Hello lovely Patrons! I've been keen to provide you all with some exclusive content for a while now but been struggling to think of exactly what to do.
It occurred to me last night that some of you may find an account of my history with gaming in general to be interesting, particularly as I've been involved with computer and video games since almost the beginning. I wasn't quite around for the birth of video arcades and the Atari 2600 (or at least not old enough to appreciate the latter) but I was around for some of the earliest home computers.
In the UK, there were a number of competitors in the 8-bit home computer market, including Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad and doubtless a few others that have been lost in the mists of time. By the time I was old enough to understand the concept of computers and computer gaming, my family was thoroughly entrenched in the Atari camp, so that was where my loyalties lay in these early years.
Being an Atari fan was interesting and sometimes frustrating. The Atari 8-Bit range was technically superior to most of its competitors in a number of ways, but, particularly later in its life, it often missed out on versions of popular and successful games that would come to platforms like the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I'm not 100% sure of the reasons for this, but I imagine it was down to the size of the market; despite its early success with the 2600, Atari never seemed to be particularly good at marketing itself, and thus the C64 and Spectrum seemingly hoovered up the majority of the market share, while platforms from companies such as Amstrad, Atari and Acorn all languished in relative obscurity. Perhaps the letter "A" was cursed.
I'm not entirely sure what led my family to pick Atari in the first place, but I do know they were loyal readers of a magazine called Page 6, which began as little more than a well-produced newsletter for a Birmingham-based Atari user group, grew into a newsstand magazine and actually somehow managed to survive into the mid-'90s in various increasingly sad-looking formats, long after even the 16-bit ST range had ceased to be relevant.
Page 6 is a relic of a lost age — and in some ways was a defining influence for my general proficiency with computers. For those who didn't grow up with home computers in the 1980s, computer magazines were rather different from the games press of today. For starters, many of them didn't cover just games — though games-specific magazines did exist, including the medium-defining and long-lived but now sadly defunct Computer and Video Games — and instead explored computing culture in general. This included everything from new ways to use your computer — many of which we take for granted today, but which were new and exciting back then — to electronic projects, programming tutorials and, most importantly for me, type-in listings.
Type-in listings, for the unfamiliar, were full programs that were printed in the magazine, usually written in BASIC, that you could copy into your own computer, save to disk or tape, then have a "free" piece of software to enjoy. And when I say "copy", I mean painstakingly type out each and every line one at a time, exactly as it appeared in the magazine.
Type-in software ran the gamut from useful applications to games, and as you might expect my primary interest was in the latter. It wasn't at all unusual for publications such as Page 6 and its newsstand rival Atari User (with whom it eventually merged) to feature the "main" game program listing for the month on the front cover of their magazine, in some cases even referring to it rather presumptuously as "Game of the Year". Some of these games were excellent, some less so, but I have fond memories of all of them — and copying out those complicated listings from the magazines' tiny print did wonders for my touch-typing skills!
Piracy was rife in the '80s. We actually had relatively few legitimate copies of games and applications, and we were by no means in an unusual situation. The majority of our software library came from a local "computer club" my father and brother attended regularly, at which, so far as I can make out, people would hang out and exchange copied disks absolutely heaving with software, often making use of then-impressive compression systems to fit multiple full titles on a single floppy disk.
In some respects, this side of things was almost essential to the British Atari 8-bit scene in the '80s, since a lot of big-name games from Atari's native United States, where the systems were much more well-supported, simply didn't make it across the pond. This was partly due to the technical difficulties of converting 60Hz NTSC American games to the PAL 50Hz signal we used in the UK, and also simply down to the fact that the games business was not the international behemoth it is today, so it wasn't cost-effective for some companies to make their games international.
I have incredibly fond memories of the Atari 8-Bit era, despite the fact that I've probably made it sound like a rather bleak time to be a computer nerd! I discovered some all-time favourite games that I still return to regularly today — off the top of my head, Gateway to Apshai, Necromancer, Star Raiders and literally anything from Activision are all still pure gold — and learned a lot about working with computers, even going so far as to write my own programs in BASIC at times. Okay, none of them were great, but let me off the hook a bit; I wasn't even ten years old!
Recently, I was absolutely delighted that my parents were willing to part with our complete collection of Atari goodies that had been languishing in their loft for a good few years now, so I am once again in possession of pretty much everything that made my childhood magical. Sadly the 1050 disk drive appears to have given up the ghost, meaning there are a number of disks I can't load, but where there's a will, there's a way, as they say — devices such as the Atarimax provide modern means of loading software onto retro hardware without having to rely on fading mechanical devices and magnetic media.
The Atari 8-bit era is what got me into computers and gaming in general — but it was the 16-bit computer era that followed that got me into writing about games. But more on that next time!