Our first system was a Binatone console with built in games. It had controllers that I would describe as sticks with rotary knobs on top for left/right control only. It also had a light gun. It played pong, a few sports titled derivatives and shooting (obviously…given it had a light gun). I don’t know the exact model of this system and googling for images brings only vague recollections of what it looked like. Most images don’t have the same controllers. The lights guns I see in many of the images are the same that we had. I believe this Binatone was indeed a first generation game system with cheaper controllers than normal. I WILL figure out the model # one day.
I loved this system. Pong I think still fascinates me. I was a whiz with the gun – fast reactions to shoot the target just as it came on screen and very accurate. I believe we have a family photo of me playing this at about age 7…but it’s a photo I haven’t seen in a long time, possibly lost.
Our next system was an Atari 2600 VCS. Our friends had one – spoiled bastards. A few years later the system had reduced in price to the point where we were able to get our own. The game ‘Combat’ was supplied with the system. The first game I ever acquired for myself was Berzerk, which like pong still fascinates and is one of my all time favorites. Shared with my brother we also acquired Frogger, which was an awesome Parker brothers game version. My brother also came into ownership of Defender for one of his Christmas presents. We were spoiled bastards now too.
Christmas and birthdays were how we were to acquire new games because they were expensive – VCS cartridges were 30 quid and pocket money wouldn’t stretch this far, nor could it be saved long enough. When my birthday came around I got a hold of Activisions Barnstorming, which was fun.
These simple games had immense replay value – high score competitions in Frogger, fastest times in Barnstorming – we rarely come across games with these such fundamental goals in mind nowadays. Moving on from which, I did get a glimpse of games with more complicated quests in the form of Adventure, which I think is my favorite 2600 title and possibly even favorite game…ever.
Not that we owned Adventure. Every time I played it, I had borrowed a cartridge from someone or rented it. The idea of acquiring a vast library of games over 100’s of Christmas and birthdays as I aged to be an old man quickly fell apart. My brother, more outgoing than me and less of a geek more quickly succumbed. While the VCS was often used and much loved, my targets for gift receipt changed too.
I’d never heard of a home computer though. I thought a computer was something large that beeped, whirred and spun wheels around as it figured out problems. Playing on the spoiled kids VCS one day, my friend announced they were getting such a thing – something called a ZX Spectrum. Apparently the games and graphics were better than the VCS (which I didn’t believe) and some of them were free (which I wanted to believe). Plus, you could program it. I was fascinated – I’d seen people on TV programming computers just by speaking to them.
Along came my friends ZX Spectrum. It didn’t look like the computers I’d seen on TV. You couldn’t speak to it either. My friend had quickly obtained a small library of games by typing programs in and copying cassettes, in addition to actually buying titles. We played Manic Miner and new types of games called adventures, the most memorable of which was The Hobbit.
When my friend took his turn, I would pick up the Spectrum manual and look at the programming tutorials. Throughout many visits to his house, I figured out how to put a program together, helped by typing the odd few BASIC keywords as we reset the computer between games. Gradually, I wrote a program out on paper at home. When I was stuck, I would wait for the gaming sessions at my friends house and open up the programming manual while he played The Hobbit. I was preparing for things I would do when I got my own Spectrum. I did want to play games yes, but I was fascinated by the idea of my own programs too. I didn’t want to try programming at my friends house either – the computer was rarely available for that when I was there anyway, but I figured it was kind of a trial and error thing, requiring time and patience. Yes, I figured this one out before I’d even started.
Finally, I got my own ZX Spectrum – the idea of programming and an instantly larger game collection than my VCS library just too hard to resist. My first Spectrum game was Manic Miner, which I loved. I was given a (ahem) ‘copy’ of Atic Atac. After a few goes of Manic Miner, I reset the machine and started to type in my program. A couple of syntax errors, but…no bugs. It worked first time – a program that responded to keypresses by beeping. Each key generated a different tone – my own little beeping synthesizer. It was my first program.
It was also the last time I ever did any kind of audio programming that was actually any good.