We talk about a lot of things in the office to help pass the time by - a lot of these topics focus around general industry trends because, after all, when you get a bunch of geeks together in a small space, they tend to talk about all things geeky. One topic that has really stuck out in my mind recently was one that Joe recently wrote a column about.
He asked what was the game that turned you into a hardcore gamer. There’s already an interesting discussion going on in the article comments and I’m really surprised by some of the responses.
The game that led me down the path of no return was Asteroids on the Atari 2600. I don’t know whether that’s me showing my age, or just me developing at an early point in my life, but I couldn’t get enough of that game. What’s great then is that an updated version was released on the Xbox Live Arcade.
I purchased it in an instant… without thinking twice. I knew I could go back to my childhood, playing a game that I used to play almost religiously… or at least when my parents didn’t tell me it was time to do some homework, or because Coronation Street was on. Yeah, I hated that show - it got between me and my game and I never liked anything coming between me and my game.
The game that really got me into PC gaming was probably Civilization - I used to play that game during my lunchtime at school. We had to break into the school network to get it installed, but that effort was well worth it. We then followed up with Civ2 when that came out in 1996, as it added multiplayer support over the network (well, technically it was introduced with CivNet in 1995, but we were quite content with Civ at the time)… but damn, that game sucked up a lot of my time.
I could go on and on about the games that I’ve been crazy about… but nothing comes close to Asteroids and Civ for me. Anyway, we’re interested to hear as many different angles as possible on this - please share your own experiences with us in the comment thread.