My life through gaming, one console at a time

My parents told me to go and tidy the dining room. I walked in expecting a mess I'd have to deal with, and instead there was a Commodore VIC-20, set up and waiting. That's the earliest gaming memory I've got, and everything else in this piece follows on from it.

This isn't news, or a review, or a list of things you should go and buy. It's just a timeline through the machines I've owned, the games that mattered on each one, and the one time a computer arrived that I hadn't even asked for and it turned out to matter more than the one I had.

The VIC-20

Two-bit graphics, by my memory, and a pack-in library that included Oh Mummy, a game my mother still brings up now. It also ran Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, which my brother and I played to death. I don't think either of us had any sense at the time that we were sitting in front of the actual birth of home computing in this country. We just knew Miner Willy kept dying in stupid ways and we kept going back for more.

The Amstrad years

The CPC 464 came next, and if you want the honest answer to "what were the best years of your life in gaming," this is it, no contest. It was an eight-bit machine competing against the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and we were completely obsessed with it. We went to conventions. There was a shop in town that sold nothing but Codemasters' budget line, and we owned all of it: Ski Simulator, BMX Simulator, the Dizzy games about the adventuring egg, Rick Dangerous, and Nebulus, in which you play a green creature called Pogo climbing rotating cylindrical towers to plant bombs at the top of each one. The Amstrad version is infamous for a bug that freezes the game the moment you complete the final tower, so plenty of us probably never actually saw the ending.

Exolon and Cybernoid were the two I went back to most, both by Raffaele Cecco, both published by Hewson Consultants, and both genuinely phenomenal games for the machine. And then there was Gryzor, Ocean Software's Amstrad port of Konami's arcade game, originally called Contra, renamed for European release because in 1987 "Contra" meant the Iran-Contra affair and the Nicaraguan Contras rather than a video game, and nobody wanted that on a shop shelf.

We upgraded that Amstrad bit by bit, tape deck first, working our way toward something that resembled the disc drive version above it. Never quite got there. Didn't matter.

Just as big a part of that era as the games themselves was reading about them. Amstrad Action was the one that mattered most, being specifically about my machine, but Computer and Video Games (C&VG) and, briefly, The Games Machine were in the mix too. I'd read reviews of games I had no way of affording, and previews of games months away from release, and somehow that was every bit as satisfying as actually playing. Looking back, that's a genuinely strange thing to enjoy as much as the hobby itself, but I clearly did, and still do.

Some of those magazines printed full pages of BASIC code you could type in yourself to build your own simple game. I did this more times than I can count, painstakingly copying line after line, only to run it and find it was riddled with bugs, either mine or the magazine's own, it was never entirely clear which. I don't think a single one of them ever worked first time. Didn't matter. There was something genuinely magic about the idea that a page of a magazine could become a working game if you were patient enough to type it all in correctly, even when you weren't.

The generation I skipped

All my friends got an Atari ST or an Amiga. I didn't, and I've never really owned that era, though I played plenty of Match Day round other people's houses. If I'm honest, this is also roughly the point where I got more interested in drinking than gaming, which feels like an appropriately teenage reason to miss an entire console generation.

The console I didn't ask for

I asked for a PlayStation for Christmas. A box turned up from the Gratton catalogue my mother used to order from, and I remember genuinely thinking, that's it, it's happening. It was a Nintendo Entertainment System. An eight-bit machine, at a point when everyone else was talking about how far ahead PlayStation graphics were. I was disappointed for about as long as it took to turn it on.

In hindsight, it's one of the best things that ever happened to me as a gamer. Super Mario World. Micro Machines. Zelda. Metroid. These aren't just good games, they're foundational ones, and I got them because my mother, deliberately or otherwise, bought me the wrong console. I'm genuinely grateful for the mix-up now.

University and the N64

I bought a Nintendo 64 myself, the day my student loan came in, which tells you everything about my financial priorities at the time. I will never forget the first time I played Ocarina of Time, working through the enclosed opening cave and then walking out onto Hyrule Field for the first time. That was my first real taste of open-world gaming, and it landed like nothing had before. Mario 64. GoldenEye, which ate entire evenings. 1080° Snowboarding.

This is also around when Edge turned up, which was a different kind of magazine entirely to the Amstrad-era ones, less "here's how to get past level three" and more genuinely thoughtful about games as a medium. I didn't always agree with its scores, nobody did, that was half the fun of it, but it's the magazine that made me think about why a game worked rather than just whether it did.

The emulator years

Before PS2, there was a stretch at university where an emulator opened up the entire Sega Master System and Mega Drive library, and we absolutely hammered it. The one that stuck hardest was a run-and-gun shooter I knew for years by a completely different name, only to eventually discover it was Contra, the same game Gryzor had been renamed from back on the Amstrad. Two different machines, two different names, one game I'd apparently been chasing since I was about ten.

PlayStation 2

I missed the GameCube entirely and went to PlayStation 2 instead. Those were the GTA and Call of Duty years, and I look back on them fondly enough, but nothing about that period felt new to me the way earlier ones had. Nothing from that console hit me the way Ocarina of Time did.

Back to Nintendo, and staying there

The Wii brought me back, and I've stayed a Nintendo gamer since: Wii, Wii U, Switch, Switch 2. What keeps me there is the thing Nintendo has always cared about more than anyone else, gameplay over graphics, and hardware that's genuinely a joy to pick up and use. I've got an Xbox too, and I properly enjoy it, it's a fantastic machine graphically. I play on PC as well. None of this is exclusive, it's just that Nintendo is home.

The magazine habit never really left either. Game was a regular read through this stretch, and I kept picking up NGC despite never actually owning a GameCube, purely for the Nintendo fix. That's possibly the purest evidence in this entire article that reading about the hobby was never really secondary to playing it for me, it was just another way of doing it.

What I've actually learned writing this down

Gameplay always beats graphics. Every machine I've genuinely loved, the Amstrad, the NES, the N64, the Wii, was never the most powerful thing on the shelf at the time. It was just the one that was most fun to actually pick up and play. The PS2 years had the best graphics I'd seen up to that point and left the least mark on me of any era in this whole list.

Attention to detail matters far more than you notice at the time. I couldn't have told you in 1988 why Exolon or Nebulus felt better than plenty of games around them. It's only looking back that you realise it was always the small, deliberate choices doing the work, not the big obvious ones.

Reading about the hobby is genuinely as much fun as the hobby itself. Amstrad Action, C&VG, Edge, Game, NGC despite not even owning the console it covered, none of that was a substitute for playing, it was just another room in the same house. I'm not sure I'd have put it that plainly before writing this out.

Games stick to memory in a way books, films and telly mostly don't. I can tell you exactly where I was standing when Hyrule Field opened up in front of me. I can't do that for a single film I saw that year. Something about playing a thing rather than watching it seems to weld it to a specific period of your life far more permanently.

Looking back at this whole list, the console I actually wanted the least, the NES, is the one that gave me the games that mattered most. Funny how that works. If you've got your own version of this list, whichever machines are on it, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Comments aren't set up on the site yet, but drop us a line in the meantime, this is exactly the kind of thing worth comparing notes on.