The Spectrum had been wonderful for my young, inquisitive mind. The Megadrive had cemented my love for gaming. But the PlayStation was capable of something much greater than that. The PlayStation was cool.
I had a horrible part time job while I was at school and, in between buying cans of lager and packets of cigarettes, I saved up wages and tips for a while to buy my first PlayStation. The Megadrive had always been one of those things you did with your mates or on your own. In your bedroom. You’d talk about it among friends but I had got to that age where girls were more important than speedy hedgehogs (don’t worry kids, it doesn’t last too long) and the PlayStation was acceptable to a much wider audience.
I remember playing with that running dinosaur demo for what seems like it could have been hours. It was, to co-opt a modern Jobsism, magical. Tomb Raider let me shoot tigers in between swan diving and shoving rocks around. Die Hard Trilogy was like being in the movies. Driver was simply unbelievable. Gran Turismo was like a video. WipEout was everything that I was just starting to wake up to socially – bright lights, electronic music and futuristic styling. It was like a safe introduction to club culture that I would hit quite hard in the next few years.
I had just started A-levels at college which I would ultimately drop out of to join a job market which was only marginally more healthy than it was now. Probably the worst decision I’ve ever made and the result of numerous things, none of which was my growing love for electronic entertainment.
It was around this time that my dad got our first modern computer. I think it was a 386 which booted to DOS and had to be kicked into Windows 3.1 via a command line prompt. I remember installing Windows 95 off a pile of floppy discs. I remember Solitaire and Minesweeper being the first games my mother loved. I remember having to drop back to DOS (quit WIndows!) to play anything decent. We didn’t get the internet until Freeserve launched in 1998 and even then it was dial-up at 56.6kbps. I did play a turn based strategy game based on the American Civil War via email though. That was when online multiplayer wasn’t so filled with people calling me a fag and trying to teabag me.
By the time the internet was connected I had been playing PC games for a couple of years but I was also playing with graphics and painting programs (which would ultimately lead to a career). We upgraded and replaced the family computer (we only had one then, it sat in the hall) repeatedly in those days and that allowed improvements to the games it would run.
I feel like I was the perfect age to experience this explosion in possibilities and the widening acceptance of console gaming, even though it still hasn’t fully matured yet. The timing was perfect for me to get involved in things which would ultimately end up being large areas of my life. Digital design, gaming, music production were all seeds planted during this time which I kept with me (although my music production died several years ago…) and profited from in some way. Those seeds were planted with gaming acting like a Trojan horse, letting them slip by and educate me undetected.
It wouldn’t last forever though, as I grew older and my social habits grew more… uncensored, my PlayStation saw less and less time dedicated to it. I entered a period of my life that I don’t look back on particularly fondly but it didn’t last too long before things started to pick up for me. Coincidentally, that was around the time that I bought a PlayStation 2.
TSBonyman
Another nice trip down memory lane :)
I remember the ps1 being too expensive so my brother and i rented one out from our local video store. We got Wipeout with it and that was the first Playstation game i ever played.
I was still getting plenty of mileage out of my Amiga at the time and i remember turning down an option in my job at Western Digital to buy pc’s at half price – i think they were 386 at the time – and i do remember thinking my Amiga seemed much better, although at that stage i was spending as much time on Octamed Studio as i was with any game!
When the Amiga was in it’s end cycle i finally bought my first games console ( i went from ZX81 thru all the commodores up to then) – which was a ps1. Apart from the amazing graphics and gameplay i really liked that you could have a console and that every game you bought for it would work, unlike on Amiga or Pc where system requirements would often rear it’s ugly head. So from then on i made a conscious decision to stick with consoles for my gaming needs and naturally stuck with the Playstation brand thereafter.
Grey_Ghost13
“unlike on Amiga or Pc where system requirements would often rear it’s ugly head”
I remember that too, even the days with damaged floppies that wouldn’t load no matter how many times you tried a disk recovery on it!
seedaripper1973
Bloody nora Peter C…did you just nick all of my memories there mate?? it’s pratically word for word exactly the same as me (I’m NOT joking) but then again i suppose people in our age group (I’m 37 now, gong on 10) and especially lads (no offence Katy) are going to have simliar eperiences, due to the fact, that the 70’/ealry 80’s were shit beyond belief, and the only escapisism came in the form of gaming…can you take the memory extracta of my head now please? ;-)
Grey_Ghost13
I remember spending so much time on my PS1 with demos, so much more than I do now with the PS3. I had demo disks for GT, Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, Tony Hawks and many more. I would spend ages playing the same section over and over again until the game actually released and then I would play that to death. I even remember back in the comodor days getting magazines with demo cassets and playing those. But I just don’t seem to get as hooked with demo’s these days.