By Jim Rossignol on July 6th, 2009 at 4:45 pm.
Last week we got to talking about the idea of our gaming education and influences: the games that made us the kind of people that we are today. Which was the game that made us stand on a table and say “O Captain, My Captain”? Which game bullied us after school and made us frightened of walking alone at night? Which game would a psychiatrist want to talk to after our first session on the couch? We’ve picked out a bunch of titles that stood out as defining in our lifetimes of button-mashing, whether good or ill. What will they be?
I’m stood at the deep end, and I get to go first.
Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe
Which gave me my disdain for unimaginative subtitles. Why bother if you can’t match Brutal Deluxe? But there’s more to it than that.
Having only had access to a BBC and then a crappy Amstrad home computer in the early years of gaming, my knowledge of what was even possible remained ruinously stunted until 1991. My first encounter with the Amiga 500, some three years after its first appearance, was a moment of intense revelation. I watched my cousin Rob – who suddenly seemed less like a surly teenager and more like some kind of glowing prophet of my inexorable tech future – playing Lemmings or The Killing Game Show, and my tiny, immature brain lit up with excitement. By the time we got to play Speedball 2 the consummation was complete. Jim Rossignol was born. The Amiga would become the altar of my teenage years, and this game was going to be my hand-blistering focus for countless weeks to come.
In fact I’ve no idea how long I played Speedball 2 for. It might have been as much as four years, on and off. But it was mostly on. I had a huge old Yamaha amplifier that I’d inherited from elders hooked up to the Amiga, and the enormous bass boost noise of the Speedball 2 ball launcher, piped via huge separate speakers into my room, often signalled my return home from school. Kid Next Door would soon be there, and I’d occasionally let him win, to keep him interested. To be fair, he always won at Streetfighter 2, and I’m pretty sure he let me win occasionally too, silently returning the favour.
Both games rewarded extreme bouts of practice. Becoming intimately familiar with the exact interaction of pixels, internalising the timing of animations, the crucial pure feedback loop of hand-eye co-ordination, understanding precisely the patterns of movement that came with a game which did not use “real” physics. I would never come close to mastering Streetfighter, but the simpler, purer actions of Speedball 2 would be wholly mine. With this in mind, it seems clear that my relationship with Speedball 2 begun my personal obsession with being good at gaming. I’ve sunk disgusting amounts of time into a few subsequent games, almost purely because I wanted the skill, and then I wanted to improve, to win. My addiction to Quake III, and Quake variants, seems little more than an expression of my Speedball 2 love. Speedball 2 gave me the taste for being a competitor, and I doubt it will ever truly disappear. It also made me believe that it doesn’t matter that games are violent, it matters howthey are violent. When the simulated brutality is tied into a game, something that we can get better and better at, that we can feel good about mastering, then it’s a good thing.
I also think it gave me an appreciation of a certain kind of minimalism in skill-based, competitive gaming. Every time I see a game with more features, more weapons, more ideas heaped into the arena of their combat, I find myself quietly tutting, and thinking about how it come be stripped back, reduced to the bare essentials. The most skeletal of games, brilliantly presented, is all I’ve ever needed. And that’s one reason why Speedball 2 has never been bested.
Hired Guns
The four-screen Dungeon Master with guns. This had a DOS version and an Amiga version, and it was the Amiga version that I spent the most time with. The best part of a week one glorious summer were spent inside a gloomy room, playing this through end to end with my friend Tim.
There were three things going on here that have stayed with me ever since:
- Co-operative gaming. There were a bunch of co-operative games that I played a lot of around this time – Alien Breed and Chaos Engine stand out particularly – but Hired Guns’ RPG nature made the experience more complex. We shared resources, and were able to come up with plans that were better developed than “kill all the baddies”. And yet it had arcade elements bound into it: the fact that it was also a kind of proto-FPS (with real time firing and reloading) meant that there was some genuine tension to keeping both people’s characters alive (we took two each). Further, we were able to do things like setting up crossfire traps for monsters we knew were going to over-power us. I often think about how that game inspired incredibly sophisticated play, despite its crude nature. Few games seem able to do that now.
- Twisted atmosphere sold by evocative audio. The world design for Hired Guns was pretty peculiar: robots and bounty-hunters on the surface of a gloomy planet called Graveyard, fighting genetically enhanced monsters that ranged from sea-monsters through monks and squirrels. Being a Dungeon Master style block-by-block first person RPG, it had to be pretty careful about what it presented on screen – something that was reduced further by the four tiny windows. It seems impossibly crude now, but the sound effects remain superb: the distorted roar of the automatic weapons, the distant metallic dog noises, the heavy pulse noise of the more industrial environments. Few games really sell their experience proper through audio, and this is a fundamental example of what an awesome asset noises are for game designers with limited tools.
- Exploration for its own sake. The demo of the game obsessed me because it had a teleporter tool that you could use to portal into secret locations across the map. Many of them were meaningless underwater tunnels, or random ledges, but I nevertheless obsessively tracked them all, hungry for secrets. Once I had the full game there was a beautiful – if rather meaningless – map screen, which laid out the levels in a grid. What was interesting to me about that was that a bunch of the levels were dead ends. There was no reason to go there if you were progressing through the game. They were also appalling difficult to play through, which somehow made their mystery all the more alluring. Few games seem to make entire levels optional, or skippable. And fewer still seem to deliberately obscure weird secrets within their depths. There was a time when the idea that their would be a wealth of secrets with in the obscure corners of a game level was a given.
Eve Online
I really don’t need to go on about this too much. Eve Online changed how I viewed the relationship between gamers and games. The looping feedback-based nature of the development of the game, the brutal aspect of the PvP, the lack of level structure, the single galaxy shard. Eve is a brilliant realisation of what a persistent world could be, wilfully ignored and misunderstood by gamers, designers, and journalists. I wanted to understand it, because the disappointment I felt with MMOs as a whole was lessened by its existence.
Half-Life
When I was a kid I used to rewatch a bunch of sci-fi films over and over. Star Wars, Bladerunner, Aliens, Predator, Terminator, even Dune. I can’t really remember why, other than I loved the worlds they showed me. I wanted to soak them up. It was as if I wanted to capture something about them, to store up the exact timbre of the escapism. I’m not sure why I lost the ability to enjoy things over and over like that, but after I was about sixteen I stopped. I never rewatch anything now, if I can help it. I suspect it’s something to do with the way videogames have rewired my attention towards active consumption of media. I now need to be involved, to be leaning forward, not back. In fact there’s only been one subsequent piece of culture that I subjected to the same repetition as those films, and it arrived when I was a young adult. It was Half-Life.
Sure, I’ve played through Stalker three times now, and I’ve gone back to a couple of other classics over the years, but Half-Life I sat and played through again three or four times as soon as I’d finished it. Then I watched a couple my mates play it. I found myself bottled up with excitement at the best bits, fascinated to see how they’d handle the marines for the first time, or the thing in the blast chamber. Occasionally I’d blurt out something about what they needed to do, and get a kick in the shins. Spoilers, etc.
I played it again last year, and it was wonderful.
Half-Life was a game that contained a huge amount within multiple layers of detail. It was the little things made it concrete enough to be totally totally involved with: guns were placed on tables or in racks, they were not a spinning icon. The environment was real and dynamic. Although it was entirely scripted, it suddenly felt far more alive that the “stage set” backdrops of previous games. Walls exploded outwards, things fell, and broke, and buckled. The moment when the marines fired up through an airduct was, and remains, breathtakingly effective.
It brought environment to the forefront of design, and not in a way that made it a spectacular deathmatch arena for your activities, but in a way that made it plausible context for your adventure. Rather than supporting the big picture (this is a shooter!), it was a series of scaffolds for your disbelief, and engine that kept up your forward momentum into a story. And it didn’t have to tell us it was a story: there was no break, no cutscene. It was, rather than “show, don’t tell”, a game of “do, don’t show”. Even now, game after game comes out and proves that the designers didn’t grasp how or why that worked.
Half-Life made me because without it my expectations of the quality of games, their world design, consistency, and the pace, would be skewed. Without it I’d be incorrectly calibrated, and of no use to anyone.
06/07/2009 at 16:51 Lobotomist says:
All great games!
And … Amiga … enough said
06/07/2009 at 16:53 FatMat says:
Oh yes ! You too with Speedball ! The bitmap brothers …
06/07/2009 at 16:59 David Amador says:
Yeah i remember not having a machine not good enough to play half-life at 800×600 lol.
One of the best games ever. The best of the series in terms of emersion.
06/07/2009 at 17:03 FatMat says:
(No edit function, too bad). One of my all-times favorite game as a teenager was l’arche du capitaine blood. You mentioned it recently. I’ve never managed to finish it ! Maybe, now ?
Our gaming lifes…
06/07/2009 at 17:06 AbyssUK says:
I need to put Speedball 2 on my arcade machine….. why did I never think of this!
06/07/2009 at 17:09 Rob Lang says:
Early on it was Frontier Elite on the A500. Then Civ. Lots of Civ.
Did you ever listen to non-game music while playing and thus have an inextricable connection with the music and the game?
I can’t listen to Sultans of Ping, Carter USM or Neds Atomic Dustbin without seeing the slowly spinning dock of a Frontier space station and I can’t listen to RHCP One Hot Minute without the Carmageddon Bloodbath coming to mind.
06/07/2009 at 17:09 DSX says:
X vs Tie is likely the earliest OMG game I can recall, the sheer joy of being inside the revered SW universe and flying around, taking and receiving orders from other pilots, but most of all having the random thrill of lining up a shot on a stray enemy be followed closely by the horror that he had baited you out of the furball so 3-4 of his mates could get a bead on your six. The mixed joy/horror of watching one evaporate while you desperately reconfigured shields and power settings as your ship came under fire still tingles today.
To that end, Homeworld was also a close space thriller, on the fleet level with far superior story telling.
It’s odd, but I can’t think of any first person shooter, despite all the countless legitimate “super sweet!” moments, that spark my tingle bone the same way for the entire duration of the game.
06/07/2009 at 17:13 FunkyB says:
Ah hired guns…plug two mice into the back of your A1200, grab a friend and see the time disappear.
I agree totally about the sound, I to this day remember with fondness and trepidation the creaks and distant rumbles of the opening levels that heralded the start of a new adventure. And fighting over who got to play as CIM, of course.
06/07/2009 at 17:16 TauQuebb says:
Call me boring but for me it was the original Sid Meiers CIV.
06/07/2009 at 17:20 FunkyB says:
I mean just listen to it!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMJvmW5O2qA
06/07/2009 at 17:21 Gnarl says:
Hired Guns would definitely be on my similar list. I think it was first game that actually made me consider games might allow real emotive travel to another world. It was crude as hell, but it felt like it tried to cover as many possibilities as possible. The atmosphere wasn’t just in the audio, but in the palette, the items, the fiction with it. First game that left me scared and elated.
I would never play it again as I’m sure it would spoil the memory.
06/07/2009 at 17:22 The Hammer says:
Great idea for a series of articles. I’ll be reading these closely!
06/07/2009 at 17:33 Clovis says:
I had an interesting introduction to strategy games. Before playing Nobunaga’s Ambition on the NES, “video game” just meant “arcade game”. The idea of running a country was really new to me.
I’ll never forget one campaign. I started off in the lower corner of the map, and an AI had gotten way ahead of me and everyone else. He started moving towards me; I would soon be crushed. The game had a weird rule though. If you managed to kill the ruler of a family, you inherited everything they had. He brought his ruler with him to crush me. So, I laid a trap. I moved all my men out of the central fief I owned, let him take it, and made a quick pincer movement to cut him off. I used all my remaining men to win a desperate battle and won! He was dead and in one turn I went from last place to first place. I’ve been a strategy gamer ever since.
One funny note on Nobunaga’s Ambition. After untold hours of playing I finally realized that the AI didn’t actually “play” the game. The stats of the AI fiefs didn’t change at all! There was almost no actual AI strategy. My great strategic triumph wasn’t so great after all…
06/07/2009 at 17:38 Ian says:
Love the idea but haven’t read it yet. I tried to kick-start a similar idea about music on another forum once upon a time, but maybe inspired by this I’ll rejig it for the Talk-O-Tron. :)
@ Rob Lang: This wasn’t my choice, as such, but whenever I heard “Bad Actress” by Terrorvision I remember hours playing NHL ’96 for the Mega Drive, because the day I got that my sister had bought that song and was playing it a lot.
06/07/2009 at 17:39 zombiehunter says:
weee EvE ftw! ^^
06/07/2009 at 17:39 phil says:
I think the Amiga pretty much defined my rather catholic taste as a gamer, essentially as a kid if it made me lose myself for 30 mins, be it F18 Interceptor, New Zealand Story, The Secret of Monkey Island, Walker, Populous 2, Skid Marks 2 or It Came from then Desert, I’d play it to death.
It also made me define gaming as a pretty solitary activity, it wasn’t until Playstation 1′s Tekken that I actually enjoyed playing video games with anyone else. That game, and SWOS which I belated realised was better when not played against the moronic AI.
06/07/2009 at 17:42 FunkyB says:
phil:
Regarding your point on the Amiga defining gaming for you as solitary activity, weirdly it did the exact opposite for me :)
Gravity Force 2 (or Gravity Power), Hired Guns, Base Jumpers…I can remember countless hours spent with my friends avoiding the sun :)
06/07/2009 at 17:45 nabeel says:
Nice feature, I’m looking forward to seeing the others’ gaming education. Half-Life is definitely on my own list too, a game that affected me in a number of ways.
06/07/2009 at 17:52 Dexton says:
Great article Jim, I look forward to seeing the other RPS members describing their classics.
Also down with Amiga, Atari ST 4life!
06/07/2009 at 17:53 Dr.Danger says:
Hired Guns!!!
At least somebody remembers that game. I still feel the pain in my eyes from spending endless hours playing it with my mate. Ah the days of yore!
06/07/2009 at 17:57 Gothnak says:
Captive & Bloodwych were better than Hired Guns :)
My sister and I were the first people ever to finish the C64 version of Bloodwych as we found a bug that made the game crash and they sent us a new copy and a free other game. Those were the days!
06/07/2009 at 17:58 phuzz says:
The A500 (Class of the 90′s pack ftw!) was my first computer, and via a A600 and A1200 (eventually with a harddrive and CDROM dangling precariously out the side) I got my education in computing.
Now I’m a sysadmin, something that would never have happened if I hadn’t started off ‘just’ playing games. So without my beloved Amiga I really have no idea where I’d be in life. nuff said
06/07/2009 at 17:58 Sunjammer says:
I could never, ever get into Brutal Deluxe. I think it’s just the fact that it’s a sports game, period. Same reason i couldn’t get into sensi soccer or anything else like it. I’ve played it again and again over the years and its appeal still eludes me.
Kudos on Hired guns though. Killer game.
06/07/2009 at 18:03 phuzz says:
(oh, and regarding HalfLife, has anyone heard an update about Black Mesa Source? Last update was in november last year)
06/07/2009 at 18:11 GamerV says:
I’m pretty sure Deus Ex made me paranoid.
06/07/2009 at 18:16 wcaypahwat says:
I got started when my grandfather introduced me to wolfenstein 3d, and later on, doom.
My family was far from wealthy. But when they purchased our first pc (I was around 6 at the time) it came with something like 40 demo’s pre loaded onto it. That kept me hooked for a few years.
Halflife was my intoduction to modern games. Between that, there was a godawful amount of command and conquer, heroes of might and magic, and master of orion 2.
Now I have an entire wardrobe full of games
06/07/2009 at 18:19 Serondal says:
I have to agree about music being linked to games. There was a bunch of music I put on my x-box that I listen to while I played some snow boarding game (can’t remember the name of it) but every time I hear one of those songs come on I think about snow boarding :P
As far as games that made me who I am. X-com made me a cautious person. Masters of Magic made me power hungry and Ultima IV taught me how to be a good person. To be quiet honest Ultima IV had more to do with my moral compass than going to church did when I was young. Church told me to be good but Ultima IV taught me what being a good person took and what exactly you had to do :P Give money to homeless people, don’t steal from the blind, don’t run away from your problems, always be humble ect ect. Was a very valuable game, I think my father had no idea what kind of game he was getting me when he came home with that one ;P Much better moral teacher than Bad Dudes or similar beat’em ups like Bayou Billy (I F@#@# hate that game)
06/07/2009 at 18:19 Bobic says:
Probably for me it was homeworld. The part where you first meet the swarmers… “This…is the garden.. of kadesh… for thirteen…. generations, we have… protected it…from the unclean
06/07/2009 at 18:19 Greg Wild says:
For me, it’s all about Rome: Total War. The love of the period it and its many realism mods encouraged me to take a degree in Ancient History, and it certainly put me ahead of other students on my course. 3 years on since then I’ve just graduated with a 1st. Now if that isn’t games affecting life, I don’t know what is!
06/07/2009 at 18:19 TheApologist says:
Yep – great feature and enjoyed reading.
Mario 3 was, and remains amazing. It was how it managed to combine a familiar format with secrets and variety and surprise. It was my introduction to the notion that great design is often creativity within tight boundaries.
Then Shining Force 2. My first turn based strategy on the Mega Drive in a crazy little world had me absolutely hooked and turned me from a gamer who played in short bursts and never finished games to a gamer that could sit for 3 or 4 hours and not get frustrated or annoyed but just plough on.
Then, I think, Baldur’s Gate. The fun of developing the character I wanted with tonnes of options and building my party in a fantasy world. I still love the character creators in RPGs more than the rest of the game…
06/07/2009 at 18:21 diziet sma says:
Oh wow. Two games I would have picked as well. Speedball 2 remains the only game to have given me blisters so painful after a days play that I had problems writing at school. A beautiful two player game.
Also the stories I could tell about Hired Guns. I played the campaign in single player, two player and three player. I think I even managed to get enough people for an abortive stab at a 4p run through. Brilliant game play, plot , characterisation and something unheard of these days. Manuals. This stands out as having the best manuals in any game alongside those that came with Frontier for me. The background details, character bios everything.
I generally played Cheule Siygess , with our other favourite characters being MC 128-7 CIM, Desverger and Kiurcher. I could wax lyrical about that game for a long time and my bitter disappointed at hearing that the sequel was cancelled especially having seen it in action at ECTS one year. :(
06/07/2009 at 18:23 Serondal says:
@wcay I had a huge amount of PC games when I met my wife. The games streched from Fallout 1 straight through to Oblivion and Call of Duty when she threw them away : P I had other games on floppy disks but NONe of them work any more. I’m not sure what happened I had a huge bunch of them in a case that is built to protect them and none of them worked last time I went through them except 1 that had really really old pron on it O.o
06/07/2009 at 18:23 Metal_Circus says:
I also replayed Half-Life recently. I’d bought Episode 2 and loved it and thought, well, I haven’t played the original in a long time. I’m really glad I went back to it. I played that game in my teens with the same excitement. That immersion is something that has definitely influenced what games I really love I think. I used to spend hours trying to find a way to kill G-man, and even more hours making the most utterly aweful single player maps for myself to play on. They were rubbish, but I made them, so I loved to play through them. The sheer joy of knowing i’d made something to play on a video game was mind boggling for me. Great article btw!
06/07/2009 at 18:25 Metal_Circus says:
Oh, also, I would have included Deus Ex in that as well. The idea of being able to fail an objective and continue the game was impossible for me to get my head around at the time. What I love about that now is that the later stages were influenced by your successes and failures early on.
And then there was Fallout. I could go on forever about this stuff so I better quit while i’m ahead!
06/07/2009 at 18:26 no says:
I don’t think I can really say any game made me the person or gamer I am today. I’m 32 and I didn’t start playing videogames regularly until I was about 20 and didn’t own my first console until I was about 29. I just didn’t grow up in an environment like a lot of you guys where I had six consoles by the age of six and bought and played every game that ever came out.
06/07/2009 at 18:28 diziet sma says:
@Gnarl
Same here. I played it many times over the course of two summers after it came out. I dread to think how many times I have completed HG. I would never go back. The sound in it is awesome and do you remember meeting the Rahl (from the polish site linked at the bottom of the wikipedia article) for the first time? Panicked laying of turrets and mines. Those bastards were fast.
06/07/2009 at 18:30 Ed says:
I would also like to contribute a “Hired Guns!!!”
I notice you mention the demo – apart from the 4-way muliplayer in the full game, the demo is my strongest memory of it. There was something weirdly terrifying about finally going down the stairs into the big cavern/room with the lizardmen things in it. Also, excellent music.
06/07/2009 at 18:35 DMJ says:
THIS is why I read RPS.
06/07/2009 at 18:44 Xercies says:
My gaming turning point has to be Final Fantasy 7 on the ps1. It just made me see games as not just fun pastimes but could also give you world, atmosphere, and characters you love and hate. If I hadn’t seen that game one time i went around my friends house I think I would be a totally different gamer
06/07/2009 at 18:46 Meat Circus says:
AMIGA: Lemmings. Monkey Island 2.
ZX Spectrum: Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy
PC: Day of the Tentacle, Civ II
06/07/2009 at 19:03 Owen says:
Fucking awesome idea chaps :D
06/07/2009 at 19:20 JonFitt says:
Here’s a few of note from my life.
Spectrum
—————-
Gauntlet 2
All the Dizzy games
Chaos
Rick Dangerous
Atari ST
—————
Chaos Engine
Cannon Fodder
Monkey Island
Ishar
PC
———-
X-Wing
Ultima 7
X-COM UFO
Half-life
06/07/2009 at 19:20 cliffski says:
Definitely Elite for me. Then also Sim City, Age Of Empires, And mustn’t forget X-wing.
Plus Call of Duty 2. The last time I could seriously pwn all comers in any game, plus first game to really get me into history.
06/07/2009 at 19:21 lumpi says:
“Sure, I’ve played through Stalker three times now…”
thrown in like it was the most usual thing in the world. :D
06/07/2009 at 19:26 techpops says:
Great article, I find myself hitting RPS daily now so felt it time to comment.
@Xercies, I had exactly the same experience with FF7 on the PS1, while games had teased with the idea of an open world before, this was the first (in my experience) to keep on delivering way beyond the point where you thought “They can’t have added anything else after this!”
But the game that defines me, well you have to go way back to drop zone on the Commodore Vic20, a perfect replicant of Defender. I went from imitating the space invaders sound while I played it, joking with friends, to sitting in darkened rooms and focusing intensely on the game. I guess that was the first time I was absorbed by any game and since then I’ve been searching for that next fix. Very few games absorb me like that did today, despite the huge advances in whats possible.
The Amiga gave me most of the best fixes until the PC came along and grew muscles (and I agree with most of what everyones said in the thread about great Amiga games) but the real game changer for me was Another World on the Amiga. This game taught me that amazing things could happen in a game, long after you thought you knew the platforms limitations. The moment that huge lion dude drops in front of you on the first level, I literally shat myself and reveled in watching others experience those same moments.
And just to retroactively boast, my Amiga ended up growing into an A1200 with 040 cpu, 6mb ram (oh yes, you read that right, 6! lol) and it was all worth it to experience the flight simulators at playable frame rates.
06/07/2009 at 19:31 Catmacey says:
Ah… Dynoblaster. 5 friends, a four joystick adapter made by a friends dad and a lovely, lovely Amiga. Now that the way to spend your teenage years. Almost makes up for all the solitary populous, millenium 2.2 (I think it was called that) and Eye of the beholder that kept me locked away in the dark for so long my parents were worried I was on drugs.
06/07/2009 at 19:32 dog says:
for multiplayer gaming i think turboraketti on the Amiga took the biscuit…
coming home from the pub/club with a bunch of mates and drinking and smoking til the very wee hours while piloting your little triangular thrust-type ship around caverns battling against gravity and another friend…
these sessions are extremely hazy in my memory… especially if bucket bongs were involved…
06/07/2009 at 19:36 JonFitt says:
Ooh, forgot Civ on the Atari ST, and lemmings on the Spectrum and later Atari ST.
Let’s go!
06/07/2009 at 19:39 jonfitt says:
How could I forget Elite! Although it was Frontier: Elite on the Atari ST which introduced me to the series. We’d trade ship configurations at school.
06/07/2009 at 19:41 Telemikus says:
Great Article Jim. I particularly liked your thoughts on the rewiring of our brains away from film, and the leaning forward as opposed to the leaning back explanation of how this manifests. I’ve had similar thoughts but that articulates it perfectly.
The games you mentioned, and many of them suggested in the comments thread are defining of my epiphinal gaming moments as well, but I’m long enough in the tooth to add Elite and Pac-man as my earliest.
06/07/2009 at 19:44 MrFake says:
An unhealthy mix of DoomCAD and JRPGs. You can guess what overcomplicated level design and spreadsheet games made out of me.
06/07/2009 at 19:48 Hmm-Hmm. says:
I like listing favourites, so here goes:
Basically my gaming favourites were all on the mac since that’s been the ‘platform’ I grew up with. From black and white to millions.
Shufflepuck
Monkey Island 1
Realmz (rpg)
X-Wing
Escape Velocity (space trading/exploration/fighting)
Marathon (fps)
06/07/2009 at 20:15 Oddtwang says:
Wow, awesome idea for a series of articles, and inspiring for comments :)
The first games I remember vividly were on my Dad’s old ZX-84 (when we could get it to load anything – hours of fun!) – Galaxians was the first thing I got any good at (Space Invaders clone), then a game called – I think – Harrier Attack which involved flying round an island dodging flaxk, shooting aircraft and bombing things then landing on your aircraft carrier again; if you bombed it as you took off right at the start it didn’t appear at the end and you just flew over screens of empty ocean until you ran out of fuel :)
My Dad had Halls of the Things, which I remember being incredibly scary and totally impossible to get anywhere with – same goes for Jet Set Willy.
My Mum’s a headteacher, and she used to bring Acorn PCs back from school in the holidays – we used to mail order games for them from a company called The Fourth Dimension (told you these were vivid recollections :P); I played Lemmings on there, and The Settlers (untranslated from German – made no sense whatsoever!) and Diggers, which I remebered being awesome, and downloaded from HotU a couple of years to be reminded that the controls were stupidly fiddly, which was a shame – kind of fragile, this nostalgia thing :)
When we eventually got a PC (a P75, which cost about £1700 at the time IIRC – just after they became widespread I guess – and was later upgraded to a 166), I remember playing hour after hour of Civ and CivII with my Dad, co-ruling an empire. Still remember being able to advance up the difficulty levels because we realised how to use Caravans :) Also plugging a second mouse into the thing and fiddling with some weird adaptor in order to play co-op Settlers II.
Oh, and Total Annihilation, which was what first drew me to online communities with the extra units they released for the game. I got a copy of Ascendancy (already a White Label one in fact) the Christmas when I wanted TA, which was a disppointment, although I still got a lot out of that ultimately flawed 4X title.
After that I guess it’s really Half-Life – that was the first time I recall being completely awed by what a game was capable of showing me and letting me experience. Played through Blast Pit with about 3 people in the room watching me, which was incredible :) Loads of time spent playing co-op DiabloII and Sven Co-op (with a friend’s PC in the room too by now) around then too; I’m noticing a theme in what I remember best here :)
Finally, it has to be ZangbandTK, for which I have Kieron’s article in PCG (now on his blog, and reproduced here – highly recommended) to thank – I still spend a huge amount of time banging my head against the brick walls that are Roguelikes these days, although mainly the work of art that is Crawl: Stone Soup – check out this place for the chance to play online, making it a lovely mixture of SP and multiplayer. And some Incursion, too – looking forward to the next version of that a lot. Have gone back to ZangbandTK recently since there’s some activity on the forum here, but it does make me miss Crawl’s stripping out of the bloaty elements of RLs (NetHack and Ancient Domains of Wipe ‘F’acery are the worst offenders for that in my mind) to leave only the core of unadulterated ASCII fun and its UI improvements (autoexplore and autopickup which WORK, a great spell system etc).
I have a lot to thank the RPS guys for here (mainly through PCG), including things I’ve not talked about, like AirBuccaneers – thanks a lot, guys.
06/07/2009 at 20:16 Mo says:
I feel similarly about Quake 3 Arena. I missed out on Speedball, but Q3A was the game that made me go, “minimalism is awesome”. All my game design since has been heavily influenced by the idea that less is more.
06/07/2009 at 20:17 clive dunn says:
Rebelstar raiders (for spectrum) was my first gaming addiction. Sure i’d plunged hours into Horace Goes Skiing and Chuckie Egg but RR was the first strategy game i’d ever played. The replay value was enormous. I reckon i played that game for five or six years uninterupted except for Laser Squad. God knows what my school results would have been like if i’d not been glued to the speccy. Happy days though.
………..What’s that noise. hang on, i’m sure i just heard a cassette case creaking open in my garage. Shall i……
No, i’ve a wife and kids now, they wouldn’t understand. If my wife came home later and saw me cuddled up with my old speccy and my hand drawn stat tables for Laser Squad she’d file for divorce.
06/07/2009 at 20:19 Knight says:
Okay, that’s done it. Thanks to this article, I’ll spend the rest of the evening searching eBay for an Amiga and a game library. Emulation just doesn’t cut it; I need that tactile experience. Speedball 2, Cannon Fodder, Frontier – I’m coming *home*!
Good work, Jim – I wonder if the remainder of the RPS hive-mind will have the foresight to accumulate a stash of the necessary hardware before provoking such rampant nostalgia…
06/07/2009 at 20:24 PaulMorel says:
What an odd list. Seriously. I am looking forward to the rest of this series.
-
Wing Commander. Doom 2. Thief. Diablo 2. Pirates (2005). Day of Defeat (original).
06/07/2009 at 20:27 Gassalasca says:
Hmm, in all likelihood
Civilization
Monkey Island
Starcraft
Deus Ex
06/07/2009 at 20:31 Kadayi says:
Due to impoversished upbringing I never had the money for things like the Spectrum, Amiga etc, but my earliest memories of computer games and the possibilities were playing things like Rebel Star Raiders and Chaos around at the rich friends houses. When money and PCs came into existence I recall Frontier Elite pretty much consumed me, (broken assassination missions and all), though I was never devoid of life enough to reach Elite status. Halflife, System shock 2 & Deus Ex were the real eye openers for me though in terms of eluding to the greater possibilities of the PC game space and what it could be (though fear and apathy have yet to make me finish System Shock 2, all these years later).
06/07/2009 at 20:52 Dinger says:
Awesome. Okay,
Flight Simulator (Apple II): this is the first commercial videogame I saw. Fun fact: the house I saw it in is featured in the 1972 Pulitzer-Prize winning book Suburbia
Starfleet Orion: a game in baggies, ca. 1978-79 for the PET, with manuals that had the entire (basic) source code printed out. But from the first mission (torpedo frigate vs. missile frigate) to the last (some 9 vs. 9 battle based on some space opera or other — the manual was memorable for its description of the missions), it provided fresh gameplay and was _so cool_.
Planet Miners followed in 1981 (Avalon Hill’s foray into gaming). I realize now that many of the factors I considered random in the game were actually quite predictable (such as the distance from earth to Jupiter at a given part of the year, given 1G acceleration/deceleration) and could have been used to strategic advantage.
After that, well, Ultima III was just awesome; by comparison, Ultima IV had that preachy morality stuff in there, where if you were evil, the game shut you out of the main story. Thankfully, we’re past that, and games let you be evil as much as you like.
Raid on Bungeling Bay was just cool. A standard shoot-em-up, but if you paid attention, the island had a life of its own. I remember landing the helicopter and just watching the enemy planes takeoff, land, taxi, refuel, taxi and takeoff again.
Earl Weaver Baseball for the Amiga is still the finest baseball game ever made for a PC. Eddie Dombrower, I understand, is now peddling something similar for the iPhone.
ATP for the PC (Sublogic’s heavy jet simulator after Flight Simulator went Microsoft) was the subject of quite a few enjoyable evenings running the two-man jetliner cockpit. Someone finally “got it” and made a flight simulator where managing comms and flying routes was as important as just flying. Of course, the ATC wasn’t perfect, and I remember being stuck in radar vector hell a couple times, declaring a fuel emergency, and still being vectored through stoogeville.
Oh yeah, for the rest? Warbirds, Operation Flashpoint and Portal.
06/07/2009 at 20:56 Sam says:
Other than perhaps some Valve Games, I think all of the formative game experiences of my life involved the Amiga.
Hired Guns, in particular, I still have the soundtrack to, and it’s still listenable to, thanks to the Amiga’s pretty good sound hardware of the time. (Looking back, though, I was also pretty rubbish at games at the time – I don’t think I ever completed more than two or three levels of the campaign game, and the multiplayer levels were equally horrendous…)
06/07/2009 at 21:00 bigredrock says:
Great article!
Games and music – I always associate Quake with Pixies’ Doolittle. “Hips like Cinderella…”
My formative gaming moments:
Spectrum
——–
Jet Set Willy – the pixel-perfect design, and the ropes.
Elite – a whole bloomin’ universe in that wee black box.
Watching my dad win the FA cup in Football Manager. Great times.
The Hobbit – it was so terribly, hilariously broken.
Amiga
—–
Eye of the Beholder – obsessive mapping, and a better ending than the PC!
Lemmings – it was always so tempting just to nuke them.
Monkey Island 1 & 2 – no explanation required.
PC
–
Sanitarium – the first game that MOVED me (the ghost of the girl).
Beyond Good & Evil – every moment was designed to be FUN, and the effort put in to making every moment different was just wonderful. I realised that EVERY game should be made this way, and yet hardly any are.
Grim Fandango – wow. It simultaneously pastiched and exceeded the best noir movies. Genuinely affecting, hilarious, and chilling. And Olivia’s poem – brrr!
“With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will for years before we rest.”
—
PS The Amiga was just … BETTER.
06/07/2009 at 21:12 Butler` says:
Gotta be Little Big Adventure, Diablo 2 and Counter-Strike pour moi, with about 3-4 others lying just out of reach of ‘relatively life changing’.
06/07/2009 at 21:17 fivedollar says:
Back in the early days it was just me and my IBM 386. Probably the first game to really grab me was Commander Keen. Am I the only person to have ever played that game? Since I was pretty young I found it difficult to complete, but it was the game that taught me to look everywhere for hidden secrets. However, no one I know has ever heard of it. Also a lot of X-wing, Doom (only the shareware, mum wouldnt let me near the full game) and much later: Half-Life. All these games like Frontier, Civ, Populous, Monkey Island and such I never got the chance to play because I had not even heard of them until years later. Maybe I’ll get my chance once LucasArts gets more of their collection on Steam.
06/07/2009 at 21:27 Dinger says:
Yeah, as an aside, in all these Windows vs. Linux vs. MacOS debates, someone inevitably says, “But there can be no perfect OS.” And the reply is “But there was. AmigaOS.”
(and no, the revival has not yet convinced me)
06/07/2009 at 21:28 GreatUncleBaal says:
The game I always think of is Thanatos on the Spectrum. I just remember being absolutely blown away by the graphics at the time, and the ability to control this massive dragon, plucking up soldiers and dropping them in the sea before fighting giant bees and raiding castles.
The music was hauntingly wonderful too.
I also loved Werewolves of London – bugged as hell, but very sandboxy for its time.
And yeah, Hired Guns on the Amiga – the character select screen music was awesome.
06/07/2009 at 21:28 Riotpoll says:
Civ, Civ some more Civ and Sim City on the side, mmmmmmmmm. And a load of old DOS games.
06/07/2009 at 21:53 Rich_P says:
SimCity (with helpings of SimAnt and SimTower), Transport Tycoon, and C&C were my early PC games. Console gaming was a more social activity (e.g. I would watch my neighbor play Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, etc.).
Eventually I migrated to online FPS games after deliberately ignoring them for years, deeming them immature diversions unworthy of an erudite city (and ant colony) planner like myself :D
However, I eventually bought Half-Life and Team Fortress has been my online gaming staple since 2000, with at least one round per week (most of them spent in Dustbowl, Avanti, and other A/D maps). Battlefield 1942 is still one of my favorites.
Looking at my gaming chronology from afar, it seems as though I’ve “regressed”: all action games these days, less management and city builders. Weird.
Look forward to reading what the other RPS chaps and commentators have to say.
06/07/2009 at 22:04 plowshares says:
hey jim come join goonfleet
Sure, we get your stuff down to delve. Contract everything you want delivered to me and I’ll have one of our runners take care of it
also there’s the matter of a 500m isk security deposit. it’ll be refunded to you after we complete our background check. Just to make sure you aren’t a spy. You understand.
06/07/2009 at 22:08 Chaz says:
I believe at one point a few years back there was going to be a sequal to Hired Guns made for the PC, but alas it got canned.
I also had a Beeb as my first computer, the first game I had for that was the text based adventure game “Sphinx Adventure”. Other notables I enjoyed were Elite, Thrust, Revs and as many other games I could fit on a C60.
I loved my Amiga 500 too. I had so many games for it, but Dune 2 of course always sticks in my mind. I spent hours and hours playing that. Later Command and Conquer and Total Annihilation on the PC would have the same effect on me. Special mention should also go to Another World and Flashback. Flashback was ace, and Another World looked stunning but was as much fun as a lead balloon.
06/07/2009 at 22:27 ToadSmokingDuckMonkey says:
@Dinger Did you know Raid on Bungeling Bay was made by Will Wright, and it was the inspiration for Sim City?
Some hobbyist-made roguelike
Civilization
X-Wing
Dune 2
Falcon 3.0 Gold
Doom
Indycar
Quake (for the mods, for the best internet multi at the time)
Total Annihilation
Alpha Centauri
I had a Sega Genesis for ~2 years before I had a PC, from which I learned about how JRPGs are different from western ones, shmups, arcade ports, and early adoption. Also, it taught me that platformers need not be so slow, and that death penalties were unnecessary (Sonic the Hedgehog and Fatal Rewind respectively (known as The Killing Game on Amiga)).
Ok, so I learned about early adoption from the SegaCD, and then I learned what it was like to be a fan of an under-appreciated platform.
06/07/2009 at 22:42 Dinger says:
Yes, and SimCity was the best game I was ever paid to work on.
06/07/2009 at 22:45 Dinger says:
Errr… I should add Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe in there. For that matter, I was deeply scarred by the whole LucasArts sequence, from Battlehawks 1942 on, and including the Star Wars titles based on the same engine.
(and apologies for the previous comment. It was a snap-reply; were I able to, I’d delete such a pathetic attempt at self-aggrandizing, even though that’s apparently in the spirit of the comments thread. There are limits, after all)
06/07/2009 at 23:08 Valentin Galea says:
DOOM!
06/07/2009 at 23:50 Gnarl says:
@diziet sma Well, looking through a site that all text made no sense to me on, and then randomly clicking until finding a page full of things that I remember all killing me at different points, as a child, is probably a form of therapy. The high points of fear would probably not condense around the ‘Rahl’, but the ‘Leahdile’ and the ‘Ogromniasty mutant’ being, from memory, the killer at the beginning and the the killer at the end. Although the ‘Mag’ and ‘Mnich’ still cause shivers. And the ‘Lemming’ caused me to avoid their games for a year two, to be sure. Though the creatures who you can only view their legs without a lift probably wins. Or maybe sharks.
In any occasion, we can all agree CIM > CIM-lite > T1000, who suffers the indignity of name non-rememberance.
07/07/2009 at 00:05 Timofee says:
Excellent article, this has been a trip through memory lane for me. So many great games I can recall on the Amiga. Amiga Power will always have my eternal gratitute for shoving Gravity Power on their cover disks.
@ diziet sma completely agreed on the speedball 2 giving such terrible blisters from overplaying, worse still I recall I was also playing SWOS as well. I must have sunk a disturbing amount of my childhood into those two
Other fav’s were Cannon Fodder, Dune 2, Worms, Skidmarks, Populous, Alien Breed and Chaos Engine.
Hired Guns holds weird memories for me as I remember being bitterly jealous of my elder brother’s A1200 where the assault rifle sounded like the pulse rifle from Aliens yet on the A500 it just wasnt the same. Also, my other brother and I couldn’t do proper multiplayer (think we needed two mice?) so one of us would instead ‘hide’ our characters and obscure the screen then the other would have to find them. I remember having so much fun and yet I can’t think for the life of me why. Ahh.. simpler times.
Also I’m disappointed that no one seems to have mentioned the absolute classics of stunt car racer and zeewolf
Weirdly on a family get together recently we were playing that other Amiga classic – Space Crusade as it was about the only thing that my laptop would run. Brilliant game, well deserving of an upgrade for the 21st centuary, although definitely retaining the turn based aspect rather than making it another samey FPS.
Now I think about it, do I also remember correctly that the Amiga had a split screen Space Hulk game where you could put guys on overwatch and while you were busy moving someone else a filthy genestealer would brutally slaughter the rest of your team? Good times.
07/07/2009 at 00:05 SuperNashwan says:
Speedball 2 really is the pinnacle of action gaming, so simple, so perfectly executed, effortlessly stylish and evocative. There’s even tactical depth with the various scoring mechanisms, the double edged sword of charging the ball and taking out a specific player to force a weaker sub on. There isn’t a single other sports game I think that even comes close to its quality, even after all this time.
07/07/2009 at 00:39 pilouuuu says:
I also started my computer playing on the Amiga and to this day I still seek for gaming experience like those.
Playing Lemmings for the first time was amazing. It wasn’t like anything before it. I wasn’t in control of a single character and I didn’t have to fight against foes! It is still to this day a show of how gaming shoudl be and I think that newer games like World of Goo have a great deal of charm which reminds me of Lemmings.
Wolfenstein 3d and Doom. Wow, the nights of lost sleep with those games. At last a game that lets you really feel like you are there, moving around in some maze like locations. And Doom was so full of terror back then. It was amazing how the sound complemented the action and the graphics. Fully immersion in 3d!
The Secret of Monkey Island. Another great one due to its immersion level. It’s like entering a book of pirates, but the difference is that now you play it and it is so funny! Probably the best game ever and one that left me spoiled for every other adventure as I kept seeking for a similar experience, possibly only finding such an epic story in Grim Fandango.
I also played a lot of Street Fighter II and just like Speedball 2 which I played a lot less, I can fully understand the thrill of competition in simple yet hard to master video games.
There’s probably a few more, but those are some of the games which helped me shape in my gaming life, and they are so good, that I find hard to find similar experiences in today’s gaming industry.
07/07/2009 at 01:05 Diogo Ribeiro says:
I think I have some to share but to be honest I’m afraid I’d bore everyone to tears. Mind if I make a longer essay on this on my blog then link to it here?
07/07/2009 at 01:13 techpops says:
@Dinger Amen to that
I won’t bore anyone with a speech about the technical superiority of the Amiga (anyone that owned one knew, anyone that didn’t doesn’t care) but I will say it was the only computer I absolutely fell in love with and (way back when) would defend it in true Apple Fan boy like style. Not pretty, but even today I won’t hear a bad word said about the hardware or the team that created it. As for what the company did with it later on, that’s another, very sad matter.
I think it is safe to say that the Amiga is at the very heart of why many of the leading game programmers/developers/musicians/artists today are doing what they do, more so in Europe I guess.
07/07/2009 at 01:22 pilouuuu says:
@techpops
Yes, I really loved the Amiga 500 too. It was so amazing the quality of its graphics and the sound… the sound WOW! And I really liked the fact that games for it very truly innovative and developers like Psygnosis and the Bitmap Brothers really seemed to make their game with true love and creativity. It’s exaclty that that I miss in the gaming industry today.
07/07/2009 at 02:10 Tyler Lanphear says:
Wow, I feel really young now :(
I can remember my first games being Super Mario World, Monkey Island: 3 and Street Fighter III. Not to mention the countless other titles that I’ve heard more about than played.
Its rather sad really. My generation will go on not knowing about the man who could hold his breath for over 10 minutes, or how there were unknown depths ( star world and special world ) to a simple game like Mario.
Oh, and SimCity. Gotta love that SimCity.
07/07/2009 at 02:17 Thiefsie says:
My most influential games – I’m at work so can’t write about them more than to list them! (inpo)
The Secret of Monkey Island
Syndicate
Tie Fighter
Red Alert
Descent
Dungeon Keeper
Quake (+2)
Duke Nukem 3D
Half Life (+CS)
Dark Reign
Total Annihilation
Thief
System Shock 2
Metal Gear Solid 2
07/07/2009 at 02:26 Wisq says:
First game I remember was some sort of Donkey Kong port on an old Kaypro computer. Can’t really say it defined me, though. And Qbert and an ASCII Pac-Man clone and whatnot were decent fun on the old XT PCs, but still not defining.
My eventual experiences with DOOM on Linux showed me that a) gaming and Linux aren’t always mutually exclusive (just usually), and b) I was actually pretty darn good at FPS games. System Shock 1 made me revise that to “pretty darn good at FPS games provided I’m not being scared half to death” — and my introduction to the use of “god mode” not as a crutch for bad gamers, but as a simple way to take the psychological edge off a scary-ass game. Also, System Shock 1 was the game I learned most of my memory-hacking techniques on, mainly to create my own god mode and mess with other things like weapons.
Played Action Half-Life for years, and it was really my first serious use of online multiplayer gaming. And OpFlash was my first real membership of an online gaming community. Both were quite realistic in their own way (“movie realism” for AHL) and have presumably had a lasting impact on my taste for realism ever since.
I’ve had a leaning towards FPS games for as long as I can recall, so presumably all these games have had an influence on that.
Also, an unusual one: MUSHes.
Though not a “video game” per se, playing on MUSHes taught me to really get in-character and roleplay, and also set the bar rather high in terms of character customisation — anything you can dream up, you can do, thanks to the text medium (and players’ imaginations). Obviously, no game to date can really measure up to that, yet the medium itself is pretty much dead, leaving a sort of void I’ve never really been able to fill. So, I play my video games and let the game developers do my dreaming for me. Ah well.
More recently, I have to thank Call of Duty 4 (and Portal to a lesser extent) for showing me just how powerful a well-done, completely linear game can be. It made me realise that, if you’ve got a fantastic linear story to tell, and if you can tell it with near-flawless execution. then sandbox gameplay — or even go-anywhere linear gameplay, a la System Shock — can be completely unnecessary, or even detrimental. I think that’s something we tend to lose sight of, thanks to all the mediocre linear shooters flooding the market, while only the better studios have the ambition to make big sandbox games.
07/07/2009 at 02:31 Thiefsie says:
I forgot Super Metroid, Mario Kart and Zelda 3
07/07/2009 at 03:41 Caiman says:
Nearly all the games that made me are ancient: 3D Monster Maze, Mazogs, Manic Miner, Tir Na Nog, Chaos, Laser Squad, Elite, Code Name: Mat, Dungeon Master, Starstrike 2, X-Wing, Doom, System Shock 2, Wizardry 8… and that’s probably where it ended.
07/07/2009 at 07:20 Aftershock says:
I remember playing the shareware episode of Doom over and over and over. I was mindblown when i heard my friend had the sequel.
And then he told me about this game called Half-Life.
Those two were my parents.
07/07/2009 at 08:52 Plushpants says:
I read the title without the comma.
“Gaming Made Me #1″
I always knew Jim was up himself ;)
07/07/2009 at 09:07 Kieron Gillen says:
Wisq: I may be doing a MUSH on one of mine.
KG
07/07/2009 at 09:08 Adam Dawes says:
Life changing games include:
Nightmare Park (PET)
Manic Miner (Spectrum)
The Hobbit (Spectrum)
Bubble Bobble (arcade)
Lemmings (Amiga)
Half Life (PC)
Deus Ex (PC)
They made me who I am. :-)
07/07/2009 at 09:11 mihor_fego says:
Ahhh… The Amiga500 years…
I too came to the Amiga after an Amstrad6128 (green screen) and found gaming heaven! The first day it came home, I played 23 hours straight (no lunch brakes n stuff)!
As for the games: Speedball 2, Moonstone, Kick Off 2, Shadow of the Beast, Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, Eye of the Beholder, Turrican, Xenon 2, Swiv, Gobliiins, Lemmings, Blood Money, Heimdall, Chaos Engine, Cannon Fodder, Alien Breed, Darkseed, Dynablaster…
I really could go on forever, as I had somewhere round 500 games back then. They also used to make some heavy duty joysticks in Greece back then, all metal, you could really pummel on the floor when frustrated! It used to hurt the floor mostly, really.
Sadly I gave up on gaming mid-secondary school, selling my Amiga with all the games, pretty cheap, too. I only rediscovered gaming as an adult…
07/07/2009 at 10:04 zak canard says:
Here’s a few of mine in order
Granny’s Garden – BBC Acorn
My earliest gaming memory happened in 1984/1985. I was in reception class at primary school, and the teacher needed someone to play Granny’s Garden on the only BBC Micro that the lower school had at the time. I think that game is partly to blame for how I’ve turned out over the years. The dev house behind this classic is still going and sell a retro version of the game compatible with windows PCs, I may just have to buy it. http://www.4mation.co.uk/retro/retrogranny.html
Sky Kid – Arcade
Back when I was younger I used to get dragged off to the same holiday park in Cornwall every year with the ‘rents and kid brother for a summer holiday. This place had a little arcade room with a handful of cabinets in. Frogger, Missile Command, and Arkanoid were all present, but by far my favourite was Sky Kid. Looked like a simple side scrolling shooter, but not many at the time had simultaneous 2 player co-op (although you could shoot down the other player if you were feeling evil), or were littered with the amount of easter eggs that had.
Ranarama – ZX Spectrum
You’re a wizard’s apprentice, who through some sort of coincidence ends up turning himself into a frog moments before his master is murdered. You’ve then got to spend the entire game hopping through dungeons to find and defeat the warlocks who did the nefarious deed using the power of re-arranging the word “ranarama” in under 10 seconds. Yeah I didn’t get why either. I still fire this up from time to time on whatever Spectrum emulator is fashionable this week and still love it dearly. It’s crying out for a remake of some kind, preferably with rogue-like procedurally generated dungeons just to keep the game fresh.
Lemmings – Amiga
What hasn’t been said about this? Well it managed to cause the death of many an amiga mouse, not because it was a brain melter of a puzzle game but because sabotaging your opponents efforts in the split screen 2 player mode usually ended up with them thrown in my direction.
Worms: The Directors Cut – Amiga
Almost the original, and surely still the best version of worms after all these years. Sure recent console outings such as WormsHD and Open Warfare 2 have come close with their online support, but the style just isn’t the same any more. Oi Team 17, bring back the pixelly worms of yesteryear with the cool weaponry and online play, then we’ll talk.
Deus Ex – PC
If voiceacting was a cheese then this would be extra ripe gorgonzola. I speel my dreenk!
Half Life – PC
I actually picked up the Generation pack (with Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Counter Strike) a few months before Deus Ex, yet even though my PC supposedly aced the system specs it just refused to work full stop. It was another 18 months before I got to play it, boy was it worth the wait.
07/07/2009 at 10:09 alexis says:
I want to talk a bit about another game of A500… oh no it came later as an AGA game !
it was Rocketz ! I didn’t read all your comments but just a part and I think you didn’t mentioned it
it comes to my mind as I read your comments about solitary/friendly activity of gaming. Whereas I found myself agree with phil : love solo game, solo immersion… Funky B you make me remind of Rocketz
it was a fantastic game with a real physics for the time, but it used it in the gameplay : the gravity was like the shape of death, always here. Speed was an escape between gravity and walls.
One player games were boring, but two players !! so fun, with the diversity of weapons, armours, engines : both action and tactics
thanks for the flashback jim
07/07/2009 at 10:28 Larington says:
Interesting how an item on inspirational games has become one about favoured gaming systems in the comments thread.
Let us see, if I cast my mind back through the cycles of time (Not very clearly mind you):
Avalon – An old text based RPG / MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon), I first joined back in the days when payment was for 15 hours of game time, until the developers were eventually forced to switch to the monthly model. It was a game I came back to several times, but each time I returned I spent less time there, each time, the atmosphere contributed to by the other players had changed a bit and become more serious. I have fond memories of my early time in the game, joining the Bards guild and being titled as the Jester of Mercinae. I have less fond memories of the time a player managed to get into the guild master position and was using it for his own agenda until he eventually got forced out. After that, I couldn’t stay and logged out in the land of the golden sun hidden away in the far North as a sort of retirement. Anyway, this was the first demonstration I had of the potential for player interaction in a game world, both the more positive aspects of community and friendship and the more negative aspects of desires for power, domination and control not to mention wanton destruction and cruelty ‘because we can’. By the time I gave up for the last visit, it had stopped feeling like a world and started feeling like a game, a cruel one at that.
System Shock 2 – Puts most attempts at ‘scary games’ to shame, doing a wonderful job of demonstrating an environment built to create fear, instead of a series of ‘shock’ moments that you can see coming from a mile away because the audio cues have changed.
Deus Ex – The classic demonstration of a merging of a strong story, good voice acting and letting the player choose how to go about given tasks, all wrapped up into a well built RPG simulationist environment. There were flaws, but they were so, so minor.
Anachronox – Showed me that games can still be full of gags and yet carry a strong undercurrent story with (ZOMG) actual emotion as well. This is another game that I’m hugely inspired by the way it creates several worlds that feel alive rather than just looking it. It is a shame, meanwhile, that people judged it for over-budgeted character model detail levels and other shallow flaws, it deserved to do so much better (It also deserved 3-6 months of polish).
Syberia series – Showed me there is still plenty of life to be had out of adventure games. But the formula for true adventure game success eludes me at this point, it’s something I need to study more. I don’t think I’m alone in this though, even the chap behind the Syberia games has come away from other projects wondering what he got right in Syberia that he hasn’t got right in other games (Purely in terms of sales I mean). As for Syberia 1 & 2 it was in the creation of an atmosphere that I think this game really shone, as in, it created what felt like a living breathing world.
Half-Life: Like all of the above games (I’ve noticed a theme), Valve crafted an environment with such atmosphere, if not life, that gave all the actions of the player far more weight than many other games in the past. Also, it doesn’t treat the player like an idiot with needless exposition and stuff, you can work out a lot of what’s going on by just looking and listening.
Planetside – Thus far the only game where I’ve A) Developed a camraderie with my outfit-mates/teammates and B) actually gone to London to meet up with said mates. Though it’s development was marred by shall we say, questionable design decisions, the core of the game non-the-less shone through for a long time. Only when the hard core team players started jumping ship did the game lose its shine (Around the time BFRs were introduced, what a shame). At the moment, a game like Planetside leads the list of what I’d want to make if I got a lead game designer position, there would be fundamental differences in the design of course, but the core idea of the game would be the same.
Honourable mentions (Games where I have to think hard to remember them or have already seen them mentioned above):
X-Wing/Tie Fighter
Elite: Frontier (IE Elite 2)
System Shock 1
Baldur’s Gate 1/2
Dwarf Fortress
Dizzy series
Dungeon Keeper
Command & Conquer & Red Alert
Dune 1 & 2 (The original more than the sequel though)
Colonization (The original)
07/07/2009 at 10:29 Schmung says:
Amstrad massive represent etc I had a 6128 as well. Terribly underrated system. It had a disk drive and everything.
07/07/2009 at 10:31 Richard Beer says:
Jim, hearty congratulations on managing to distill everything into just a few games. I think I would have found that virtually unpossible, given the vast tracts of satisfying childhood memories I have, from Tomb of Drewan on my Vic 20 through untold blah blah [insert personal list of legendary games here].
Speaking of Hired Guns, did you ever play Doom Co-op? I can’t remember the name of the guy who made them, but we had a variety of enormous custom-made Doom 2 maps on the BBS I frequented designed for 4-player co-op, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard or consistently as during those late night, accidental rocket-in-the-face sessions.
07/07/2009 at 10:35 Kommissar Nicko says:
My list is short, maybe a little pedantic: Sim City, Civilization, Final Fantasy 7, Half Life.
I’ve never much liked FPS, and it shows to this day, and simulation is my cup o’ tea. The ability to really BUILD things, and revel in them, has always been a wonderful feeling to me. Final Fantasy 7, for what it’s worth, is only here because it inspired me to write my first (really horrible) novel. And it wasn’t a fanfic, mind you, just bad. In its own roundabout way, Final Fantasy motivated me to create “simulations” from my own imagination, not the products of others.
07/07/2009 at 10:38 Kommissar Nicko says:
Damn, edit function. Half-Life was great not only because the game was fantastic, but it got me INTO first-person shooters. Plus, the mods are the reason why I have friends today. Admission to my first LAN party in high-school was predicated on my enthusiasm for Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, and Counter Strike (back when they were actual mods, like for free).
07/07/2009 at 10:53 RuySan says:
There is much Amiga love on this blog. You should do more features about it. Including interviews with some of the legendary programmers (Bitmap Brothers, Jon Hare…*ahem*…Peter Molyneaux)
07/07/2009 at 11:14 JM_Zen says:
‘“show, don’t tell”, a game of “do, don’t show”’ is a wonderful thought, and something of a sentence which describes what makes games different from all the other mediums of storytelling/entertainment out there. I do believe I’ve been looking for this for years. Thank you.
As for my own experiences, I may come back to add to this: but Quake 2 and Asheron’s Call both played a huge role in my development.
Regarding the former, I could see the underpinnings of my love for community (MMO) games in those late-night/early-morning games where we’d all had enough of the fragging, and just decided to see if we could build a grunt pyramid.
This led directly into my introduction to Asheron’s Call (AC), when a fellow clanner admitted why he hadn’t been playing Q2 so much lately. I quickly got myself into the closed beta and was completely and utterly wrapt. I didn’t even fully understand that there were over a thousand people playing on this one ‘map’ my first times through.
The actual realization came when I was inside a building, selling some of my hard-acquired loot for Pyreal coins, and I happened to look out the window. There were people running around the town, on various errands, interacting with each other and the NPCs. It dawned on me that all of these avatars represented Real People, and it was the single most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in a video game to date.
Though over the years I became jaded toward all multi-player games, and now play almost solely single-player stuff. I guess I’m looking for the next revolution. :)
Sorry to ramble on.
07/07/2009 at 11:26 Larington says:
Oh my god, how could I have forgotten to mention the original Master of Orion!?
07/07/2009 at 11:29 Schmung says:
There is now an excellent topic about this on yon forum.
07/07/2009 at 12:30 ToadSmokingDuckMonkey says:
@Wisq I never felt that I was controlling the action while playing COD4; especially during the sequences where you have to figure out the exact place to stand and shoot, until you reach the exact moment that the mission designer intended you to advance. Miss it, and you must endure another enemy wave.
While the game had it’s moments (the second half of the flashback sniper mission, and the surprise bit around the end which I won’t spoiler), I’d rather have watched the thing as a movie.
Portal on the other hand… that was great. The pacing and the difficulty curve, the just sick enough since of humor, and the writing. The situation was the perfect setup for a game; COD4 has a good one as well, but they ruined it with linear writing and flat characterizations.
07/07/2009 at 13:02 Bozzley says:
Speedball 2 came with an awesome booklet in the box, which described the history of the sport and the best ever players. One of which was “No Legs” Brahe, who got stuck in an air vent. Genius.
07/07/2009 at 13:30 Seniath says:
On the topic of Half-Life, I stumbled upon this awesome (albeit 3-year-old) image earlier.
07/07/2009 at 18:04 Joshua says:
I think I was the only one in America who bought the Speedball game on XBLA. Since I never owned a comp that was the first time I ever played a Speedball… and I loved it! One of XBLA’s best titles, even today.
07/07/2009 at 20:52 Paul B says:
I remember Speedball 2 fondly too. It was one of my favourite games on the Amiga, and one of the most frustrating. I would slowly fill my team with star players, get promoted to division 1, and then fall at the last hurdle to Super Nashwan, ending up in second place.
I recently played Speedball 2 again using WinUAE, and despite all my extra years of gaming experience, I still lost to Super Nashwan. Some things never change ;)
07/07/2009 at 22:11 cowthief skank says:
I remember first getting Half-Life. My computer was sans-graphics card, so I could either play it in software or wait. Somehow managed to wait, just playing this one level over and over. I think it was a tutorial or something? There was not much to do, but it kept me going until we got a graphics card.
The soldiers in that game still rank as one of my favourite enemies, and the plot touched the scientist / science fiction fan inside me.
I also remember spending time, a lot of time, making crappy single-player levels, trying to make places I knew but failing miserably, making incredibly complicated objects that slowed it right down. Would take ages for my computer to save the level in order to preview it, only for me to find out it wasn’t right and would have to change it.
Great fun. Half-Life would be in my list for sure.
07/07/2009 at 22:15 toonu says:
I played Speedball 2 on the Atari ST e. At the same time, or roughly at the same time, I played Bloodbowl with my brothers. Yes the tabletop game of course.
Speedball 2 was the bloodbowl come to life..only tame and not quite as visceral as the images and play by play moments in your head. Though, its management was great and each player that got better, brought it a little more to home. In the same light that your XCOM soldiers get better, you value them more and take it personally when when dies, or in SB2…gets injured.
08/07/2009 at 11:38 Paul Moloney says:
Elite on the Spectrum. Used to switch off the bedroom lights and put a Star Wars soundtrack album on full blast as I played. I probably didn’t know the word “immersive” at the time, but all my favourite games since then have had to give me that feeling of being in the skin of a character in a realistic world (perhaps it’s why I’ve never really been able to get into RTSs, despite many tries).
P.
09/07/2009 at 09:01 Halbyrd says:
Super Metroid: taught me that exploring things can be fun, and going at your own pace is just fine sometimes.
Final Fantasy VI: no matter how desperately weird you are, you can find friends, and even love, if you try. also, clowns are pure evil
Half-Life: smart people think their way out of a problem, instead of just shooting at everything
UT99: the best way to win a one-on-one fight is to be the third person; good teammates are worth their weight in platinum; and competition can be fun, so long as you don’t jump in the deep end before learning to float
09/07/2009 at 10:25 Jonny B says:
Jim my boy where is Quake 3!
09/07/2009 at 14:05 Dracko says:
Jim is a man of wealth and taste.
B, Quake III Arena is online now, so therefore, no longer indie cool. :(
14/07/2009 at 18:32 Jonny B says:
Could surely argue that it has always been an online game though Dracko!?
16/07/2009 at 15:39 KindredPhantom says:
Hey Jim have you checked out smashball? From your love of Speedball 2 it sounds like you may enjoy this mod.
http://www.smashball.tv/
24/07/2010 at 10:59 cheap uggs says:
The games you mentioned, and many of them suggested in the comments thread are defining of my epiphinal gaming moments as well, but I’m long enough in the tooth to add Elite and Pac-man as my earliest.
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