My Gaming History: Part 3 - Among My People

Throughout primary school, I always felt like a bit of an outsider being someone who was "into computers".

I didn't enjoy a lot of things my peers were into — well, mostly playing football, though I did try a bit — and so I found myself spending a lot of time at home enjoying my hobbies and interests by myself. Besides computing, this included music, but that's a whole other discussion.

When I got to secondary school, after an initial bout of social anxiety (which I now recognise as being related to the Asperger Syndrome I've likely been dealing with for most of my time on Earth) I made some new friends. And I was delighted to discover that they liked games just as much as I did.

This would have been around the time the Mega Drive and Super NES were becoming popular, as I recall some friendly fanboy rivalry between several of my friends — particularly once Street Fighter II came out and started playing tennis between the two platforms in terms of features getting added and expanded. (The Super NES pretty much won the whole battle so far as we were concerned primarily by virtue of its default controller having enough buttons to enjoy the game.)

As for me, I was fascinated by everything that played games. I had a Super NES myself — though in retrospect, I never built up much of a collection for it — but I absolutely loved any time I got to go to my friend Edd's house and play on his Mega Drive, and loved it even more when my brother came home from his jobs on gaming magazines at the time with gaming hardware and import games in tow. As such, I never really became a "fanboy" of a particular platform; much like I do today, I went where the games were, and always had a good time.

It would have been around this time that I also started getting into PC gaming. As you'll recall, prior to this point my computer gaming had been on the Atari ST and Atari 8-Bit, so switching to PC was interesting. By this point, the advent of 256-colour VGA graphics and dedicated sound cards meant that the PC was finally a superior gaming platform to its predecessors, and a wide variety of games were more than happy to show off what the maturing platform was capable of.

I had a fair few commercial PC games, though the majority of my fondest memories from that period actually come from shareware games. Wolfenstein 3-D, Commander Keen, Doom, The Catacomb Abyss, Duke Nukem and numerous others — they're as much a part of my gaming background as anything else.

The great thing about shareware was… well, you could share it without feeling guilty. Copies of the aforementioned games all did the rounds among my friends and I, and we'd frequently spend whole lunchtimes talking about them and attempting to get our heads around the various modding tools available for them.

I never got on with Doom modding and anything beyond, but I absolutely loved playing with Wolfenstein 3-D's map editors. Interestingly enough, our family had signed up to CompuServe around that time for our first real online experience that wasn't a direct-dial BBS, and one day while browsing the "GAMERS" forum on the service, I was contacted by someone who was looking for new Wolfenstein levels made by fans, and apparently offering money for them.

It sounded too good to be true but, with my parents' approval, I provided my details and sent him the ten-level episode I'd created. To my great surprise, a few months later a package arrived containing a cheque for $200 and three floppy disks, containing a full registered copy of the latest version of Wolfenstein 3-D as well as its brand new Super Upgrades expansion pack. The latter included my levels, so technically I'm a professional game designer.

Other great memories from the time include the Lucasfilm and Sierra adventures, which I'd actually often play with my mother as a bonding activity. And because we both liked them. My mother wasn't a particularly big gamer, but she'd always enjoyed adventure games since their text-only days, and she got on well with graphic adventures. Particular favourites included the first Gabriel Knight game as well as Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the latter of which my aforementioned friend Edd and I adapted into a veritable epic of a clumsily-drawn comic strip featuring self-insert characters in the leading roles.

This period in the early '90s remains one of my most fondly regarded eras in gaming history. I'll always have a soft spot for the games from that period — particularly on PC, but it's been great fun catching up on the 16-bit console games from the era, too.