My parents recently decided that I have lived outside the family home for a long time now and my old room should be put to good use. I thought holding all my childhood junk was a good use for a room but apparently I was wrong. With this in mind I flew to Ireland and damned all my childhood possessions to the charity shop or worse still, the bin. A few cherished items made it into a box for the attic but I must admit there was mainly dusty junk cluttering up my cupboards! I did enjoy seeing all my ‘pre computerised gaming’ stuff and here are two things that I had in abundance and feel are a mere step from owning a PS3.
Errrr… this a blurry picture of me on a beach near my home. It proves that I really went home and am not just lying and LOOK HOW CLOSE I WAS TO A BABY SEAL! OK, on with the stuff that has something to do with anything.
First there was the giant selection of adventure books. I used to enjoy choosing my own fate, but I was a big cheater and if turning to page 53 lead to my demise I would simply go back to the last option and pick a different page number instead of restarting the whole book as generally suggested. I loved these books so much that I even found a hand written version created by myself and a friend. It seemed that we were more taken by drawing our lead character dying in various grotesque circumstances than we were with actually developing a sound and usable story, but at least we tried!
Second to this collection was my clear love of sliding puzzles. I had loads of them hidden about my room, all of them pictures, never the dull number ones. I remember playing with these a lot, and they were a favoured toy on long haul flights to Spain (not too long) or America (really long!). Luckily my parents clearly enjoyed me demanding that they repeatedly rearrange my puzzle and I guess it was preferable to me crying for the whole journey. Oddly I only ever had one Rubik’s cube, showing that although 2D could capture my childish mind, 3D was just too taxing. I am now the proud owner of three Rubik’s cubes, not one of them ever fully completed!
I feel these toys were a natural lead into gaming. It is possible that other things played a role. Maybe setting up huge displays of Sylvanian families each year whetted my appetite for Sim City, or that typing in DOS commands made me feel really clever and if there was a one pixel game at the end of it all the better. It could even be that I am a gamer simply becasue it was available to me and games are great. However I think it was the early combination of choosing my own fate and picture puzzling that really set me on a clear path to loving those first text based games and simple point and clicks.
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