With age comes a lot of nostalgia and with the recent boom of retro gaming I find myself reminiscing about the early days of geekdom and computing. Being born in 1971 I grew up in a computer-free, Internet-free, cellphone-free and all in all analogue environment. When you wanted to communicate with people you had to pick up the phone (ours still had a rotary dial at first) and talk to someone, or you had to walk to their home and check out whether they had time to play. Mail still meant paper, stamps, and days if not weeks of waiting for a reply.

In Germany it also meant having only 4 TV channels (1 and 2 were state-financed channels, the 3rd was usually was regional a programme, and since we lived close enough to the border we were lucky to also receive Swiss German TV on channel 4 as bonus). Another unique thing of my youth was that you had to watch programmes on TV when they were on, because there was no means of “time shifting” such as recording or watching them on demand. When I was very little, our old TV didn’t even have a remote, and being three siblings we often had arguments who’d have to stand up, walk to the TV, and change channels on the device this time around. It also meant that we got to play a lot outside, because our house was located at a large public yard in front of the parish hall, with two large trees and so all the kids from the neighbourhood would usually come there to play with the others (mostly hide-and-seek, ballgames, cops and robbers, doing stupid stunts with your bicycle or pedal scooter, etc.).

The earliest memory of “digital games” I have, are board games with some electronic enhancements. We had a battleships board game that would make explosion sounds if you hit the other player’s ship. Then there was Simon (in Germany initially sold under the name “Senso”) which the whole family enjoyed playing. Later at a funfair in my hometown there was a construction trailer set up in a corner, with the latest and greatest in arcade video games. That’s where I played Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man for the first time. Unknowingly that was also my first encounter with Nintendo…

My Second Encounters with Nintendo

In the late 70s/early 80s, digital watches were all the rage. Everybody had one and it was common that school lessons were interrupted by the hourly beep of people’s digital watches. An extension of a digital watch were the LCD games. They surely didn’t have much more power than a wrist watch, but those games were so popular, that even my older brother, who never had much interest in electronics and computers owned a few of those. I was never conscious about who made those games. I just recently found out that several of the LCD games I owned were from Nintendo, because I was searching for photos of the devices. My favourite was Donkey Kong Jr.

There were also some Disney branded games and lots of cheap knock-offs and some really creative new versions with multiple LCD split-screens and whatnot.

My First Console (And It Wasn’t What You Think)

My parents bought us a Vectrex console. That was an almost mind-blowing piece of hardware. Since it was based on vectors being drawn on the screen with the cathode ray instead of pixel bitmaps, the animation and gameplay was absolutely smooth. It also came with an analog joystick that allowed for much more subtle control than the digital joysticks normally used for games at the time.

Since it was limited to vectors it couldn’t draw filled surfaces or colours, but every Vectrex game usually came with a translucent plastic screen especially made for that particular game, that you’d attach in front of the screen and then get the illusion of colours. There were quite a few unique games available, but unfortunately it was discontinued about one year after its release, so it never got much traction.

First Encounters with Computers

I first got interested in computers through some of our mail order catalogues that almost every home in Germany had a copy of (mostly Quelle and Neckermann). They had a “computer” that you had to assemble yourself, with a plastic foil keyboard. And I think it had a display that could only display a few lines of text. This computer was quite affordable (it was a glorified pocket calculator), and I felt this mysterious device was now in arm’s reach, and I really wanted one…

However, after a friend went into raptures about how awesome his ZX-81 was, I became aware that there’s a whole world of home computers (yes, that was the official moniker – this being the era before the PC) out there that I had no idea of. Then a classmate showed me “Way of the Exploding Fist” and “G.I. Goe” on his Schneider CPC (same as Armstrad CPC, it was just branded differently in Germany) on a green screen. That was the revelation – you can play games on these things!

Now I tried to find out what computer models and systems were on the market and I was torn between getting a Commodore VC-20, a ZX Spectrum, some MSX machine I can’t recall what the brand was and the mother of all home computers the even then already legendary Commodore 64. I wanted more, and then some more, so in the end I really, really wanted the Commodore. How’s that for ad-hoc rhyming – but I digress. Yes, the C=64 (that’s how the real geeks write it) was an incredible machine and rather affordable.

So, some time around 1983 or 1984 I got my C=64, or as we in Germany often called it my Vierundsechziger (64er) or Brotkasten (bread box, because it was brown and the rounded corners bore some resemblance to traditional German bread boxes), but that’s another story for another blog entry…