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Mission

Quite simple really. I have had it with the real world, I cannot bear wallowing within it any longer. This is not a suicide note, this is merely my official announcement that I would like to live in the virtual world. Gaming is a passion, has been since my dear parents bought me a Spectrum 128k back in eighty-something. Something happened to my soul that day, it was uplifted. A religious experience maybe... could have been a bad batch of eggs... but something inside me hatched. A little gamer was born.


Whatever happened to a tape deck in your keyboard anyways? This was my introduction to a world I couldn't possibly imagine yet. Years later I opened a Christmas present and again my parents had delivered a gift from the gods. An Amiga 500. You can see at the end of the video below (kills me with nostalgia, 1991 i believe) the Cartoon Classics box - that was mine (not literally). Captain Planet, Bart Vs The Space Mutants, Lemmings and Deluxe Paint 3. Brimming with possibilities, that might have been the best day of my life. Also my introduction to another side of digital media - creating. Deluxe Paint 3 had an animation suite that whilst pretty crude by todays standards was an insight into what could be done with a home computer. 


From there my parents were spent up. So the continuation of my gaming education came with friends at their houses. Some owned Super NES, some owned Mega Drive's. I liken it in many ways to the East Coast/West Coast rap conflicts in the 90s. Sonic and Mario felt very much at war, and you better pick your side lest you be ousted from normal society. The start maybe of gaming becoming less geeky and more mainstream. Cool kids played Streets of Rage, thats a fact. 

My first PC was a Pentium 100 from Packard Bell. I seem to recall it costing £1200 in total. There a love/hate affair with Championship Manager (now Football Manager, i'm all about the SI games, sorry EIDOS, not happening) began and also where I first encountered Guybrush Threepwood. Oh happy days. There was no gamefaqs.com back then sonny-jim, oh no, when you were stuck, you were STUCK... for weeks! That damned rubber chicken pully thing, i must've tried it with everything. Still, memories like that are why gaming has a piece of my heart, and why I want to be permanently involved. God bless you Ron Gilbert.



A few generations and what feels like a million games later we arrive here. Gaming is a market that is here to stay, were a looong way from Asteroids built into a table now. Those feelings of embarking on new adventures, beginning new seasons, mastering new tricks are still all there, coupled with new stuff that technology allows us, massively multiplayer societies to join (I swear I could write a thesis on WoW), everymore interesting ways to interact with our machines and fun for all the family. We surf on the crest of an ever-bigger wave, and I for one am not de-wetsuiting anytime soon.