheap and had a nice little set by the time I got my machine. My school was half SNES half Megadrive.... no one had a turbo graffix or a neo... I did get a Neo years later but only had it for a few months before selling it on, it was to expensive to keep...
I will talk about old hand helds next time.
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Post by dmb672 on Aug 25, 2023 10:29:46 GMT
In our household we started off with a NES, but then it was DOS and Windows 95 gaming all the way through to working age. I did play SNES and Megadrive round friends' houses but it was obviously fleeting. I was so desperate to play I used to cycle to the local toyshop and play the demonstration games. I also had a Game Gear, which was a bit of a mistake in retrospect, but still gave me many hours of joy when I was plugged in.
For our household it was the big RTSes for my brother - Dune 2, Civ, Command & Conquer. For me I loved platform games, so shareware filled that niche - Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, Jazz Jackrabbit filled that niche rather well. Doom and Quake were great favourites in my house, as well as puzzle games like The Incredible Machine and Lemmings. Sierra games made their appearence like Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest. Living in Belgium and with seemingly no shops around us, it was a struggle to get hold of games sometimes, but we muddled along.
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Post by kerr9000 on Aug 25, 2023 17:43:01 GMT
In our household we started off with a NES, but then it was DOS and Windows 95 gaming all the way through to working age. I did play SNES and Megadrive round friends' houses but it was obviously fleeting. I was so desperate to play I used to cycle to the local toyshop and play the demonstration games. I also had a Game Gear, which was a bit of a mistake in retrospect, but still gave me many hours of joy when I was plugged in. For our household it was the big RTSes for my brother - Dune 2, Civ, Command & Conquer. For me I loved platform games, so shareware filled that niche - Crystal Caves, Secret Agent, Jazz Jackrabbit filled that niche rather well. Doom and Quake were great favourites in my house, as well as puzzle games like The Incredible Machine and Lemmings. Sierra games made their appearence like Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest. Living in Belgium and with seemingly no shops around us, it was a struggle to get hold of games sometimes, but we muddled along. Thanks for sharing chap, its neat to hear the experiences of someone who is from outside of the UK. I remember the first ever time I saw Leisure Suit Larry it was round my aunt and uncles, what a game.
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