How Long Have You Been Playing Video Games?

How long have you been playing video games? When I say video games, I'm referring to both computer and console. When I say computer games, I'm referring to both Apple and PC.

I've been playing video games all my life, started around the time I was probably 7 years old. It's been too long ago I don't quite remember the brand, maybe Radio Shack? Anyway, the box it came with contained a console box, 2 controllers with dial like knobs that you turn left and right, and 8 to 10 pictures on semi-transparent plastic that easily sticks to your tv screen via static. If you don't put the picture strip up on your screen all you'll see are white squares and rectangles moving around when you turn the dials of the controllers. The problem with this is if your screen is bigger, or smaller, than the plastic, you won't be able to understand what you're doing, if you understood anything at all. I mean, PONG was easy to play even without the plastic, in fact it's better played without it. But HAUNTED HOUSE, if that is the name as I'm pulling it off from memory over 30 years old, is a cat and mouse game where this square ghost appears at the door or anyone of the windows and even the chimney if I remember right, and your detective square has to catch it, or touch it, before it disappears. It sounds easy but you try to climb up a few flights of stairs with dial controllers and you'll hate that game forever.

Video arcades provided most of our gaming those days with Brick Out, Evel Knievel, Spy Hunter, Galaxians to name a few, and the grand daddy of them all SPACE INVADERS! I was grade 5 when I forced my mom to get me an APPLE Computer, inspired by the computers in the movies SCANNERS and WAR GAMES, it was my dream to have my own. She bought an Apple II Plus computer and a few games in Hong Kong, since at that time that's the only place where you can get an Apple and some software. The games I first had were Flight Simulator, Apple Panic by Broderbund, Castle Wolfenstein, and a submarine game by SSI that I think was Sub Hunter. I had a lot of other text games that played so good but I can't anymore remember their names. MS-DOS was the Disk Operating System of the Apple II Plus at that time if I'm not mistaken. My screen graphics was 40 characters wide and 24 deep, and it could produce 32 colors in regular mode. In hi-res mode I think the Apple II Plus could have a resolution of 320x240 and can still show 32 colors, whoopee.

The Apple vs PC era happened around the time I graduated high school in 1986. Computer geeks and gamers like me had difficulty weighing the pro's and con's on whether or not to stick with the Apple or move on with pc's. The common arguments were IF YOU ARE A GAMER YOU SHOULD STICK WITH THE APPLE, as there were literally hundreds of games for the Apple and PC'S WERE ONLY FOR BUSINESS AND APPLICATIONS USE. Power though was attributed to the PC, to get a similar performance with an apple you'll have to install at least 3 interface cards that do additional stuff like give your screen 80 character spaces instead of 40, or an EEPROM card for modifying your BIOS, etc. All of that the PC natively does without having to add anything.

When it came to price though PC's were dirt cheap, I bought my PC with my dad because of price and power, literally a bang for the buck, and didn't care for games at that time since I'll be needing a computer for college. The PC cost PhP20,000(around US$1,500) at that time, while a brand new Macintosh would have cost PhP130,000(around US$10,000), and rumor was that the Macintosh didn't have games not like the Apple II's. Of course I could have opted to get an Apple II e,, which had almost the same features of a PC plus better graphics power, but I decided I wanted to try something else.

Having the PC was a drag when it came to gaming. I had only 2 games I think, Microsoft Decathlon and a Boxing game by Sierra I think. I was stuck with those 2 games for about a year, but eventually I was able to buy games like Conan, King's Quest, Space Quest, Bard's Tale, Below the Root, etc. But the worst part of the PC was that it was limited to only 4 colors. Early games looked terrible, which was the main reason I needed to get Nintendo and Sega consoles to compensate. Luckily the EGA card came out a few years after, now instead of just 4 colors my PC can generate 16 colors, among friends I had a high end graphics rig, ha ha ha, I can't help but laugh now thinking how naïve, and satisfied, we were that time.

Today is a different story, the PC is the number one gaming platform and consoles come next, and the Mac is, well, not even for gaming. I mean, you can get games that run on Mac's, but quality wise, I've seen older slower pc's churn up better performance with the same games.