Spacedone wrote:Actually come to think of it before I had a Commadore I had (well my older brother had... I was about 4) a Dragon 32. It was rubbish and yet brilliant at the same time.
All those period computers were little bits of magic that had somehow filtered down to our lives (well, my life, in industrial Cheshire) through a process not understood. I was 16 and my mate 5 doors down had a Speccy ZX that was simply magic. OK, it took about 10 minutes to load a game off a cassette, and if that game was Fighter Pilot you'd then spend the next 3 hours flying in a monochrome blue sky failing to find and destroy the single enemy jet lurking up there flitting back and forth. But it was, er, fun.
The major breakthrough was Elite, a space trading and combat game thar was so absorbing as to remove hours from your life unnoticed (as it did, as did the original D&D). I didn't actually own a computer until 1984 when I finally bought an Amstrad CPC6128, which was twice as good as the Spectrum, or, to put it another way, only half as dreadful. I can still remember knocking out a dreadful games magazine called StAB (Strangled At Birth) dedicated to play by mail games on it and a dot matrix printer that cost me £160 back in 1985.
The highlights were Elite, Lords of Midnight, Tau Ceti and probably one or two other titles I've now forgotten, but wouldn't mind having another crack at. I tried programming, but didn't understand it, and it was only about4 years later that I suddenly got it and became vaguely proficient. Perhaps I should have become a games programmer (as a long time wargamer, it has an appeal given that we're not exactly thick on the ground), but there you go.
I could rabbit on about this sort of shite for hours, as it was both fun and illuminating, but I'll close this message by reiterating my thanks to all you lovely bods who've been so supportive today and to assert that Elite is better than Football Manager. Probably. Although Western Front
was ace; as was Austerlitz. And Over Flanders Fields. And some more I've just remembered.... oh dear....