What was your first ever videogame?

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As a boy, computers were in their infancy. The earliest games I played were at friends’ houses, and they would just be consoles you would plug into the TV. The kind of thing you see above. Basic stuff.

I suppose the alternative would have been to go to a bricks-and-mortar arcade. Arcades were few and far between, there was just one in the city I grew up in, which was large-ish at about a half-million people. Games like Space Invaders and Pac Man had just been released, but they were generally prohibitively expensive. In other words, I was never good enough at them, would lose all my lives after 2 minutes, and would baulk as I was expected to feed yet more money in.

I guess the only interesting thing about that is how much society has progressed. Even to play the simple game pictured, we could not afford a console on which to play it. Or, I suppose, my parents could have afforded one, but found the idea too frivolous. Contrast that to now, when many-times-more-sophisticated games are available even on the most basic of mobile phones.

I loved it, by the way, when this sort of game was released for the PC, years later, when someone thought on to write an emulator. Just hit the button to start, no need to insert any money whatever. My favourite “early” game was called Battle Zone. I guess it was kind-of tank warfare, but in this very basic, wireframe world. Monochrome, just green on black. That it no longer cost anything to play made all the difference, and I played it enough to become very good.

But I dropped it very shortly afterwards. Those early games are nostalgic, but the gameplay was pretty limited. As soon as I discovered the one surefire tactic that would beat the machine pretty much every time, I lost interest.

Through my twenties I had a mild interest in games. My first job, they closed the site down between Christmas and New Year, so I couldn’t have gone to work, even if I’d wanted to. That first Christmas, I went into my bedroom, started playing something, and never came out again until I was due to go back to work. You know, you kind-of imagine this hairy slob, wearing pyjamas and eating bowls of cereal to survive, and that was once me! If only for a week.

That experience taught me that I would lose days and days to games, if I wasn’t careful. I mean, sure, I’ve had games I have played since, I have a football (soccer) management simulation that I like to play occasionally nowadays, but I never play anything now to the point where it becomes an obsession.