"In Since the Beginning" - A Potted History of a lifelong obsession with Videogames. Part 3: The 1990s!

 

It is the 1990s and it's time for KLAX. No actually, it was time for huge sweeping technological change in the world of gaming, as more powerful machines hit the market, sweeping aside notions of the old 8-bit era and ushering in home gaming experiences that could finally match the thrills, graphics, sounds and fidelity of the arcades. 

I was still obsessed with computers at the start of the 90s and I started off the decade by ditching my Commodore 64 in favour of this grey beastie, the Atari ST. 

Just like every decade before, the ST was one half of a fierce tribal battle between two main factions. ST owners were fiercely proud of their machines, with built in MIDI ports for all manner of electronic music mania, but sadly lacking a decent custom sound chip like the immediate competitor - the Commodore Amiga - boasted. 

Amiga owners will gleefully list all the faults and foibles of the ST but for me it was the first home machine I'd owned that genuinely brought the arcades home, with absolute pixel perfect conversions of many of the games I was completely obsessed with from the bleepy bloopy temples of worship where I'd spend way too much of my hard earned cash. 

Super Sprint, Gauntlet and Gauntlet 2, Buggy Boy, Bubble Bobble and many others were converted for the ST and looked and played brilliantly. The Atari ST boasted the same 9 pin joystick port as the C64 had before it, but also had a mouse - and it was probably the first machine I ever remember dabbling with digital art on (with a superb art package by Rainbird which I've totally forgotten the name of). By the time I sold my ST (with huge regret, selling the computer and all its games as a job lot was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do), I began to crave the convenience of console gaming once again. Sometimes it was just easier to shove a cartridge into a machine and be gaming 10 seconds later, particularly as non-gaming life got busier. 

So the ST gave way to the Sega Megadrive (Sonic the Hedgehog and Desert Strike were probably the two games I spent the most time on initally) and the Super Nintendo (I'd skipped Nintendo's earlier console but couldn't resist the lure of Super Star Wars and Super Mario Kart). The SNES was a brilliant way to resolve household arguments on who would do the washing up or cook meals in the shared house I lived in at the time. I always sucked at SMK and Sensible Soccer, so I washed up and cooked a heck of a lot. 

Nintendo also released the Game Boy during the 90s. A monochrome portable console with the world's worst LCD screen but small enough to stick in a pocket, and with the 'killer app, the mighty Tetris, ensuring that even non-gamers could enjoy this simple but amazing little console. For a while those three kept me happy (and poor! I must've spent a fortune on the SNES games alone, they were ridiculously pricey!)

Midway through the 1990s I chucked in a long-standing job to become an art student in Brighton, taking with me a console that - originally - I hadn't intended to buy. 

The first 32 bit consoles were hitting shelves and I had my eye on a Sega Saturn, purely because it had an absolutely belting version of Sega Rally on it. I turned up to a local Electronics Boutique, cash in hand but on the monitors in the store there was a loud, bombastic fighting game being shown off on a console I'd never heard of. What the hell was a Sony Playstation anyway? Sony making consoles? Whatever next!

The loud bombastic fighting game turned out to be Tekken 1 - the original, and the moment I saw that game I went home with the Playstation and a copy - and played the heck out of it. A proper 3D polygonal fighting game that looked brilliant (at the time at least). 

For a very long time the Playstation was my machine of choice, right up till the end of the decade (in fact I went through two, the original PS1 was horribly unreliable and my original machine was surreptitiously shipped back as a faulty unit, replaced with a brand new one, hooray!) 

Alongside Tekken I picked up Destruction Derby (still a fantastic game even by today's standards), Wipeout (the original Wipeout was brutally hard but had such an awesome look and feel to it, and of course a truly awesome soundtrack that made it a real hit with clubgoers at the time, and actually made gaming 'cool' again). The PS1 even boasted a superb version of Doom and I remember being so poor as a student that I had to save up for 8 weeks to be able to afford Tomb Raider (but maaan did I get my money's worth out of that game, completing it several times).

After a couple of years in Brighton I came back to Oxford and went to work in a games store while finishing off my studies. The one and only good thing about working in a games store (aside from the generous staff discounts) was getting to see preview copies of games before they were released. 

One day a game turned up in a blank CD case. We quickly stuck it on the demo units / monitors in the store in attract mode, and my goodness, you should've seen how many preorders we took for it. 

That game was Gran Turismo and it might not look like much to you now, but seeing the rolling footage of replays from this game drew people into the store like flies to jam. 

It wasn't actually due for release until the Christmas run-up but we gleefully let it roll. Customers came in and offered us serious cash for the store copy, and I think it was the year that Sony absolutely decimated Nintendo as the Nintendo 64 (and its sole playable game at the time, Goldeneye) failed to match sales. 

The PS1 literally sold like hot cakes that year and we ended up with a lot of disgruntled customers who couldn't get hold of one (hmmm that rings a bell Sony, feels a LOT like this fricking year and the woes of trying to get hold of a PS5!). 

In all I must've bought a ton of PS1 games, mostly preowned (because Electronics Boutique sold used games and again we as staff got them for ridiculously reduced prices).  I did eventually pick up a Sega Saturn, and joint purchased an N64 with my brother purely for Goldeneye and Blast Corps (still a horribly underrated game - RARE managed to get some decent results out of the N64 despite its lack of power). 

As the 90s came to a close, I'd scraped together enough cash to afford my first proper gaming PC. I bought the components and built the thing myself from scratch, cobbled together with a graphics card that cost more than most of the consoles I'd previously owned - and a whole crop of amazing PC games like Battlefield 1942, Starcraft, Screamer Rally and many others. A bunch of us would all collect at someone's house, lugging our PCs along with us, linking them up with network cables to compete against each other - long before online gaming was even a proper thing. 

The noughties would once again see massive change, not just in gaming but in my personal life. So if you can stand to read another one of these, watch out for Part 4 coming in the new year!