Widescreen Gaming Forum

Wolf 3D on my 386 w/ 4 megs of Ram. My god I was hooked. I loved Doom also but my best gaming experience that I can remember was VQuake on my Veritas (SP?) 3D board from Sierra. It was running Quake at 640 x 480 x 32 bit at 20 FPS. Nothing would ever be the same!
I can also remember the night that John Carmack released Glquake on the world and made Voodoo 3D accelerators a household name. It changed everything and the rest is history!

I don't share quite as rich a history as a few people here, but I've been into gaming as far as my memory goes back. Aside from my Dad's Pong machine, I started out on a 286 my dad bought when I was somewhere around 3 or 4 years old. I can remember a few of the titles I played back then: Commander Keen, Aldo's Adventures, ...some batman game on 5" floppy...what order those were played in escapes memory.

From there I've played it all...from the classic Sierra titles, to the cheezy "online" BBS text games, to any console I could get my hands on at home or a friend's house.

The first console I personally owned was a SNES, and frustrated at my parents' slow upgrade cycle, bought my first gaming PC when the first Athlons came out, complete with a GeForce 2. Not that I missed out on any games before then..but I mark that as the beginning of the parting between ordinary computers and gaming computers, thanks to the increased reliance on 3D accelerated graphics.

As far as particular games, a few of those that will forever stand as masterpieces in my memories: Civilization, X-com UFO Defense, Master of Orion, Masters of Magic (yeah, I liked Microprose games).

wow. i'm not the oldest one here! woohoo@!

i started out in the arcades with lunar lander, tempest, and centipede. tempest was a big obsession with me - brilliant game really.

i spent some time with the coleco vision, and the nes ... never had a 2600 of my own, my best friend had an intellivision ... then the sega came along ... and the original NHL hockey. 12 hour marathon tournaments and nintendonitis and everything.

i didnt start gaming on the PC untill i upgraded to a rage fury and bought episode 1 racer - and i was hooked.
about a year later, i got an ISDN connection, and someone showed me tribes. team based combat, and up to 20 people at once! f'in brilliant.

now i am starting to get more into single player games, the gta series and the POP series lately, and any decent racing game that is still arcade-y. the uber-sims lose something for me. it stops being fun and is too much like work.

definately pc gamer for life now.

My first ever computer was an Amiga 600 when i was 8 :) And the first game i ever played on it was Edd the Duck, followed by Lotus Turbo Challence 2 :)

First console was a Game Gear (the following christmas) and i played Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time!

My first PC was a Packard Bell P-75 (with a massive 8MB of RAM), i nearly dropped dead when i saw the graphics on Decent :D

Unfortunately that PC didnt last very long (it was rubbish!) and a few months later my parents got me a Gateway P120 instead! And the first game i played on that was Hi-Octane which is still one of my fav games, even now!!

Since then, ive grabbed pretty much every console since the 16bit era onwards (although i seem to have missed a SNES somewhere along the line...).
Ive been obsessed with a fair few games! Sensible Soccer, Red Alert, Quake 2... but my main obsession was Unreal Tournament. I was actually pretty good back in the day and joined various clans, but when UT 2003 came out, it really dissapointed me, and i havent really played online since.

Ive gone between PC and Console gaming a lot, and was dedicated to consoles not too long ago (as my 2.53 P4 was struggeling in games). But since ive upgraded my pc and bought my Dell 2405 im most deffinately back to being a PC Games :)

I'm old, bit not THAT old ;) I started out on a PC XT from my dad on which I played Outrun and Leisure Suit Larry in amazing 13" orange-monochrome colors :)

After that I 'upgraded' to a Commodore 64. Still, my best gaming memories go to that machine! Loved it!

The next logical step was the Commodore Amiga 500, with it's brilliant graphics and sounds.

After that, it was PC's for me: 386DX40, 486DX2-66, Pentium 90, Pentium 200, Pentium II etc.... until the current system you see in my sig.

I mostly play racegames like GTR, GT Legends and I loved the Grand Prix series by Geoff Crammond.

And now, I am awaiting my Dell 2005FPW to arrive. I'll keep you posted on my experience with it, it will be my first LCD.

I guess I've always preferred the PC. My favorite console is the Dreamcast.

I got into gaming on the IBM PCjr. Anyone remember that? My parents bought one, and you got three software titles with it. IBM had commissioned Sierra to make a game to showcase the 16 color CGA graphics, and the soundchip that could make three tones. :shock:

King's Quest was that game. Back then they packaged it in a large plastic case that resembled a cassette tape case, complete with a "J card" for a cover (Anyone here remember those?). I begged my dad to get it. He said no.

Later that year I moved up to the Boy Scout troop (from Cub Scouts) and made a friend that also had a PCjr. AND HE HAD KING'S QUEST!!! We played that forever. I remember when KQ2 came out. We split the cost and bought it from B. Dalton Booksellers in the mall. My dad had a friend who could crack the copy protection on the game, so we each got a copy. We did the same with KQ3, the Space Quests and so on.

I remember that KQ1 was one disk, KQ2 was two disks, and KQ3 was (shockingly) three disks. The games kept getting bigger and better, and we were all excited when KQ4 came out, thinking it would be four disks and a monster of a game. Well, KQ4 came out and it was NINE floppies...

We also played the Ultimas, specifically Ultima II. In that game random encounters could pop up at each turn. To level, we would get in a "safe" spot and hold down the space bar to pass turns. Then kill everything, get the XP, and repeat.

We used to go to the Legends world (which was small and had easy moongates to get out if we got in trouble). We tried using s stapler to hold the space bar down, but that didn't work. We ended up with a banana on its side. After a while we got frigates (which you could board and then use to fight with), and used them to make a land bridge that wrapped around the world. One time (we beat the game multiple times) a rocket ship appeared in the middle of the ocean. Don't know how that happened. Those were only available in the modern ages.

We also played Wizardry and found out about a cheat that would allow you to level your character instantly to level 99. Go kill one monster, then when you'd go into rest at the inn, you could insert a blank formatted floppy and it would level you character all the way to 99, and say you needed a few million XP to your next level. The game had multiclassing, so in a very short time you could take your whole party to have every class maxed to level 99. Hint books were almost essential, unless you wanted to map every level of every dungeon.

Then there was Bard's Tale, and we got hint books to help with that as well. I remember there was one room where there were four groups of 99 berserkers. We'd hit that dungeon, teleport to that room, waste them all using Fire Horns and AOE fire spells, teleport out, and repeat.

I wonder if many gamers will have such fond and vivid memories as I (and all the "old" gamers I know) have about gaming and growing up with games. It was an exciting time to watch the industry grow and see new games being made.

My story is similar to most of you. I am 34 and started with Pong. Then we went to an Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, Nintendo, Ti-99/4a, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Amiga 2000, 3DO, 486DX, Playstation, Nintendo 64, Pentium, Sega Dreamcast, Pentium II, AMD Thunderbird, Plystation 2, Pentium 3, AMD Celeron, Nintendo GameCube, Pentium 4, and finally my new AMD X2. Maybe not in that exact order, but close.

I have two favorite genres, so I have 2 favorite systems. For FPS- the AMD X2. For sports games- the Playstation 2.