Ah where to begin. I suppose the real beginning was when I was four or five years old. I went on a family holiday to the Isle of Man which started off bad when the guest house we were booked into turned out to be worse than Fawlty Towers. My parents quickly found another location for us to stay in which turned out to be a rather posh sea front hotel. You could not imagine a more stark contrast between those two locations.
Anyway, this hotel was also rather modern for the time. It was kitted out with a games room and and a gym. In the games room was a couple of strange looking devices which I would later discover would be Space Invaders arcade machines.
It was my sister who really started it all as she would sit with me whilst I played on this electronic wonder for what felt like hours although I suspect that it more like minutes. In any event it was sowing of the seed in my mind of my passion for video games. Without doubt that was the earliest encounter I had with an electronic game of some sort.
I have always regarded myself as being lucky to have experienced playing video games right from the very beginning. Not long after returning from the Isle of Man my mum and dad went out and bought the family a Pong console. Ours was made by Binatone and the most distinctive thing I remember about it was the two black and orange controllers and the rather primitive switched you used to select which game you wanted to play. It was advertised as having a number of sports games such as football, basketball, ice hockey and tennis to chose from, but in reality they are all just variations on the Pong theme.
Although it was a digital marvel in it's day it was rather limited and it also required to players to play on it. The initial interest shown by my parents quickly died and my sister was more interested in going out with her friends (she is a few years older than me) and so interest in the Pong console died out.
My interest in video games did not die out though. Another craze had started which was the Game and Watch series by Nintendo as well as table top electronic games by a company called Grandstand. Whilst one of my friends was more into the Game and Watch, I went for the Grandstand games and one in particular which was called Scramble. This was unlike the arcade game of the same name but it was a challenging game that required you to take out a series of alien craft in increasingly difficult waves. It took me a while to beat it but I eventually did to be confronted by a bizarre 'hhh' in the score box which flashed signalling that I had beaten the game. To this day I had no idea what the 'hhh' meant!
The limitations of these games was clear. There was no way of playing anything else on them without having to buy a whole new unit and that was not practical. However my mum and dad were about to buy me something for Christmas in 1983 that would completely change the game for me. From then on gaming would not be a thing that was restricted by having to buy new consoles each time. I was about to get something that would draw my interest in and 28 years later still hold me in it's grasp.
But that will come in part two...
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