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Feb
11
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Inspired by Games Radar’s article The greatest game on every platform I decided to put together my own list choosing a class of hardware at a time. In today’s installment I’ve chosen the ‘Micro Computers’ which I take to mean those systems that were definitely not PCs (or Apples) but definitely were not consoles either…
ZX Spectrum My first ever gaming machine was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K and I loved it, at the age of eight years old being given a system so flexible that you write your own games was amazing and largely responsible for my entire IT career. Despite writing my own (very basic) games from time to time I also had a load of games and among the many tapes I had there were a few that really stand out for me.
Fantasy World Dizzy was a basic platformer released by the Oliver Twins and published by the (then) much respected and admired Codemasters, it was years ahead of its time and literally wowed me with it’s cartoon-style graphics (sounds ridiculous now I know). Operation Wolf, one of the handful of games that supported the ZX Spectrum light gun and probably the only truly decent one (come on, Bullseye was crap in comparison). It was also possibly the first pseudo-FPS game I ever played and definitely gave me the thrills and excitement that would later come from games like Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty 4. The other game I feel compelled to mention is Alchemist, I’m not aware that it was ever especially popular but it’s blend of platformer and adventure puzzle game had me playing for hours and hours – perhaps the earliest game that I was completely immersed in.
BBC Micro
The BBC Micro was the first computer I ever used at school (and possibly the first real computer I ever used), at the time my Primary School was relatively advanced for the area in technology terms and although we only had the one computer we did have an hour-long ‘lesson’ with it every couple of weeks in small groups. Brilliantly (and probably because the teacher didn’t know what she was doing) we ended up playing games in these lessons and the main game we played was Granny’s Garden.
Granny’s Garden was a educational adventure games (think Oregon Trail crossed with Wizard of Oz) which was essentially a text-adventure with the odd graphical screen here and there. This really introduced myself and a generation of kids to the idea of computer games and that you had the freedom to explore a world inside the computer. Other than the handful of (again, basic) games I wrote for the BBC whilst in Secondary School I didn’t really play that many other games but one piece of software that was pioneering at the time and for many years later was the Domesday Project published in 1986.
The Domesday Project was a very early version of Google’s Streetview and came on a couple of giant laserdiscs (like a CD but SO much bigger), I only saw this in the early nineties and even then it was revolutionary. It allowed you to browse a map of the UK and view photos that had been selected as representative of that area, nothing like the coverage that Google Maps or Streetview has but still it allowed you to explore the country in a way that had never been previously possible.
Commodore 64
At this point I have to admit that sadly I never had much exposure to the Commodore 64, a friend of mine had one and I remember playing International Karate+ and Commando.
Commodore Amiga+ Atari ST
It doesn’t seem fair to combine these two platforms as they both had unique and distinct selling points but their similarity (and the comparatively poorer sales of the ST) resulted in so many games being released on both platforms and being practically identical. By the time these platforms had gained popularity I had migrated to the PC as a gaming (and general mucking about) platform so I only experienced them via friends but I never really found anything to make me favour one platform over the other.
Their place in the history of gaming is nothing short of a landmark, this was probably the first time that many people used a mouse and perhaps the first time they’d used a fully-featured GUI and desktop environment. I believe that this extra level of usability, relatively low price point and availability of games brought computing into a lot of households and expanded their use (the ST became a popular tool of choice for early music creators. Because of my limited exposure to the platform it’s hard for me to choose specific games that in my eyes ‘belong’ to these systems but of those I played I did really enjoy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the magnificent Sensible Soccer.
In my eyes Sensible Soccer was more of a PC game but was vastly popular on both the Amiga and the ST, one of my all time favourite sports games – all three versions benefited enormously from having keyboard controls as well as having the keyboard to make editing teams much easier. The game had an inherent humour about it anyway as you made your ineffective little men scurry around in up to 8 directions missing the ball on every other tackle attempt but the humour really came out in the team editing. My friends and I would spend almost as much time making up themed teams (Monty Python characters, rude words, friends names, etc.) as playing the game but it was absolutely worthwhile when you got to play a full World Cup of custom teams.