Classic Computer Games and Cultural Snobbey

I have always been facinated by computer games. From the very 1st cassette loaded games for the ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64's of the early 80's. I have had some real happy times playing these games. Sometimes I think it’s a sad reflection on my life that I have such fond memories of these old classic games. But am I any different from the people who become obsessed with soap operas or movies? Someone who is knowledgeable about movies or literature in considered to be cultured and intelligent but someone who is knowledgeable about computer games is a geek who needs to get a life.  

This cultural snobbery really pisses me off. Those who know nothing about the gaming industry look down their noses at adult gamers as if it’s a sign of immaturity. They will quite happily spend 2 hours a night watching brain numbing soap operas on TV or watch Arnie machine gun 1000 terrorists and consider it time well spent.

I have never been a movie fan and I don’t watch too much TV. These forms of entertainment are just too passive for me. They don’t require anything from you, just your attention. It has to be something very exceptional to hold my passive attention for a couple of hours. I don’t mind reading a good novel because that isn’t quite so passive. You have to fill out the scenes being described in words with pictures from your own imagination. I have always hated watching a movie of a book I enjoyed reading. The story that unfolds in my head is never the same as the one that Hollywood portrays.

But my favourite ‘waste of time’ is gaming and has been since the 80’s when they 1st started to appear. Initially they began in amusement arcades and later into pubs, snooker halls….there was even one in my dentist waiting room. In the early 80’s the 1^st home computers started to show up, the BBC Micro, the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore.

I owned the ZX spectrum and remember being so mesmerised that I could actually control what was happening on the screen in front of me. This will be very hard for anyone born in the last two decades to understand but up until that point you TV screen was or watching passively. Here was a screen which I could control, at least partly. I had an input and could influence what happened on it.

The 1st games I remember playing were very simple. The arcade consol games were among the 1st to appear so I had Pong, Asteroids, and of course Space Invaders. They were incredibly simple but also wickedly addictive. My local pub had a Space Invaders machine so I was pretty good on it. Many hours were spent trying to beat my own high score. These games came on a cassette and played into your computer using a portable cassette recorder. They would often take about 20 minutes to load during with time it would beep and squeak much the same way as a fax machine does. If you were lucky it loaded ok but often it just gave an error message and you had to start again.

Another odd and endearing genre of the time was the text adventure. Absolutely no graphics at all. You were presented with a wall of text describing a scene. You had a few commands you could type in, which would either result in your horrible death or move you to the next scene. It seems so absurd now but I loved these games. It was like reading a novel where you were the hero.

Eventually I geared up to an Amiga. These had a disk drive and games were now being sold on floppy disks. You could get a whole 1 mb on a floppy in those days. My Amiga came bundled with Lemmings. This was a new concept in gaming at the time. It was a save-em-up where you had to stop the little bleeders from killing themselves. This was probably the 1st game I became truly obsessed over. To the point I took a couple of days off work to complete the last few levels. At the end of the last level you were rewarded with a group picture of the game development team and a message saying well done! One of my proudest moments ;)

This was when I truly became a gaming addict and what follows is a list of the most memorable games I played. These games have a real nostalgic value to me. They punctuated my life and were often the only high points in a sea of crap. They have been my sanctuary as well as my hobby. There were times when stepping into a pixelated virtual world was a release from the harsh realities that were happening around me.

Elite.

Anyone who has played and enjoyed Wing commander or the X games owes it to themselves to take a look at how the genre started. This is a space trading / exploration/ combat game that was also one of the 1st 3d games. 3d was mind blowing to me, being able to truly explore a space in a virtual world. The hardest part about Elite was landing when you discovered a new planet. Until you earned enough through trading to buy a docking computer it was done manually and often ended up with you crashing and burning. Still, it started a love of the space trading type games that I still enjoy today.

FA-18 Interceptor

Everyone knew what a flight simulator was in the 80’s. We had seen them on TV. They were used to teach pilots how to fly and they looked like a hell of a lot of fun. So imagine being able to have on in your home! This game sold in bucket loads because even dads who might not see the point of computer games wanted to have a go at a flight simulator. This was probably one of the best.

Midwinter

A 3d strategy adventure game that kept me up and made me late for work on more that one occasion. For the time the 3d environment was enormous. 160,000 square miles of frozen island in a post apocalyptic world. You played Captain John Stark. You had various modes of transport and weapons you could pick up through the game to help you defeat the bad guys. The thing I likes about this was you had to plan your routes through the mountains using the mini map. The 1st time I can remember the mini map concept being used.



The Secrets of Monkey Island

I spotted a You Tube video of this game recently and as soon as the music started the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. This is truly a classic. Any kid seeing it nowadays would just never understand how jaw dropping this was back then. You were the star of your own adventure. God I miss Guybrush Threepwood. The developers had sneaked some rather risqué jokes into some of the random text Guybrush said when you were exploring, including one about dick cheese….no really I’m serious ;)

Populous


One of the 1st God sims. A nice game to play but it had a really easy way to win on almost all levels. You just had all your followers build on high ground then flood the world to kill all the bad guys who had settled on low lying ground. Still, it was fun being God and again it had a random terrain generator so it was fun for a long time.

Sim City

Staggeringly simple but so damn addictive. The beauty of Sim City was that it randomly generated a new world to populate every time you played. It was never the same game twice, which gave it massive longevity value. Of course you can still play this game today in its updated forms

Civilisation

Again another game with randomly generated worlds that you tried to conquer. I remember phoning my then wife from work to tell her to start loading this game up because it took ages. Then I could start playing as soon as I got through the door…..we’re now divorced Oh hum.

Master of Orion

I have a thing for games that randomly generate a new game world each time you play and MoO generated a whole universe. It was so addictive to set your sights on a planet you could see but couldn’t reach yet. Race to get there only to find that the enemy had reached there at the same time. Just writing about this has made me want to play it again.

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon

Yes really! I know it sounds obscenely geeky but this was a fantastic game. You had to develop a rail system in the face of competition from the AI. Try to link up the most populous cities and find the supply chain for factories from raw materials to finished goods. I real brain teaser.



Homeworld 2

Moving on a bit now into the new millennium. I still own a copy of this game and recently started playing it again. The detail is still staggering when you think this is almost 10 years old now. Some people hate the level of micro management needed to play this game well. I love it. The whole game is played by pausing setting up individual commands for you fleet of ships,, unpausing and watching what develops, pausing again to change commands based on how the battle is going…..sounds utterly mind numbing when you descried it like that but it a true strategic challenge. Almost like a turn based game. And it is beautiful to watch. Enter it into a youtube search and you will see some staggering action that is actual in game footage, not a cut scene.

Half life 2

The amazing thing about this game was the physics engine. Everything reacted exactly as it would in the real world (almost). It was also one of the most atmospheric games I have ever played. There was a real sense of menace and danger all the way through. At times it scared the crap out of me too. “We Don't Go To Ravenholm”

Far Cry

My favourite FPS of all time. Its just so much fun to play and the environment is exquisitely rendered. Every time I play it I try to take each objective from a different approach. This one has given me many happy hours of gaming and I still go back now and again when I need to shoot someone in the face!

Ok I think I should stop now. I could go on forever but these games are the ones that bubbled up to the top of my consciousness when I started to think about this post so they deserve to be here for that reason alone. I’m sure if I gave it more thought I would think of many more.