Evolution of PC Gaming. What's your story?

[TechAngel85]

I found this video while getting lost in YouTube this morning and thoroughly enjoyed it so I thought I'd share it:

 

 

My first gaming experience was the Nintendo followed by the SNES. I play Legend of Zelda:Link to the Past for hours upon hours as a child. Of course Mario was tossed in there too and several sub-par games not worth mentioning. Later in life I moved to the Playstation where Final Fantasy VIII was my love and passion (no, I've never played FF:VII and yes, I spent far too much time play the mini-card game in FF:VIII). My first PC came in Junior High, but it was more for web design as I had my own fan-made anime website back in the day. I did play a few games on it, but nothing serious. My gaming at that time was mainly on the Playstation 2 where Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War was my go-to game. Seriously, if you never played that game you missed out in a big way. That particular Ace Combat was probably the best in terms of storyline. It was simply out of this world as a fighter-sim game at the time. They destroyed the Ace Combat franchise, imo, when they released 6 and focused more on the planes than the storyline.

 

When I reach High School, I got in with a group of friends that loved computers and technology. These guys were perfect for me. I was the kid that had his dad order a $1200 PC from a home shopping network on TV and when it came in I had it took apart and in pieces in my bedroom floor trying to figure out how everything worked.  Remember that this first PC was in Junior High...I can still remember the look on my father's face when he walked into the my room to see that $1200 PC completely disassembled and in pieces. He just turned around and walked out without saying a word. Haha!

 

Anyway, this group of friends also consisted of the school's network administrator who taught us a lot about computers and networking in his free time. The school eventually hosted after-school activity classes during different days of the week. I was the type of guy in high school that got along with all the groups (jocks, "aggies", geeks, outcasts, etc) so I joined the welding class and computer gaming class. It was the computer gaming class (hosted by the network admin) that launched me into PC gaming. I had been saving up my money for a top of the line PC and during that class I was able to purchase an Alienware laptop that had all the latest tech in it. It was so powerful that we started using it for the gaming server rather than the network admin's PC. Which made me proud! During this after class we would have LAN parties with Half-life, Counter Strike, Battlefield 1942, and Battlefield:Vietnam. Counter Strike was our go-to most of the time and everyone developed their own specialties and teams. We were all eventually quite good and the game became a real challenge. Those were the days!

 

That was how I came into gaming and PC gaming specifically. Since that time I always build my own PCs, achieved several industry recognized IT certifications, and have one year of college left to having a bachelors in Networks Design and Management (aka Computer Network Engineering). I'm currently not pursuing this degree due to financial issues, but I will complete it sometime within the next few years (hopefully).

 

That's my story. What's yours?

[Darth_mathias]

My gaming experinece was mostly console until quite recently

 

My first console was a NES Nintendo Entertainment system and the classic game duck hunt (think i am slighty showing my age here). amazingly i still have it and it still works. After many many years of begging and saving I finally brought a N64 and Goldeneye whcih again i still have. I then brought a Nintedo gamecude I got zelda, all 3 prince of persia games. the adatopr for gameboy advance so player quite a few pokemin games and again still have and yes still works. then I was given a Xbox 360 as payment for a job is did. I became massively obessed with Assassin Creed (actaully got all of them expect Unity on Xbox 360) also got quite a few of the lego games dragon age and dragon age II (I played Dragon Age 2 before Orgins) even got the Withcer 2, I still use this everyday (but not for gaming). I eventaually decided to build myself new PC after watching Gopher's Skyrim Stiv LP in Like july 2014 (think i was stuck on something and stumled across him) and throught that modding skyrim would be fun. so brought myself a new graphics card a GTX 670 and started from there (now got a GTX 980TI)

 

I was very dubious about Steam at first (thought it must be a con) no way could you get games this cheap; But as we all know Steam isn't fake and very much real and the go to place for games. I am still getting used the to whole Keyboard and mouse thing after some many years of controllers but I am getting there. So this it my gaming experience 

The last ever Game an purchase for my xbox 360 was Assassin Creed Rouge which I still haven't got round to playing yet.

Edited March 18, 2016 by Darth_mathias

[TechAngel85]

I played Dragon Age too and that's what got me into Skyrim, actually. I know what you mean about Steam. I was an earlier adopter of it and back then it was BUGGY, really buggy! So much do that many users would crack their games they bought to avoid the software, altogether. It, as you know, has come a long way and is now the go-to for nearly all PC gaming. The last time I purchased a disk version of a game was a long, long time go ago.

[kryptopyr]

As a kid we had several games on the family computer.  They all came on floppy disks, and while I don't remember their names, my favorite was one that involved horse racing.  My brother ended up with a Sega at one point so I played that occasionally, but I've always tended more toward computer games.  Command & Conquer and Myst are the ones I remember specifically, and I enjoyed playing both of them a great deal.  I don't really feel that they were ever a significant part of my childhood, though.  I spent a lot more time with physical toys (Legos mostly) and books. 

 

I probably hadn't even glanced at a computer game or console game in 12+ years by the time I met the guy who would become my husband.  I remember talking to him on the phone early in our relationship and he was trying to describe Oblivion to me and the concept of mods.  I thought it sounded rather strange that other random users were creating content that was getting added to this computer game he was playing.  I started playing Oblivion shortly after that and got hooked.  Then after a while, I started playing around with the construction set and from that point on, all was lost.  I spent months working on this massive castle mod (basically a highly modified version of the Griffin fortress).  I think I was still working on that castle when Skyrim came out.  My husband likes computer games quite a bit, so I've now had exposure to a number of different games over the past several years, but I don't play as much or often as he does.  Though I might play more if modding didn't dominate so much of my spare time.  I suspect that I'll probably always consider myself a modder first and a gamer second.

[redirishlord]

My family was the first on our block to get Pong, way back when. I've been fascinated by every shiny new gaming product since :-)

[darkside]

I have been a long time gamer. I started with NES. I fell in love with JRPG. This was very common for boy my age in Thailand. We played Japanese version eventhough we have no Japanese language skill. English translation for these games was not common at that time. I played Final Fantasy(I, II, III), and Dragon quest (III, IV). SNES is my next console. I again played numerous JRPGs. I used PC at home, but mostly for work. I was then got into medical school. My time for gaming had slowed down significantly. I never actually owned PlayStation, but manage to play FF 7, 9, 10 with my friend's console. I have no interest in newer FF. I had been busy with studies -residency training, and fellowship training. Marriage and kid came along. I just got back into PC gaming over the last few years. Skyrim, FNV, and Witcher 3 are my current favorite games.

Edited March 18, 2016 by darkside

[TechAngel85]

That totally sounds like you, Kryptopyr! haha! You're modding skills is a testament to that.

 

As for Final Fantasy, 8 was the only one I had played until X (10) came out. That was a good one, but not a story-rich as 8 was. I actually never finished 10 because I had gotten to the very end, was leveling myself up some and trying to get the ultimate weapons before taking on Sin. I let one of my friends play and he overwrote my 80+ hour save. I didn't have the will to start over, so I never play it again. After that I played XIII (13) and the story was "okay", but not great. It was relatively short as well so I didn't play much of it after the main story ended.

[Spock]

The narrator doesn't seem to really know a lot about the workings of PC graphics :X

 

I started PC gaming with an Atari Mega with 1 mb ram. My first addiction was to Hack, I only recently managed to beat the game in the form of it's successor Nethack.

 

 

This is an exciting era, we are close to getting away from the rasterizer and manage real time path tracing. AMD is very close to providing the necessary shader power, they just need to keep the usual pace, fully use the bigger die and implement fp16 double performance.

[TechAngel85]

I had ATi cards back in the day, but became any nvidia fan when I started having trouble with their performance and hardware issues over time. I've never had any issues with nvidia. That goes both ways and is subjective, but there it is.

[Audley]

Really nice stories guys! Give me either tonight or tomorrow I will spend a bit of time to write mine out. 

 

Cheers, Audley

[MonoAccipiter]

First game I remember playing was some ski jumping game on a floppy disk on my family's home computer in the attic. After that my second era of games was with small demo versions of strategy games (in particular a Brazilian one I don't remember the name of) on my own computer which I think my dad bought a GPU for before I even understood what a GPU was. The reason I remember this was because it came with Gun Metal which got me really into mecha games, and I've played through this several times on my computer. Eventually I got an Xbox because one of my older friends had one, and I started playing the Halo series with Halo Combat Evolved. Those were truly the days when people just came over to hang out and play video games, in my opinion a far superior experience to playing together while Skyping or the like, which is still fun I guess, though I do miss  the ability to just be in a room together and play. For anyone who's played the first Halo game, you probably remember the first mission where you encounter the Flood. That mission scared the crap out of me and probably was the cause of me being afraid of the dark for a really long time. My favorite mecha game on the Xbox was MechAssault II: Lone Wolf, mostly because it was one of the first games I ever played which had a Co-Op wave defense mode, and my friend and I would spend many a lazy afternoon attempting to beat old records or simply making scrap heaps out of enemy mechs.

 

A game I first played at someone else's house was what got me back into PC gaming, namely Oblivion. While a much less alien and fantastical experience than Morrowind, which I only became aware of years later, it was still so new and exciting that it blew my mind. I played it for a really long time on my console, having traded for it with the aforementioned friend, and remember exploiting the scroll bug a lot. For anyone not familiar with it, there was a bug in Oblivion where if you dropped a numbered stack of scrolls and an item of your choosing, the item would duplicate to the number of scrolls. Eventually I discovered the modding scene and actually dabbled in modding a tiny bit, but was far too young to have any comprehension that could keep my easily distracted head in place. Better Cities is fondly remembered as perhaps my favorite mod from the era, though it frustrated me that every house for no reason suddenly had large doors in their ceilings, this being added by a incorporated mod which made paths for thieves all over the Imperial City. Funnily enough I found the realm of Cyrodill far more magical and enchanting than most describe it as, though this probably has to do with the contrast to my home country, as I found Skyrim's environment, and especially the parts inspired my ancestors, the vikings, to be more generic when that game came out. At this time I also delved headfirst into the realm of computers and built my very first PC after proudly unpacking the giant cardboard box I had begged my parents to help me order while on an especially boring trip to the mountains. Never having taken that much to my parent's sportsmanlike approach to the outdoors, games like Oblivion allowed me to satisfy that urge of exploration which I imagine I would've had to rely on the woods for in previous eras.

 

It was also around this time I managed to acquire a copy of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords on the Xbox, another game I remember very fondly from my past, and which has also continued to grow on me as I grew older and more fond of literature. While being called things like unfinished or buggy, what KotOR II did fantastically well was tell a story, and one that you could experience from several side. It had the enchanting and vivid universe of Bioware's original game (which I played a bit, but never finished, on loan from a friend) while adding onto it a great cast of characters and things my mind couldn't let go of until I had played through it another time to see if I could understand it then. It also helped that my sister really liked it as well, and I would spend time just watching her play, offering advice here and there and feeling like I could actually help my big sister do something, like she had helped me do so much else.

 

Eventually Skyrim came out, and I found my way to STEP not so long after the website was launched (I remember using the PDF guide by TheCompiler before there was the Wiki version) and registering some time afterwards, eventually managing to help REGS with some testing while it was still experiencing some early life throes, though sadly I withdrew from posting for about a year after lapsing into a more serious depression that I had to seek help to combat. After that I think I wasted a lot of time playing Dota 2, though it was a fun experience as well, and I did meet some nice people I still keep in touch with today. Wish I didn't spend so many hours on it though, but that's kinda what I did for a while. Go to school, come home, feel sad and not want to think about how sad I was, then play Dota to forget about everything. Luckily I managed to break the cycle at some point, and it was my experience here, and my experience with KotOR II that led me back to the forums in order to follow SRB's F&L guide and pick up Fallout: New Vegas again after having ended my first encounter with it when I managed to get a bomb collar strapped around my virtual neck and alienate the people who could remove it (faction armor system, woo) without having a proper save to go back to. Playing it through fully, I fell in love with the game and the same writing that had made KotOR II so dear to my trashcan-poet-heart. Which in turn led me onto modding. This also did help me deal with some of my depression, and I remember sending SRB a very akward PM thanking him for the guide personally.   Anyways, glad to be here and able to contribute to something today. Think I managed to squeeze in all the important parts at least.

Edited March 19, 2016 by MonoAccipiter

[TechAngel85]

I love hearing reading these stories. Thanks for sharing!

 

These stories are bringing up some good memories! Speaking of mecha games. I kinda got a lost in a not so well known title of a good while called, Ring of Red. It wasn't anything fancy, but was very addicting. I guess I've been all over the board when it comes to console games, but 9/10 times I'll play a game for the storyline over anything else.

[EssArrBee]

We had everything when I was a kid. Commodore 64, Atari, Nintendo, Apple 2... I got to play all those old games. I loved Dig Dug, Frogger, Centipede, and Galaga. Then later on I got into Contra, Double Dragon, all the Nintendo stuff like Mario and Zelda. From there I got further away from PC gaming. I always thought those old RPGs were more frustrating than they were fun, so I tended toward consoles since most non-RPG games were multi-platform.

 

Once the Pentium CPUs and hardware accelerators (that's what we used to call GPUs) started coming out, I got back into it. My first GPU had 16MB of memory and PC had 64MB of RAM. I thought it was the pinnacle and there was no way they'd ever make better graphics. Playing all those shooter games really got a hold of me for years. Basically, the only thing I played for the better part of a decade was twitch shooters and occasionally N64. Doom, Quake, Unreal, and Duke Nukem were so much fun. It all started with that first gen Pentium processor. I still remember when my dad brought it home. They were actually made in the US too. Up in Santa Fe. 

 

That pretty much took me up to grad school. I became obsessed with work and study, so I didn't play much except for the occasional Xbox match of Halo, Mech Assault, or Madden on the weekends. Any time I was in front of a computer I was using it for school or some other project I was working on. It wasn't until I my last year working for the DoD that I built a new gaming rig. I let that thing die and haven't built a gaming rig since. I have a workstation, but I just can't bring myself to install windows on it. 

[darkside]

Voodoo2 GPU anyone?

[Greg]

I remember my first deep dive into gaming was with the Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and the expanded version by Don Woods. I spent many days crawling through those caves and trying to find my way out of the maze of twisty little passages all alike. From there I moved onto the Zork series of text adventures from Infocom and the Kings Quest series of graphics adventures from Sierra. Back in these days I was using a TRS-80 Color Computer 1 and 3 running the OS-9 operating system (multitasking/multi-user operating system for the 6809 and later 68000 processors) and I was primarily into hardware and software development, so I didn't spend a significant amount of time gaming.

 

Later on I moved into the world of PCs running MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2 and dabbled in a few games here and there like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Myst, Riven, Dungeon Siege, Prince of Persia but never really found anything that really grabbed my attention until I came across Morrowind. When Oblivion came out I was really sucked into the game with somewhat of a love/hate relationship. I loved the game, but all the bugs were really irritating. I specifically remember being able to walk right up to the front door of a cave and it would refuse to recognize I had discovered that location until I walked around to find the exact trigger spot. I remember coming across some mods for Oblivion at one point, but never really did anything with them. I didn't really get into modding until after Skyrim came out with the typical trials and tribulations of not knowing what I was doing.

 

I still spend the majority of my time stuck in a compiler, but Skyrim is my go to game when I need a break.