Ninja Gaiden for the NES. Really damn tough. I remember playing the last really long stage a few times; every time you ran out of lives you had to continue from the beginning of the entire stretch. I finally got to the end of it, where you face the first (Ryu’s father) of three increasingly difficult bosses. Fortunately, I’d read the novelization of the game, which revealed the secret to the first fight. Yup, it wasn’t enough to play video games… I had to read all about them, too.

Anyway, I finished the first of the three bosses and was filled with pride at my incredible skill. I was so proud that I paused the game and went around to all the kids playing outside in the neighborhood to tell them how far I had made it in the game.

Of course it didn’t mean as much to them as it did me. They hadn’t invested their thumbs into bringing down the forces of Jaquio the way that I had. Still, it felt good to share.

I went back home, unpaused, and died right away on the next boss. Went back to the start of the long level again. I’m not sure if I kept playing long enough that day to beat it, but I know I eventually did. That was the day that I had finally felt it was within my grasp.

I’d play it with the volume at the lowest possible level on their really old console TV, and any time I heard anything that could possibly be someone walking around upstairs I would turn off the TV and sneak into bed. Surely they wouldn’t look hard enough to see the red LED that showed the NES was on.

In any given night I probably had at least 2 false alarms, and I think I probably had around 10 nights where I stayed up to play. Never once was I caught. I don’t know why I thought it was such a big deal, but I felt like a ninja.

Or probably be the best; playing Final Fight in the arcades with my late Grandad holding a handful of 10p’s ready for when I died and I needed to continue. You’ve never seen an old man move so fast when there’s a screaming 10 year old on the continue screen as it counts down 10….9…. “Change! Grandad! Change!” Ahh great days. I’ve still never beaten that damn game.

Cyan/red cyan/red, will it get to the blue and yellow bits!?

Will the title graphic load? Without glitch?

We’re nearly there!
YUSSS, the game!

That and Rollercoaster were my two faves back then. Tried many times to write some code and get results but that took ages and the keyboard was so clunky. Games from tapes were so much acer.

Young console users don’t appreciate the time we used to have to wait to play the game. Oh the anticipation!

Good memory: Mom freaking out while playing Doctor Mario. Bahaha!

Bad memory: My oldest sister always being the one with the controls, therefore getting better and better. I would just watch. Right, Véro?

It was the 80s, and home computing was taking off slowly. While people marvelled at the ability to do home accouting on their TV screen rather than the 100 times faster method of scribbling in a book, kids were getting into the likes of Jet Set Willy and The Lords of Midnight. Home taping was killing, not only music, but software too, no doubt, and my school had a huge illicit trade going on with ZX Spectrum games. Our cousin had the Spectrum 48k and the 128k had come out recently too. We’d relegated his cast-off ZX81 to a cupboard somewhere as gameplay was not really an option on it. We begged and pleaded and asked repeatedly for a Spectrum of our very own. We wouldn’t just play games on it, we insisted, we’d learn programming and everything! And on Christmas day Santa delivered a computer. Excitedly we threw back the table cloth covering the tea trolley it had been mounted on and found… an Atari 800xl.

My parents, oblivous to the whys and wherefores of technology had gone into Dixons or whatever the mid 80s equivalent may have been, and been sold this machine as much better, more powerful, all around more suitable for kids. They encouraged me to type up one of the games from the old ZX81 computer magazines and see if it would load. The damn things never loaded on the machine they were meant for, I was pretty certain it was futile but they had me try anyway, “Some of the language must be the same,” they reasoned, “it might work”. Of course it didn’t.

Later, we did get the 48k, after my cousin cast that off in his next upgrade, but the trading games thing at school had died down somewhat. And it was on there that I played the followup games to the one that really impressed me beyond description on the Atari 800xl. It was the following year, on my birthday, that I was presented with a game that cost a tenner and was a rubbishy platform clone and one that had been £1.99. That game was Spellbound, the second in the Magic Knight series, and the first to use “windimation” a fantastic drop down menu system that let you interact with the game world. We’d sit and wait for hours to load up the game from the tape recorder, and never quite mastered save games, so replayed it a lot to get back to the same position. It was a brilliant game, well ahead of its time and sadly underrated alongside most of the Spectrum world of gaming.

I’m not sure how to attach a picture, but this shows me holding my little sister as we all croweded around the computer that Christmas, pretending to be a bit more impressed than we actually were.

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs612.snc3/32229_414968747632_592797632_4837956_7631871_n.jpg

But when it came time to finally face the eponymous Metroids in Tourian I couldn’t do it. I was too scared. My video game playing buddy would need to take over while I went to the other room.

Sometimes I’d have dreams where I went to take out the trash, opened the garage door, and in would swoop a Metroid to drain me of my vital sparks.

I got over it. Still love the series today.

Night Stalker was my favorite game. Running around a maze trying to kill the killer robots before they could kill me. At the time I didn’t have my crazy Nintendo-developed skills, so when the robots started to get cloaks and all of that, I was powerless to stop them.

That made it all the more exciting.

Unfortunately, the computer defaulted EVERY TIME to having a keybeep noise at high volume. The first task upon booting was always to activate the key combinations that would drop that volume to zero. I had it down to a series of five keypresses, always worried that I’d wake my parents and get in trouble.

I think my Dad was just happy I was taking up an interested in computers.

My reward for helping was to get to play star trek, very similar to the old battleships boardgame. There was no screen, the game was played by printing the map out at the start of every term, and then using a punchcard to plot your ships movements and torpedo solutions.

Compared to todays HD 3D graphics and new style controllers, it doesn’t measure up. But to a 5 year old boy with an active imagination, this was the very essense of gaming, and the experiences and wonderment I felt then have been transferred over to every successive generation of gaming technology since. I can remember the thrill of beating the mainframe for the first time, it was like a drug, and one that I have been addicted to every since.

Yup I still am, and always will be, a gamer.