Teenage gaming memories
In my early memories of home computing post I wrote about some pre-1995 games. This is the 1995-2002 edition.
Because we already had a computer in the house we were late to consoles. I remember, pre-1995, playing Sonic at other people's houses. But this was not a widespread thing. Most people had neither a console nor a computer.
The first console at my house was a Sega Mega Drive. That was a cool little machine. We had a bundle of games on one cartridge - loads - but I only really remember Mean Bean Machine and Micro Machines. We loved them. Heck, I still love them. Mean Bean was Tetris, basically. I feel like we should all know Micro Machines, a simple top-down multiplayer party racer. On Micro Machines you could have four people playing on two controllers but you had to literally share the controller - your hands on it with another person. Which is mostly how we played it.
The summer I was fourteen we were camping in Cornwall and the games room had an N64 with GoldenEye. Every night most of the campsite played big knockout tournaments. That was such a fun time.
We then went to a PS2 and that was when Tony Hawk happened. My brother was into skateboarding anyway, as were many of my sister's friends. I was and still am very bad at this sort of game. I cannot move fast enough. I was just button bashing. But I liked it, I liked rolling around listening to music. I liked us all hanging out and playing together. All the music still brings back those memories. Just writing this is making me sing Ace of Spades.
On the computer it was Age of Empires, as of 1998. I used to make my own map - walling one red guy in a corner - and then just play until I had exhausted all the resources.
SimCity (the original) was in my previous post and I played all the subsequent games. I remember this real sense of progress? Each of the early ones was such a marked advancement from previously. The art, the game design, the technology of it. It was easy to feel very cutting edge back then. I remember one of the versions got a bit too real for me, too much about power lines and such, and it can't only have been me because they seemed to scale the Reality™ back a notch after.
The Sims came out in 2000 and honestly I would have guessed earlier. Probably just as well, or I might have failed my GCSEs. As if AoE and SimCity weren't enough. I think I only really played the first edition. But it remains such a formative influence. I still give myself a 'Sims check in' where I imagine the little status bar over my head. Do I need the toilet? How is my hunger? If only I could also use motherlode.
We stop at 2002 because that's when I went away to uni and that's when The Big One happened. More on that another time.
In honour of Blaugust's gaming origins. Filing under games stuff.