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The weekly question

  • Inna Kryvoruchko
  • Apr 1, 2016
  • 6 min read

So, today is a nostalgia day here at CT! Most of our employees were lucky to be born in the 80s and to witness the dawn of video games as kids. Huge computers, wacky old time consoles (that seemed to look so high-tech back then!), and 8-bit, 16-bit games, characters consisting of pixels… Oldies but goldies.

In order to remember how it all started, we asked our colleagues the same questions:

1. What was your first console?

2. What games did you enjoy playing the most on it and why?

What we got back were not just plain answers, but rather an insight into this promising age – the last two decades of the 20th century. Enjoy…

Shane Hulgraine, Project Manager (Ireland)

Growing up in the 80's meant that, even though gaming was a fledgling industry at best, I was able to enjoy some very early console inceptions.

While most of my formative years were spent using a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga 500 later on, soon to progress to a Super Nintendo, the first console that I owned was an Atari 2600.

I can still remember the TV spot sucking me in.

Games were not so readily available in Ireland back in those days and, as an early console adaptor, I relied heavily on borrowing titles from fellow Atari owning friends. My soul pride and joy was a game called Berzerk. In it, the user controlled an ‘L –shaped’ blip on screen that represented a human trapped in a maze with dangerous alien blips trying to take you down. I died a lot.

Get shot - die.

Walk into an alien - die.

Touch the walls - die.

Looking back, Berzerk taught me valuable street smarts growing up on the northside of Dublin. ;-)

To this day I don't know if it was possible to complete the game but it was always entertaining.

Other titles that made the grade were Joust, Jungle Hunt and Yars’ Revenge.

Irene Doval Marcos, Spanish Localisation Specialist (Spain)

When I was a kid, my dad had an Spectrum with the old cassette games. He really liked the flight simulator, the pool and the basketball ones, and so those were the first games I ever saw and put my hands on. At that time, the only technology my sister and I had was a Cinexin (a kids movie projector).

When I was seven, though, one of my teeth fell out and Perez the Little Mouse (the Spanish equivalent of the Tooth Fairy) got me one of those consoles that only had Tetris pre-loaded and the whole family spent hours and hours with it.

I was about ten or eleven, so in the mid-90s, when my cousin got a Super NES for himself. I was lucky enough to be handed down his original NES with three games: Mario, Mario 3 and the Flintstones.

I played those games until the remote wires broke and I had to tilt to the left to make them work. I even took one of the bones of my finger out by doing that and had to go to the doctor to put it back. I remember it hurt a lot and the doctor said “no console until it recovers”, but I still wanted to go back to playing because if my mom switched off the console all my progress would be lost!

Luckily, we have saving features now…

Jessica Alcaraz, Project Coordinator (Spain)

The first console I owned was a PlayStation. Before that, I had always played on my uncle’s consoles… He had them all, and I used to borrow them, but I was so proud when I managed to get my hands on my very own console!

I had very few games, but I remember the first one that got me truly hooked: Final Fantasy VII. I know it’s a cliché, but I couldn’t believe how good it was. The story, the characters, the music… I got pretty obsessed about it at the time – I even dreamt that I resurrected Aeris!

After finishing it a couple of times, I kept asking for more but my mother was reluctant to spend the money, so I started spending my weekly allowance (about three euros) into renting games.

Soon I became friends with the owners of the local video store, and they started recommending me titles like Legend of Legaia, Koudelka, Tomb Raider, Silent Hill, etc., and even ignore the fact that I used to bring the games back one or even two days later than when I should have.

It sounds a bit sad when I say that my mother wouldn’t buy me games (took me long enough to convince my whole family to get me a console!), but I guess the fact that as a child I already had to “work” to get my gaming on made me appreciate it even more.

Aah, the good ol’ days!

Robert Hill, Japanese Localisation Specialist (England, UK)

Having a slightly geeky older brother of seven years, I have been surrounded by videogames my entire life. From the ZX Spectrum to the Commodore 64, home computers and gaming consoles are just something I have always had around me. So when the question comes up as to what was my first gaming device, it is something a good deal more difficult to answer than you may imagine.

I can point to sneaking into my brother’s bedroom in the late 80s to watch him play R-Type on the Spectrum as one of my earliest memories, but at this point I was still too young to actually take the keyboard and play myself. At the tail end of '89 we got a NES and I look back fondly on those days playing through the first few games in the Super Mario Bros. series or trying desperately to get through the sewer level in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, but I don’t think it was this point that my love for gaming began either. I would say that the first time I ever really felt like gaming was the thing I enjoyed above all else was when I began playing The Secret of Monkey Island on my brother’s DOS PC. There was just something about the moonlit Caribbean island, populated by drunken pirates and sassy Governesses, that drew me in. I was still perhaps a little too young to get ALL the humour, but I certainly understood the flavour of the wit and it is something that has stuck with me ever since.

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The Secret of Monkey Island

My love for all things LucasArts continued on throughout that period, with me and my brother both

avid fans of Sam & Max, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and the awesome (and just remastered) Day of the Tentacle. As the golden era of the adventure game came to an end, and the period of PlayStation rose to the forefront, so my tastes changed. Soon enough I fell out of touch with PC gaming and became pretty much exclusively a console gamer, but I still look back on that period with a huge amount of fondness and nostalgia.

So what was my first gaming device? Well I don’t really know. But the first time I ever really loved games was when I first arrived on the shores of Monkey Island back in the early 90s. Oh, and you fight like a dairy farmer!”

Thibault Carpentier, Project Manager and French Localisation Specialist (France)

“Technically, my first console – or rather system running games – was my Dad’s Commodore Vic-20. I spent many hours trying to play games such as Blitz and Bonzo, but never quite managed to get through the first few levels. Actually, I would consider the NES as my first proper console.

The games I played most were the two included in the bundle: Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt (both on one cartridge!). To this day, I have to say I am still not quite sure how the NES Zapper worked, but for sure I tried many times to shoot the cheeky Dog who was making fun of my lack of accuracy. Of course, it’s with Mario Bros. that I discovered the whole “video game grammar” that is still relevant today (fire balls, run+jump, end-stage bosses, etc.)”

NES, Playstation, Mario Bros., Zelda, Berzerk, Final Fantasy… If those words make your heart beat faster, it probably means you were born in the 80s or early 90s just like us! So, why not paying tribute to the idyllic past of the industry and sharing with us what video games you played as a child.

Let’s keep the good old 16-bit ball rolling!

 
 
 

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