I was lucky to be a part of the very first generation to grow up with computer games. I remember those halcyon days – I was around 10 years old in the 1980s – at my old Apple IIe, trying to program my own simple games and trying to hack into other games that I pirated with help from the neighbor kid. I also remember saving my money religiously to buy some real games – games like Castle Wolfenstein. Buying those boxes with the big 5.5 "floppy disks and the game manual was inside euphoric.
The computer was an amazing tool just starting to trickle down into average households. Sure compared to modern programs the gameplay and graphics were terrible. After all how much could you do with 64 kb RAM and a green dot pixel low-res screen with sound output that was basically a series of beeps and clicks? But the old game designers were true artists. They were the first of their kind, free of restrictions of the past. Free to create great games that truly inspired the imagination of young players. These were the games that also inspired the creation of an entirely new business of game development that is now today, a mere twenty five years later, a multi billion dollar industry,
I still love playing these classic games today and every time I "boot up" an old Apple or DOS emulator, I still get that same great feeling I used to have from the old days.