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Tuesday, 25 September, 2001, 11:20 GMT 12:20 UK
Your say on classic video games
Our article on a new book which captures the golden age of classic video games stirred up fond memories from hundreds of you who grew up with Pong and Space Invaders.Disclaimer: The BBC will put up as many of your comments as possible but we cannot guarantee that all e-mails will be published. The BBC reserves the right to edit comments that are published.
Dan Hall, UK
I used to love Frogger and Donkey Kong. I always had the highest score for a girl, at our local youth club.
I used to play space invaders on the Atari 2600. The only problem I had with it was that the high-score didn't go high enough, and eventually it cycled back round to 00000! I'm glad that I didn't just play games on computer however, since from starting to write a few programs in Basic on the TRS-80, I'm now a professional software developer. I think it's a shame although inevitable that no modern games can be written by one person. The requirements of the industry have gone beyond that. We'll probably never see the likes of games like Elite again, since large teams struggle with the clarity and vision that one or two people can achieve.
Kev Beeley, UK
Who says these games are a thing of the past? I still play them on my PC at work - in lunchtime of
My first experience of video gaming was with a good old "TV Game" with tennis, squash on it. And a two-tone beep sound. It was great. More fun can be had with that than a lot of the new big lumbering PC games of today. Keep it simple and look to the old days for real enjoyment in gaming. More action per square inch of screen is what it's about.
I remember being particularly prone to "Atari Finger" as I would spend hour upon hour glued to the TV blasting Space Invaders. The joysticks used to get hidden from time to time to allow the callouses between my thumb and first finger to heal.
I will never forget the first arcade machine I saw; Donkey Kong when I lived in Zimbabwe. I was about 6 years old and there was loads of grown-ups there. One of them took the toy guns out of my holsters and put them on top of the cabinet. Being so small I couldn't reach them. Nowadays technology makes things so small, I've got a clone of the same game on my PDA!
Games programmers today have almost limitless computer power, and also call on software as an aid to creating their games. Let's now think back to the days of the Sinclair Spectrum with only 16 or 48K of memory. Some of the games for such machines were remarkable. The Hobbitt for example.
Chris Merriman, England
It was Atari who brought the game of Pong to the masses in 1972. Anyone remember the Grandstand home video games from the mid 70's? Video gaming took on a new dimension with the introduction of Vectorbeam graphics in 1977 when Atari introduced Space Wars to the arcades. Vector beam produced straight lines on the screen without the low res block effect of other games graphics. This format was also used for Asteroids.
When Space Invaders was introduced to the arcades by Taito in 1978, it took the world by storm. My personal favourite came from Williams, the pinball specialists who dipped their toe into video gaming with Defender in 1981. Smooth multi-coloured graphics in a fast 'fly your spaceship and shoot everything' format, you needed all your fingers to play it. A clever piece of programming as the whole game runs in 26K. How things have changed.
Donkey Kong and Galaxian were favourites of mine and I still enjoy playing them today on my PC, the theme tune to Galaxian sticks in every kids mind if they are in their early to mid-thirties.
Excellent fun because of their simplicity.
For me it all started with the BBC machines where our science teacher in junior school used organise computer game playing sessions after school. A really competitive and at sometimes, hostile, atmosphere built up especially when playing the all time classic Elite from David Braben and Ian Bell, or even the less demanding games such as Snapper, a Pac Man clone and Killer Gorilla. Several of us, due to our games addiction and the schools respect for the Acorn computers as a learning tool persuaded our parents to buy a BBC Micro Model B or in my case the budget "Acorn Electron".
Samantha Norris, London, UK
I remember the first games coming out on a Sinclair ZX81 (remember them?). The games used to use characters of the ASCII code to represent an object on a screen, it was also limited to 2 colours, black and white ! It was more fun in them days programming in machine code. My favourite game from this era was Asteroids, simply black and white wireframe graphics.
Like myself, I think many console owners and games players of today were children when video games first took off. I have fond memories of those early days - Asteroids, Defender, Missile Command were all very simple games but, at the same time, truly absorbing. That may be why we are keen to be reminded of where it all began.
I loved Pac Man when I was younger. Play an online flash version here: http://www.geocities.com/jackospage/pac.htm . This will bring back a few memories.
I must say, that looking back to the very early days of gaming, I still clearly remember the first console my parents bought for me and my brothers. It was the good old tennis game, and I remember it so clearly, for us this was a time back in 1975/76. It snowballed from there on. The almighty Atari, Space Invaders, Missile Attack. Oh those were the days. For that was when you were really surprised at what you saw, where as today, nothing really surprises anymore, we expect reality in a game, we expect to be engulfed in storyline and colours and shapes of all kinds. I remember two games that my brother was nothing short of a true master - Defender and Pac Man. This kid back in 79/80 was a legend in my whole town and somewhat in surrounding towns for his ability and shear skilled he showed.
There were two superb games I grew up with: 1942 an arcade shoot-em up and Harrier Attack a fantastic yet simple game on the Amstrad. I have yet to find an emulator for either of those, can anybody help??
During the year of my Inter Cert (O Level exams) (1983) some friends and I would spend almost every lunch time in the back room of a local pub where they had a Pac Man game in a coffee table machine. We discovered it was emptied of money each Wednesday during this time. The game owner (not the bar owner) would arrive take out the money box, go behind the bar to empty it, and then return the money box to the machine. However during this time we would put the same 10p piece into the machine over and over catching it as it fell out each time. This built up lots of credit, and usually we would spend the rest of the day playing, skipping class to play for free.
There are ongoing projects to preserve the original arcade video games. One of the best is MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) which is free and can be found at www.mame.net. The games for it can be
found at www.mame.dk. You can play every original game mentioned in the article - plus about 1800 others from (my/your) childhood - free. It makes a bit of a difference from spending my dinner money on Moon Cresta
at the chip shop near my old school.
I remember asking my folks for a Zx Spectrum plus 3 but instead getting an Acorn Electron. It had a tape loader so when you plonked your desired game-tape in it it took about 1/2 an hour to load (remembering to turn your tape over half way through) with a characteristic multi frequency screeching. Drove my mum mad. However once loaded, Frogger was the game of choice. Still gets me smiling thinking of the fantastic soundtrack.
I remember being the first kid on my block to have an Atari Video Computer System. We had Pac Man, Missile Command, Night Driver, Air-Sea Battle from Atari, then we bought Laser Command and Home Run Baseball by Activision. Soon, there was a new toy on the block - the first generation Nintendo Family Computer. That spelled the end of the Atari Era but I'll never forget it. It was one of those watersheds in my life.
I remember the early games so clearly - the late 70s and early 80s were defined by them, for me. And many of them are still incredibly enjoyable, too, even now.
The Hobbit for the Spectrum was my first experience with computer AI. You could talk to the characters and they'd talk back! It inspired me. I now work on the cutting edge of the internet for the world's biggest ISP and put down my passion to my early years playing games
For those of us who remember the 8-Bit period (and before), I still marvel at kids today who have grown up with Playstations and N64's not experiencing the fun and creativity that was abundant with home computer coders making truly original games. Remember £2.99 games? Dual formatted cassettes? Ah, those were the days. That was when dreams came true for many bedroom coders with just a £100 system could code and release a commercial product. Just a shame you can't do that these days.
Simon Mansfield, Belgium
I used to play Asteroids. My record was four hours scoring 1.5 million. (the score 'clocked' at 100,000 so people used to count for me). I had to stop when my legs cramped up. I also used to play Defender and recall how the whole game would slow down when you reached 990,000 into something that looked like bullet time in the Matrix.
My PDA resembles more of a retro arcade than anything else. Galaxian, Pacman, Elite (called StarTrader now) and many many more oldies have been stored on there. At least they come in useful for boring lectures at university.
I have hazy rose tinted memories of the games I played some 16 years ago. Defender drove me mad as I was never tall enough to fully see what was going on, a deadly flaw in my game playing. Still good twitch play though. Console-wise I have good memories of my Atari 2600 at the time. The computer game though was Head over Heels, far too many hours of my youth spent on this. Any one remember seeing the arcade Dragons Lair for the first time?
Oh, in reply to David looking for 1942, you could try Mame emulation, or Capcom themselves released the actual game and it's sequels on the Playstation and Saturn as Capcom generations. Check out cex.co.uk they might have it.
I remember when I was young, I saved money for over a year to buy Atari and Space Invaders. In the arcades, I especially remember a game called Lady Bug, which was a kind of new Pac Man game. I didn't at that time eat sweets, because I used all my money for this new world to me. Now that I have my own powerful laptop I still play, but of course more advanced games, though I remember a nice time with the beginning of games.
Don't forget Scamble ! Absolutely loved this one along with Phoenix, where you had to blow the huge spaceship up. It was the noise that got you going... I can still hear it in my dreams... I used to find the sit down machines great, as the game went on you would lean further forward and masses of people would start to lean over too. It was more like a performance, unless you were awful of course.
The 'dun,dun,dun,dun' rhythm of a space game must rate alongside the music for "Jaws" as a symbol of ominous threat, even 20+ years on.
One of my old favorites is a game
called Mazewar for the Atari 8-bit
computers. It was written by Mark
Price, IIRC. You'd select how many
computers (Zombies) and how many
players (Wizards, up to four on a
computer with four joystick ports)
and then you'd get in there and
start blowing stuff up.
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