One of the most vividly remembered events in my childhood was the very first time I ever played Pac-Man. I was 8 years old and completely amazed. That would have been around 1982. I had accompanied my dad to the working men’s club in Stockport where he played in their darts team – he’d drink with his pals, toss a few darts, and I would head off to explore the arcade machines scattered among the…

The first time I ever landed a punch in a video game that hit someone that looked like a person was at the age of 41. Sounds silly saying it that way, but that is the honest-to-God truth. By the time I caught up with all the gaming history that I needed to know, I was approximately 40 years old and I had been playing retro games for nearly a year. I had played the…

My first experience with the game DOOM was in 2011 when my daughter told me I had to “play this old shooter.” She said, “Dad you can’t possibly understand gaming history without playing DOOM.” I was somewhat hesitant to play it initially due to wondering how well an “old” computer game could be. Boy was I mistaken. After loading a source port version of DOOM onto my laptop (yes, I know that’s not the same…

It is hard to put into words exactly how I reacted the first time I threw a punch in a video game, that actually hit something that resembled a human being. I know this will sound insane now, but that is how I remembered it. At forty-one years old, I had been studying the history of gaming for approximately one year. During that time I went through all of the classic games that my daughter…

When I was 40 years old, and spending my time to catch up on every aspect of gaming history that I missed out on during my childhood, I was going to experience something that would completely change my perspective of what can be accomplished in the video game industry. The events surrounding this occurrence occurred approximately 2011, when my daughter continued to encourage me to play more SNES games and specifically encouraged me to play…

There is no doubt that the best way to enjoy Street Fighter II is at an arcade. I will admit that I was immediately hooked upon entering the Pizza Ranch in July 1991, and observing a high school kid doing things in a video game that I didn’t know existed. The kid was playing Guile, the military dude with the super long hairdo, and he was launching those curved energy blasts while yelling “Sonic Boom!”…

Man, October of 1997 was an amazing month to be a gamer. I had recently purchased a brand new Pentium 166 MHz PC (yeah, back then PCs were rated by clock speed, and “Pentium 166 MHz” was basically the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti of computers). And I was pretty damn proud of my 32 MB of RAM. Enough bragging. Point is, I thought I was ready for whatever games could throw at me. I strutted…

Ok, let me take you back to when star wars games actually mattered. When Lucasarts still knew what they where doing and way before Disney stole the lot. I mean the good Star Wars games, not the shite EA keep churning out. My first experience with a Star Wars game wasn’t on my bedroom computer (we weren’t rich enough for that luxury). Nope it was at the arcade down the road in Stretford wedged in…

I remember buying Diablo — hell, I remember the day that changed my life. It wasn’t alcoholism, girls, or any of the other problems you might expect from a university student. I was living in Manchester one snowy February Tuesday night in 1997 staring at the cover of a video game in a store named Electronics Boutique. There was a guy wielding a sword and standing in front of a red backdrop. That game would…

Hey kid—I’ll level with you. I grew up a Sega kid. I cut my teeth on our family’s Packard Bell PC playing LucasArts adventures. Hang with me here, Genesis freak—what I learned from those games is that games didn’t need cutting-edge graphics or blazing fast processors to entertain me. I first played The Secret of Monkey Island at my cousin Mike’s house in Tucson in July of 1992. Mike’s father worked at some computer company…