{"id":1443,"date":"2021-11-02T22:43:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-02T22:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jameshatton.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1443"},"modified":"2021-11-03T22:35:55","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T22:35:55","slug":"gaming-my-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jameshatton.co.uk\/blog\/2021\/11\/02\/gaming-my-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaming – my history"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On a few occasions, I’ve bought a game and found that I already have it in my collection. To mitigate this, I decided to maintain a list of games. (I seem to have inherited this propensity toward collecting and cataloguing things from my Dad). I found a great website that has information on a massive array of titles; and this has invoked yet more nostalgia for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I seem to have amassed huge collections of digital media although, admittedly, I haven’t ‘consumed’ everything. My photography, ebooks and podcasts are just files in folders, indexed by Windows. I am reluctantly transitioning from mp3s to You Tube music – I say reluctantly because I feel like I’m forfeiting control. I abandoned DVDs a decade ago so my movies are on a Plex Media server. Plex <\/a>is great because, you dump the movie on there and it supplements the movie with additional information, presumably from imdb<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That leaves gaming. I needed something to check, out and about, in case a title caught my eye. A Google Keep note got disordered and a spreadsheet seemed high maintenance if not a little formal. I needed something like imdb so that I could a title and the software does the rest. After trying out a few websites, bingo, I found rawg.io<\/a> and it is the perfect solution. You can even just connect gaming profiles (e.g. Steam, Playstation Network, Xbox) and it will automatically pull in your game game library and their associated details. I just needed to know title and what platform I have the game on but it supplies so much more. You can see my game library on there: https:\/\/rawg.io\/@retrojimmyx<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wouldn’t describe myself as a serious gamer (nor indeed particularly good) but as I started flicking through the catalogue of title dating back over several decades, I realised I do seem to have a long history of gaming, dating back to the 80s. Computer games have evolved at an incredible pace in my lifetime and the industry is estimated to be worth a phenomenal $180 billion this year alone. I would not of (but should of) anticipated that in the 90s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Our family’s Commodore Amiga 500 in the late 80s<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My first recollection of computer gaming was our family Commodore Amiga 500. The competitor product to the Amiga was the Atari but I had no experience of it. I was recently chatting to a guy who runs a gaming trade shop and he said that the Atari was viewed as more of a serious machine and one that musicians were drawn to because of its MIDI capabilities. The Amiga was definitely seen as more of a gaming computer, although I vaguely remember using it for typing up the odd document and printing out on the dot matrix printer (also pictured). As a little digression: I dated a girl in the 2000s at Uni and we lived in a seven person house share. We’d all know when she’d have an essay due because she had an A3 dot matrix printer and oh my God, those printers were noisy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we got the Amiga, I was in awe: This was my first foray from the world of analogue into the digital world. The Amiga 500 had 512 kilobytes of RAM (and we did later get the 512K expansion module). Now to put that into perspective, Samsung’s current flagship mobile phone, the Galaxy S21, has 8GB of memory. That’s over 16,000 times as much memory as the Amiga 500 in a device that is a fraction of the size! And that’s not considering the speed of the RAM either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Commodore Amiga 500, released in 1987<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Amiga 500 was an all-in-one unit where the computer and (mechanical) keyboard were built into the same housing. There was a roller ball (not laser) mouse and we had joystick. It used 3.5″ floppy discs, which could each hold just under 1.5 Mb. I wouldn’t be able to even fit a single photo taken with my phone on one of these discs now. Although they seemed so small now I actually still saw some businesses using them well into the 2000s. As you can see from the picture above, the Amiga displayed on a(CRT) TV – definitely not high-def.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We must have bought games for the Amiga but I can’t recall seeing that many game boxes and without DRM, floppies were easy to copy so perhaps we got copied games. I’m guessing the game, Batman (released in the same year as the movie<\/a>), was bundled in with the Amiga. This is the first game I remember playing. I was in awe of the movie and the game. It’s funny to see that the franchise is still very much alive, decades later. Here’s a few videos of the games I remember most fondly – it’s the sound effects that invoke feelings of nostalgia for me more than anything else for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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