I’m a bit of a veteran gamer, my interest being sparked by the Space Invaders + Pole Position type games in the local amusement arcades (even though I didn’t always get to do it with money in them and actually get to play ‘em), and also via the ACORN BBC Micro computers at school with games such as Repton, Martello Tower, Chuckie Egg + others. I think there was also a handheld PacMan game one of my older cousins had, which I may have dropped.

My interest was further fuelled by visits to my Cousin Stephen’s house (he was about a year younger than me), where he always had both a Sinclair ZX Spectrum + a Nintendo NES, which I used to get to play on. For years I bugged for my own computer, initially being fobbed off with one of those Handheld LCD games, before finally one Christmas getting my Cousin Stephen’s old Spectrum when he was upgraded to the newer more advanced AMIGA (told you my gaming experience goes back a long way).

Things started getting a bit better, when I got an ATARI 7800 and later a Nintendo Gameboy, then also an Amiga 600 (slightly dented, but alright-ish for playing games on) from a kid at school who wanted the money from selling his Amiga to buy a new Surfboard.

Eventually they ended up completely knackered & outdated anyway, and then I FINALLY started catching up when I started having a bit more money. In the summer of 1999 I FINALLY bought a usable computer, it wasn’t that special (75MHz Intel Pentium1 Processor, 16MB of RAM + Windows ‘95) but it allowed me to finally start doing stuff on computers that I wanted to be able to do... and more importantly start playing decent games like DOOM, TOCA Touring Car, Grand Prix 2 + bloody loads of demo games from computer magazine cover discs and very slowly downloaded offline, particular favourites in those early days of PC gaming included Star Trek: Star Fleet Command, Need for Speed: High Stakes, Sim City 2000, JANE’s Apache AH-64D Longbow + others