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1983 - 1984?






So lets go back in time.......

 My initial introduction to gaming / computers was back in 1983 - 1984, when I purchased a Commodore 64. I can remember sitting under the stairs with my computer, screen and tape deck! I remember how amazing the whole experience was, coding took a lifetime and de-bugging was another experience, once you had finally developed something you then had the major time delay of saving and loading the program via the tape drive. I developed a similar game to 'pong' only it had the odd snowflake type object that randomly fell from the top of the screen, you had to play your 'pong' shot and take into account the occasional snowflake!

 I thought this was genius, the sense of engagement and pride that I had achieved all of this from a simple keyboard and a weird new language.

 I now look back and wonder how my children would have handled the delay.....anything up to 20 minutes to load this program from a tape deck, I can hear my youngest Zac moaning that the Xbox is updating and it will take about 2 minutes via our fibre optic connection!

 1995 I think was my next encounter with gaming when the PlayStation 1 was released in Europe. I was living in London with two other guys, two of us worked for FileNet in Wimbledon Village and the third guy worked for Reuters. It really was a constant episode of 'Men Behaving Badly'. The three bedroomed flat we lived in was amazing,  if you learned slightly out of the balcony and looked right you had a wonderful view of Tower Bridge, I was later offered this apartment for, I think £130k, or was it £230k? I cant imagine what the value would stand at now.......needless to say I did not purchase the apartment.

 Anyway on the day of the PlayStation 1 release, we all went 'sick' from work and queued to buy the new shiny machine, it came with a single game 'Ridge Racer', we hurried back to the flat and set the system up via our Bang & Olsen TV (which we had acquired). What happened next made us realise very quickly that gaming and gaming consoles were going to be huge. The three of us played Ridge Racer for over 28hrs constantly - addicted to the engagement of the game, the social interaction between the three of us and the necessity to progress and improve. It truly was quite scary - a whole new world had just arrived in our living room.

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