December 3rd 2023.
As a retired engineer, I have had the amazing opportunity to experience gaming from the very beginning. It all started back in the early 1950s when I was just a kid. I experienced Winky Dink and You, the first ever video game, on a black and white television. It was a transparent TV overlay that you had to draw on with a crayon. I must have been too young to understand the mechanics of the game because it would still go ahead with the action even if I didn't draw the right things on the screen.
My next gaming adventure was with the Magnavox Odyssey which was a huge letdown. It was only capable of playing Pong and Hockey. It had three knobs to control the paddle, which was ridiculously hard to use without three hands. After this, I was lucky enough to play the NES, Atari Jaguar, Genesis, 3DO, Neo Geo, Commodore 128, Timex Sinclair 2068, Xbox, PlayStation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and many PCs.
I had a lot of fun playing the games but, except for the NES joystick and the Neo Geo sticks, the controllers on all the other systems made the games almost unplayable. The Atari 5200 analogue stick was especially terrible as it flopped over when you let go. To solve this, I made a digital joystick that worked perfectly. I believe it is the only one in the world for the Atari 5200.
I also cracked the save code for the PS1 Doom 1 and 2 disc, and generated a bunch of save codes with full weapons and ammo. One code was kept to myself and it starts Doom 1 on the first level with all weapons and ammo including the double barrel shotgun, which you can't get until Doom 2 normally.
My experience with the Commodore 128 was amazing. I learned Basic and bought over 100 games for it before I stopped using it. Tomb Raider on the PS1 was also a great experience.
I later got into MMOs, playing Ultima Online the first year it came out, and then many of the rest for about a year each. One of my most memorable experiences was seeing a huge train in EverQuest. Someone had started running around aggroing things and created a whole train of monsters following them, and it was hilarious to watch.
I think the most fun I had in gaming was with the Commodore 128. Every game was a completely new experience because developers were trying everything they could think of in games and were avoiding doing what other developers were doing. There was a creative spark that is missing in gaming today. Too often, developers are looking for something old that worked to copy instead of looking for something new that works. Firing up a brand new game on my Commodore 128 was always a thrill because I never knew what to expect.
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