Reply to: Can you remember...

[DaveB]

The very first game I ever played was on a home brew machine of uncertain provenance built by my Maths teacher some time around 1979/80. It was called Snarks and I have never seen anything like it since.

It used Ascii graphics in black and white and involved the management and control of creatures called Snarks that would shoot about the screen vertically and horizontally unless interrupted in their progress by you (killing you in the process), a boulder you had pushed into their path when they would randomly change direction, a tree, which were poisonous to players and snarks alike, or another Snark when there was a chance of them producing offspring.

With good management you could build walled enclosures with the boulders and farm the Snarks by penning them in and letting them breed before letting them out again. There was no score and no objective but I remember being completely fascinated by it.

I blame this formative experience for the years of squandered time since spent playing games of all descriptions.

[NickFitz]

For those of you who want to rekindle their "Elite" memories, I've been playing "Oolite" for the past couple of months. It's a true re-write of the original for PC and you can install OXP's for additional functionality.

Elite is currently being redeveloped and should be out around the end of the year...but in the meantime, Commander, Oolite to "Load new Commander"

+1 from me too. Note that it's not only for PC, but also Mac and Linux.

And if you fancy some truly hard core nostalgia, Ian Bell's site has the 6502 assembly language source code for the original BBC Micro version, along with the game itself for various 8 and 16 bit platforms, runnable in modern emulators: Elite Home Page - Archive Index

[Cliphead]

For those of you who want to rekindle their "Elite" memories, I've been playing "Oolite" for the past couple of months. It's a true re-write of the original for PC and you can install OXP's for additional functionality.

Elite is currently being redeveloped and should be out around the end of the year...but in the meantime, Commander, Oolite to "Load new Commander"

+1

Been playing Oolite on and off for a couple of years. Pure nostalgia.


Linky

[TraceRacing]

For those of you who want to rekindle their "Elite" memories, I've been playing "Oolite" for the past couple of months. It's a true re-write of the original for PC and you can install OXP's for additional functionality.

Elite is currently being redeveloped and should be out around the end of the year...but in the meantime, Commander, Oolite to "Load new Commander"

[hyperD]

Used to like the multiplayer arcade game Gauntlet. Who would have known about 20 years later we'd have MMORPGs such as WoW?

[psychocandy]

My Dad bought one of those for my sister and I - I do remember my Mum going nuts over how much it cost.

I had a ZX Spectrum 16k (we were too poor for me to get a 48k). I bought one from ebay and excitedly showed it to my son - has was not impressed.

Me too. 16K. Then I paid for the memory myself and upgraded it.

Still got mine.

[psychocandy]

Doom was ok

but before that I loved Rebelstar Raiders, Lords of midnight and a neat little game called Chaos

Lords of Midnight = classic. Bit too easy though.

Never really got into the follow-up though - bit too complex for me.

[hyperD]

Nope.

Nothing that sophisticated, must have been around 1977/78.

IIRC it was a sort of maze game.

And there was some sort of driving game in 1978/9 that I played about twice but resented having to pay so stopped.

Tank?

[Platypus]

Hunt the Wumpus

I think I played that on a Teletype !

I played Star Trek on a Data General Aviion mini computer in the 70's

[Platypus]

Larry the lounge lizard.[/IMG]

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

I think you'll find

I completed that one too. You could make Larry do stuff like take a dump and shag female characters

[original PM]

Same here, but it was in the arcade on the pier at Fleetwood. We used to go there for summer holidays when I was very young (in the 60s) and in the early-mid 70s we were up in Liverpool visiting family, and our parents decided to take us up there for the afternoon. I still remember my brother rushing up to me, telling me I had to come and see this amazing machine that was like playing table tennis on a television!

As I believe I've mentioned before, the UK cabinets were called "Ping" because of the connotations of the word "Pong" in British English; and my brother rather irritatingly adopted the habit of shouting "Ping!" whenever he achieved something like kicking a ball past one in the back garden for quite a while afterwards.

Still, a little over ten years later I had my revenge: I was actually doing my dream job of writing computer games, albeit for a minuscule salary, whereas he was stuck miserably in an extremely lucrative position in the legal profession.

Ping!

NO way! My grandma lived in Fleetwood spent many a happy hour on the pier and also the ferry boat arcade fruther round the bay.

But my first computer game was on an Acorn Electron - pretty sure it was Felix in the Factory.
Happy days!

[Scrag Meister]

Money Run on the PET.
Defender on the BBC B.
Hero on the C64, along with Way of the Exploding Fist, Hovver Bovver and Revenge of the Mutant Camels.

Back in the day when Jeff Minter ruled.

We were cutting edge at one point with a Binatone console with various Pong like derivatives.

[hyperD]

And some sort of tank game in a pub. Which I didn't play much coz I don't like paying money for that sort of thing.

Battlezone?

[d000hg]

The first computer game you played?

Don't remember the name but it was where you controlled a logo-esque cursor moving around and drawing a line, on top of a starfilled background - if you hit a star or your own trail you died so the aim was to go as long as possible and fill the entire screen up.

Like the motor-bike game in tron but single player.

This was on an Amstrad 1512 which was the first computer I had access to.

The first game I remember being amazed by, also on the 1512, was the original Prince of Persia.

[eek]

That's a good point. The "Ping" anecdote I posted above must date from a summer between 1972 and 1975, because from September 1975 I had access to the school's PDP 8/e, and thus a plethora of Teletype-oriented games.

73-75 because it was only released in June 1972.