Gaming Nostalgia – Part 1

Today’s Google Doodle (21 May 2010 – For Pac-Man 30th Anniversary !  ) remembered me of my ‘gaming history’ and that  made me feel nostalgic as gaming is (or was? 0_o) an important part of my life. Those days things were different. I was still an innocent child just looking to have fun. I really missed those times, when gaming was a culture, not a business.

Games are no longer as they were before. In the past developing games was a passion for people and they devoted lots of time refining the gameplay of their games. Unlike today there were technology constraints and each developers had the same restrictions. Nobody cared about graphics. It was all about having fun playing. And these games were pleasurable and exciting. You could have spent a great deal of time on them contrary to today’s games which are very short and much more expensive. If you want more, you have to pay more.

I was introduced to gaming in around 1996-1997 and the first game I remember to have played is of course the original ‘Prince of Persia’ on my late uncle’s computer loaded with MS-DOS!   The game was available on a floppy disk and I recall those wonderful moments spent playing it. My cousin and I used to memorize each command by heart (e.g : cd.. ENTER, cd Prince ENTER). In fact we didn’t even know what was an OS or how to use it, we just knew how to load the game and play it(even with cheats ).  The game was launched using the command ‘PRINCE MEGAHIT’. Then in-game we used ‘Shift+T’ for extra lives . At that time we did not know these were cheats but elders just taught us to play it as such and we just thought it as the usual process.

Prince of Persia is still a great platformer today and the dos version can be played for free using the emulator DOSBox : http://www.dosbox.com/. It was also released for different systems such as the Super Nintendo and Amiga. In my opinion the most beautiful version is the Macintosh version. I managed to run it, but it was quite tricky (and somehow not legal) requiring Mini vMac, a macintosh emulator, and a ROM image.

Another game I remember to have played is Mortal Kombat 1. This was my first fighting game. It was a cool game, but I found it very difficult to play(probably for a 4-5 years old child ) and the fatalities were even more challenging; only my older cousins could accomplish them. Mortal Kombat had an advanced gameplay for its time with also a good plot. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to play it again today, but I was a fan of its sequels, specially Mortal Kombat 4 on PSX.

In short these were some of my first and best ‘video game moments’. I would have loved to be part of the Golden Age of Video Games in the early 1980′s, but I was born too many years later.