In the first house I lived in we had a video games console that we fed cassette tapes. An educational puzzle game would blink on to the big, bulky TV set’s screen. An Uncle twice my age would set up his childhood console when I visited him at my Nan’s house. It was even more basic. He sat with a pamphlet and inputted code for half an hour before I could play a black and white Ping Pong game that entertained me for hours.
A year or so later, friends were starting to talk about the Sega Megadrive. I’d have a play if I was at theirs for tea but I got more satisfaction out of my Dad’s Commodore Amiga. The way a little green character named Super Frog bounced through medieval, Egyptian, circus and space levels to an upbeat soundtrack was mesmerising, and very gay. The stern bitmap image of a floppy disc on the screen was an exciting event for my sister and I, signifying our success in completing another world of the game and having to enter a new disk.
The Amiga stuck around with us whilst we lived in another house. Friends at this point were bringing Gameboys into the playground, raving about Sonic The Hedgehog and role playing the Mario brothers in school assemblies. I remember one afternoon at school, being sent by the teacher to the classroom next door for the code to access a level of Lemmings that my friends and I couldn’t reach.
The pace, noise and colour overload of more progressive gaming options took a while for me to come around to. I remained content flicking through a chest of pirated floppies my Dad had copied from a friend at work. Lemmings was often in the mix, many a Sunday afternoon would be spent on Street Fighter 2 and once I received a midi compatible Yamaha keyboard for a birthday (the PSS 590 – it still sounds great), I had it wired up to sequence bits of music I could never develop for lack of not having a hard drive or understanding what it was to save. After hours or blocking out squares on a grid and looping sounds together, I powered off and watched my efforts get zapped to the middle of the screen before it went pitch black and fizzed with static that you never hear from modern monitor.
By the time I started secondary school, a weekly IT class was the norm. Windows 95 had changed the world and after some reluctance and no doubt saving, my parents bought the family its first home computer. The Compaq Presario ran on Windows 95 but welcomed users first, to a virtual shopping mall. One shop front would take you to a desktop and start button that confused us for a good couple of months and the other would launch a horrid Compaq impersonation of Microsoft Office. Whilst you ‘stood in the mall’ a horrific recording looped on the virtual Tannoy. ‘Welcome to Compaq Presario Plaza. We hope you enjoy your stay. Where do you want to go?’ would be considered an abstract joke if sold nowadays to a world addicted to smooth user journeys and simplicity.
On that first PC, before months of my life were consumed playing strategy games such as Theme Park and Command and Conquer, filling the entire 2D square of Sim City with buildings was my main focus. A friend came to visit one Saturday and we managed to not leave one pixel of the game’s map uncovered by road, commercial or residential blocks. My Mum wasn’t best pleased with two young kids spending their whole day in a dark, curtained room and we were put on our bikes and sent for a cycle around the block. All we talked about together was what area of the map we’d bulldoze to redevelop. We were obsessed. Just as we were coming back down my road, the friend imagined. ‘It’d be amazing if someone was playing the exact game at the exact time, somewhere else in the world. We could join our cities up!’
600 floppy discs, a Discman, several mini Alba bedroom HiFi systems, trips to central London with friends to play shoot ’em up games across LAN networks in gaming cafes and an old Nokia mobile phone just about able to handle a game of Snakes later, things are obviously rather different. And that’s the true beauty of technology.
It’s come along way and has a limitless way to go. When I took the hour long bus journey home from school I carried a rucksack filled with 5 separate CDs and spent most of the trip swapping them back and forth to hear one song from here and one there. I never dreamt of a wallet size piece of plastic whizzing my record collection of 10,000 tracks up to my ears whilst I sat on a train, booked on a website using a phone that could film, edit and distribute the journey to the entire world in minutes. Technology takes the unimaginable and destroys it with creation.