ericgooch

I’ve been playing computer games for a long time. My first gaming memory was of the Pong machine I saw at a bowling alley in my teenage years in Ohio. Pinball machines had been around a long time, but this was the first game using a TV monitor that I’d seen.

Over the next decade the video game arcade came into it’s own, with a multitude of game types, including racing, fighting, rpg, shooting, flying, you name it. Everybody had their favorites…Joust, Centipede, Defender, Gauntlet, Mario Bros. I wondered back then if a day would ever come when we’d be able to play cool games at home, without dropping wads of quarters into arcade machines.

Who could have seen it coming.

My first home computer/game system was a Commodore VIC-20. I think it had 8 colors. I played Scott Adam’s “Adventure”, a game that was loaded from a casette. When you died, you had to rewind the casette and then play it again to load a save point. But the first system that really hooked me was the Amiga. I can’t even estimate the hours I spent on that system playing some great games.

When Commodore shot themselves in the foot about 80 times and the Amiga development slowed to a trickle, I climbed aboard the PC train and have been gaming ever since. It also became my career, and I’ve been doing game graphics for the last 13 years.

So this section is dedicated to gamers everywhere, and I’ll use it on occasion to mention games I’ve liked and what the the gaming world looks like from here.