I was fascinated by video games. The earliest in home experience for me was a Binatone system that had a version of pong, soccer and some shooting games (it had a light gun). Later we had an Atari VCS on which I played the likes of Berzerk, Frogger and when I could borrow it (I never owned it) Adventure, a game that I was fascinated with.
Then came the ZX Spectrum. Now the Spectrum wasn’t just a toy to me in that it was obvious (given that it had a keyboard and a BASIC language built in) that it was programmable. That’s when the light went on and I became interested in creating games. I used to think about the games I would make and the worlds I would create if I had the chance. I taught myself programming, but it was difficult to make progress on anything substantial given it used a tape recorder and I had no peripherals such as a disk drive. I don’t think the Spectrum made a good development host machine or environment anyway.
So I moved to the Amstrad CPC. A friend of mine had one and I was impressed with the real keyboard, half decent basic and potential for expansion. I got a model with a disk drive (6128) and a while later, a rom box and an eprom based assembler, effectively giving me a built in assembler to the machine. I started doing Z80 assembly language.
I managed to land myself a job making games a couple of years later.
I am still making games today. I still dream of the worlds I might still hope to create…probably in my retirement because I’m too busy making games for other people, or herding cats.