My earliest game memories
Man, I could write pages and pages on each panel. I was a Commodore 64 kid, even though by the late 80s everyone else had a Nintendo. My dad also belonged to a game-sharing club, so we had hundreds of games. Couldn’t make heads or tails of half of them, but boy did I have a blast.
New Game Journalism came and went, hated by many because they found it was the equivalent of recipes that put a life story before the list of ingredients, but I liked it because it treated gaming as an experience deeply linked to who the gamer was as a person; you could spin your own unique narrative by filtering the gaming experience through yourself. In most of these panels I can see that these memories are not so much about the games themselves, but about the specific things that stimulated my senses, about my family in the room as I played. While I played a lot of entertaining games, these anecdotes are what I remember most vividly. Dancing to “Enola Gay”. Learning English with my dad. Screwing up classical music. My grandparents curious or dismissive about this new toy they couldn’t quite comprehend.
Good times.
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Brings back memories. Also my subscription to “Compute’s Gazette” (Compute was a magazine for computer enthusiasts, Gazette was their publication specifically for Commodore 64. It had program listings you could type in. But fuck that, I also got the disk version)
There was also Q-Link, an online service specifically for C64. Online games and message boards, and a graphical virtual world called Club Caribe. The company eventually changed theiir name to America OnLine.
If you’re interested, there’s a modernized version of Giana Sisters on Steam.
I remember the music program on C64. There were several songs that required TWO C64s to play at the same time in order to get all the music done. Fun times. Did you ever get to play Archon?
@Mark My dad once bought an issue of Ahoy!, which had the code to “program” Contra, but I gave up after finishing the title screen.
I didn’t know of the HD remake… it loses a lot of charm without the direct copy of Mario graphics lol, but what are you going to do. The developers of another recent Giana Sisters game, Twisted Dreams, actually contacted me for permission to repost one of my early comics, “The obsolete Add-on” which was about GS. I played it a bit, it had an interesting gimmick.
@Jeff I didn’t but for the longest time one of my aunts kept promising she’d ask her boss to borrow that “chess game where the pieces fight each other”, and reading the description now, I think she might’ve been referring to it.
I don’t think it occurred to me until now that Bruce was climbing walls in that game; I always thought they were rope ladders! Ah, the days when you had to fill in details with the imagination…
I swear I restarted Impossible Mission a thousand times just to hear that diabolical voice intro.
The music program sounds like SidPlayer. That was my introduction to a lot of popular songs… I knew what “The Longest Time” sounded like in chiptunes format long before I knew who Billy Joel was.
¿Tenías la camisa blanca? Or would that be tuviste? I’ll never get when to use imperfecto vs. indefinido right. That story about your grandpa … you had a golden heart, even as a kid.
@Morgan I was puzzled by them but actually I though I was close with my first guess: I thought they were hanging, like, latticed wooden boards, even if it didn’t make any sense at the time… much much latter I would see that kind of ornamentation in old Asian palaces, so maybe that’s what they were. But then you also climbed something that looked like moving sand, so who knows!
@thorstenv funny thing was, it really wasn’t anything important. Likely he was just cranky I wasn’t paying attention to him. I was dismayed but what are you gonna do, we were taught to respect and obey. Now, had I done the opposite and kept ignoring him, that’s the sort of things that probably would’ve bothered me years later.