Retrogaming, part 1

Four and a half years ago I opened my twitter account. Not that I had any intention to use it a lot, and it was merely to write about dumb, funny, silly or tragic situations, such as the day when a Russian store that used to sell delicious smoked pork chops decided to close down.

Approximately 1 year ago I started to post on my Twitter account about 90´s retro games such as Road Rash, my favourite Sega Megadrive game. It was then that I began to find a lot of gaming accounts related to Nintendo, Sega, Atari, MSX and the Commodore.

Let´s go on a blast to the past.

In 1986, one of my classmates has a Popeye Game and Watch which I play on a Friday afternoon before going to jiu jitsu class. The jiu jitsu itself was kind of boring, so I quit that and 2 years later I started to play soccer.

In the summer of 1987, my parents, my younger brothers and me went on holidays to a small village in the kanton of Zürich, Switzerland. After a few days we went further south to Italy. On the camping in Verbania, close to the swiss border was a small arcade with a sort of grandprix game. Basically it was my first holiday hanging around at an arcade, but unfortunately the Lago Maggiore flooded and we left to Neuenburg in Southwest Germany, near the french border of Chalampé.

In the winter that followed, my dad switched his blue Sierra for a red one. That same particular weekend, with incredibly boring iceskating on the telly, he was very busy in his office with his new PC, one of  those terribly heavy hardplastic suitcase machines. If I remember correctly it could even be locked with a small key.

He showed me the computer and eventually I asked him; Are there any games on this computer?

I found a pacman game in ASCII style, very basic and simple, and in GWBASIC there was a cute blackjack game.

In 1988, you could say that I got stuck in the Nintendo warp pipe. My cousins had the NES and they really had to drag me away from it. Their games: Super Mario Bros 1 & 2, Mach Rider and Tennis.

At a certain point I was more or less addicted to this japanese wonder, then somebody decided to hide the cartridges in a microwave, and a couple of hours later they were damaged enough and the NES wouldn´t recognize them anymore; bye bye Nintendo Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, almost all DOS games were for CGA, EGA or VGA, but I still played monochrome. There was a German emulator to play then on Hercules, so I started writing my first batch files. My niece had the same issue. I went to visit her one day and asked her what games she had. Oh well, most of them are for colour computers so…

Her dad, my uncle (a great guy with splendid music taste who rests in peace for almost 6 years now) had a fabulous collection of games. My niece said to me; Hey, I´ve got this strange game about a bloke who is in a bar, he buys a whisky and then he goes to take a piss…

 To be continued…