My video game memories from a boy in the 70s to army duty in 2001 – Reader’s Feature

From Space Invaders in the late 1970s to SSX Tricky in the early 2000s, a reader recounts his early history with video games and how being in the army didn’t stop him playing.

There’s been a lot of reminiscing on these pages lately and I thought I would join in. As I’m 54, I have seen a lot of things in the history of gaming, so I am just going to go through some of the memorable moments and with luck bring a few sage nods and the odd smile.

In the late 70s my dad used to run the local football club bar. On a Friday night, as a young whippersnapper, I used to go with him and help bottle up, ready for service that night, before my Mum came and picked me up. I remember going in one Friday and there was this shiny new cabinet between the jukebox and the fruit machine. Emblazoned on the front was Space Invaders. I had heard of this but had never seen one in real life.

As we were getting things ready, Dad asked me to switch it on. I just remember watching it go through the boot sequence and going in to demo mode. I was awestruck. Dad had the keys and opened it up and put a few credits in for me. I was rubbish, the credits were gone in seconds, but a love of video games was born.

The early eighties, one Christmas my parents got my sisters and me an Acorn Electron. Their thinking being that it was like the ones in school, and we could learn from it. It was all hooked up to a black and white portable TV. Mum and Dad had bought some learning to program books and such like, but we wanted games!

We didn’t have a huge collection but the ones we played were played to death. Snapper, a Pac-Man clone, Danger UXB – I can only remember its name, not what it was about. And of course, Chuckie Egg. On a Sunday I was allowed to connect to the big television and play in colour! What a revelation to see the yellow bird jump around the screen.

By the early nineties I was in the British Army and serving in Germany, and it was the time of the Amiga. I didn’t own one at this point, but my roommate Norm Fowler did. Two games will always remind me of those times. Speedball 2 and the greatest football game ever made, Sensible Soccer! I wouldn’t even like attempt to put a time on how much this was played.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that it would be loaded up at 5pm and not switched off until gone midnight. I think all the single lads in the block were involved in leagues or cup competitions. Between matches you’d head off to NAAFI for a few pints, come back and keep playing.

The big debate was which joystick was best? There were only two contenders. The Competition Pro or the Quickshot. My personal favourite was the Quickshot. I don’t know how many of them I went through, but they took some serious abuse from doing the big punt downfield and then throwing it left or right for aftertouch. You just can’t recreate that goal with a controller.

Finally, the mid to late nineties. I’m still in the Army but I’m serving a tour of Bosnia. At this point, Bosnia was pretty quiet, the war was over and things were pretty boring. I took a PlayStation 2 with me in my luxury items box. I didn’t have a TV but if my memory serves me correctly, me and my good buddy Stretch Armstrong went halfers on one. A big old CRT thing.

We had a lot of games between us but two games that jump out were Destruction Derby 2 and SSX Tricky. We literally played that PlayStation to death. One day it just gave up reading discs. The unit I was attached to had an electronics troop so I sent it down there with a few packets of chocolate Hobnobs to see if they could fix it.

Unfortunately, it was unrepairable as we had worn out the ribbon on the CD drive! I seem to recall we wrote a bit of a begging letter to one of the PlayStation magazines, seeing if they could ‘help’ us out but we never got anything.

There you go, a few memories from my gaming life.

By reader Dirtystopout

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