Old School Gaming
do you remember a game called Stratego? the name was first registered in 1942 and the US trademark was filed in 1958, classic. another game i learned to play at a young age is chess.
i remember playing the old Atari 2600 console. never had one of those fancy systems when i was a kid though, but i do remember playing pong at a friends house once or twice.
Willy The Worm (1985)
the first computer games i played were Willy The Worm, Zaxxon, Pipes, on my family's Tandy 1000. i remember having to mount the 5.25" floppy disc drive manually before having the ability to access and load games in the drive something about DMA (Direct Memory Access) BIOS (Basic Input Output System) something something. back in the day we had to go to Radio Shack to buy games because there was no internet. 256KB (yes kilobytes) ram memory was a damn supercomputer back in the early to mid 1980's. back then we had black and white, monochrome, cga, and ega graphics.
King's Quest (1983)
we later upgraded to a new computer made by IBM. did you know IBM was incorporated in the year 1911? the new IBM system was capable of playing Kings Quest and Space Quest if memory serves me correctly (some of my favorite games back in the day). this new system was also capable of playing Donkey Kong for DOS (which stands for Disk Operating System). do you remember the windows 3.1 mouse tutorial? our next PC ran Windows 95. Windows 95 was a real game changer. another great DOS game is called Warcraft (that is where World of Warcraft came from WOW).
in the late 80's and early 90's the games we played weren't only on computers or consoles. we also got down with the tabletop games RPG style with pencil, paper, dice, and a book. i remember having a Bubble Tape canister full of different dice for gaming. 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided 20-sided etc. here are some of the original role playing games we played (check out the links):
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness
https://rpg.rem.uz/_Collections/Cartoon%20Games/TMNT/TMNT%20-%20Corebook.pdf
Car Wars
http://www.sjgames.com/car-wars/games/classic/img/car-wars-classic-rules.pdf
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
https://idiscepolidellamanticora.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/tsr2010-players-handbook.pdf
BattleTech
then a company named Nintendo came out with this 8-bit console called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) that i am sure you have heard of. i remember using the Game Genie add on that you plug cartriges into to enable extra cheats! good stuff. some of the games i remember playing Mega Man, Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, Swords and Serpents, Zelda, Mario Bros., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon, Contra, Mike Tyson Punchout, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, and Ice Hockey. Gauntlet was always one of my personal favorites.
not long after the NES was released another company named Sega developed a 16-bit console named Genesis. with double the power of the 8-bit NES the 16 bit Genesis games were graphically superior ie: Sonic, Sonic II, Terminator II The Arcade game, Castlevania, Mortal Kombat, and Earthworm Jim were some of my favorites. then Sega Genesis II came out with plug on the side that attached it to an add on system called the SegaCD. SegaCD might have been the first gaming console to use the compact disc games. with it's monster Motorola 68000 @ 12.5 MHz processor. the main benefit of CD technology was greater storage, which allowed for games to be nearly 320 times larger than Genesis cartridges. SegaCD even played audio CD's! i remember a game called Sewer Shark where you are blasted through the sewer in a rocket or something that you can't seem to stop. all you could do is shoot ratigators (rat/alligator hybrids) and bats and go up down left or right in the sewer tunnels. the graphics and audio were pretty amazing though considering the times. see the video below.
Sewer Shark (1992)
Sewer Shark (video)
next thing you know the gaming consoles finally reached 32-bit systems. with the SuperNES you had Super Mario World, Mortal Kombat II, Super Metroid, StarFox, Donkey Kong Country were fun games. Sega answered back with the 32 bit Sega Saturn, but never got as big as the SNES.
within a few years of the SNES being out there was a new contender in the gaming world calld Microsoft Windows with it's preloaded game Minesweeper. when windows 95 came out it was a big time for PC gaming. GTA 1 was released in 1997 for DOS and Windows (tons of fun). another big hit was SimCity 2000. there was also a game called Battle Chess that was awesome because when you took one of your opponents pieces the pieces would fight humerus and sometimes extravagant battles before dying.
i still enjoy gaming. every now and again i will break out the old DOSBox emulator, but the only two games i really play any more are the real time strategy games StarCraft Brood War Remastered and StarCraft II. my favorite race to play as is the Protoss. i am not real good at playing against other players, but i did manage to reach elite level difficulty playing 1v1 against the computer.
i would like to thank @MindsGaming for inspiring me to write this blog. it is the first blog i have ever written, and i enjoyed writing it. hope you enjoy.