BETT 2023 GIVEAWAY - What is your earliest gaming memory?

[VeryPC]

How's it going Edugeeks? We have another BIG gaming giveaway featured at the Bett show this year! We know you are all excited about Connect@Bett but don't fret, we'd rather you just popped over to our stand to talk to us.

 

Anyway, we wanted to give you geeks the first chance to enter our giveaway for this mega gaming machine worth over £4000!

 

(Click for bigger image)

 

 

What's in the bundle?

 

1x Corsair ICUE Gaming Rig (Sponsored by Corsair)

1x ASUS TUF Gaming Monitor

1x Corsair Gaming Mouse

1x Corsair Gaming Keyboard

1x Corsair Gaming Headset

1x Corsair Gaming Mouse pad

 

What about the specs?

Corsair 500D Airflow TG ATX Case

Intel Core i5-13600k CPU

ASUS Strix RTX 4070Ti GPU

ASUS Prime Z790-A DDR5 Motherboard

Corsair 32GB 6200MHz Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5 RAM

1TB Western Digital SN850X Black NVMe (M.2) SSD

Corsair H100i Elite LCD Liquid AIO Cooler

Corsair RM1000x 1000W Fully Modular 80+ Gold Power Supply

Corsair ICUE SP120 RGB Elite Cooler Fans

Windows 11

 

How to enter

Just comment on this thread and tell us your earliest gaming memory! What was you playing? What console or computer? Any fond gaming memories welcome

 

Bonus Entries

 

Every geek can get up to 3 entries whilst everyone else can only get two!

 

1. Visit us at our stand (NL52) and get scanned by a member of the VeryPC team and make sure to tell us your Edugeek username.

2. Take a selfie with one of the VeryPC team using the hashtag #VeryPCAtBett2023 and we will feature you on our social media updates.

[VeryPC_Luke]

I know I can't win it

 

but my earliest gaming memory was Super Mario World on the SNES sacrificing Yoshi at every opportunity

 

Good luck all, see you next week!

[Mr.Ben]

My earliest memory is from 1988 - I would have been 6 years old - waking up in the night and wandering down stairs to find my Dad playing on our 'new' Commodore 64.

 

Clearly my Mum was out for the night as he let me stay up and we played a game called 'Blue Max' and then Frogger for what seemed a good few hours, but was probably minutes as time has extended the memory!

[timbo343]

The Commodore 64 with the tapes! Oh the tapes were the bane of the system where they would take forever to load and then suddenly the system would crash.

 

Infact i remember a friend having an Atari and we picked one up from a car boot sale.

 

Then onto the Amiga where we had 3.5" floppys and game loading was so much quicker! Things such as Lotus Challenge, Outrun, creatures, a football game with oranges and pears, Lemmings along with a game that had an egg as a character and another game had some small elf characters - one was called "Fingers". We ended up copying some games and waiting for the dots to turn from blue to red whilst it was copying.

 

Moved on to the master system 2 with Alex Kidd built in, a friend of mine had the NES, then on to the Game Boys (both grey and clear with accessories) along with colour versions, Game Gears, mega drive 2, SNES, PC with Windows 3.11, Playstation & Saturn (which ive still got), N64, Xbox, Game Cube, PS2 and the rest is history.

Edited March 20, 2023 by timbo343

[Andrew_C]

Pong - but I'm too old to remember what it was on. Definitely the TV as a monitor though. Something borrowed by my father from work maybe?

[elsiegee40]

Commodore PET my Dad lugged home from work - working from home late 1970s style. Had a table tennis game we could play on it and I thought it was amazing!

[SteveM555]

Earliest memory is my brothers playing on the ZX Spectrum, I was too young to know what it was at the time but probably why I was so interested in computers growing up and it spiraled ever since!

[southhamster]

ZX81 my Dad bought around 1983? My sister's and I spent ages programming the damn thing to play games from a magazine listing but it usually crashed or there were errors in the programs. Can't even remember what games they were!

[smurfomatic]

Amstrad CPC464 - bought for Christmas 1985 or 86. Favourite games would have been Dan Dare, Psycho Pig UXB and Harrier Attack. Moved on a few years later to an Amiga 1200 (complete with Lemmings and Worms) before getting a PC in the mid to late 90s.

[thimon]

Alex Kidd, was built into my Sega Master System. Felt like it was never ending, never completed it [emoji23]

[Rob_D]

It was some time around 94/95 when we got our first PC. The first thing I remember doing on the PC was playing Star Trek 25th Anniversary with my dad. I think a quirk of delivery led to us getting the game before the PC.

[Mkjarred]

Batman on an log green amstrad computer

[XiJ]

Visiting my Nans house when my uncle still lived there. He had a spectrum 48k and I loved playing brick wall in his room on a pull down desk. I think that for me into computing tbh.

 

Followed up with a 48k of my own which I used to program, first from magazine pages then with my own basic code.

 

My uncle and I would also want the next big thing then - Amiga through to PC’s.

[hardtailstar]

Granny's Garden on BBC micro computer...

[Mr.Ben]

The Commodore 64 with the tapes! Oh the tapes were the bane of the system where they would take forever to load and then suddenly the system would crash.

 

Infact i remember a friend having an Atari and we picked one up from a car boot sale.

 

Then onto the Amiga where we had 3.5" floppys and game loading was so much quicker! Things such as Lotus Challenge, Outrun, creatures, a football game with oranges and pears, Lemmings along with a game that had an egg as a character and another game had some small elf characters - one was called "Fingers". We ended up copying some games and waiting for the dots to turn from blue to red whilst it was copying.

 

Moved on to the master system 2 with Alex Kidd built in, a friend of mine had the NES, then on to the Game Boys (both grey and clear with accessories) along with colour versions, Game Gears, mega drive 2, SNES, PC with Windows 3.11, Playstation & Saturn (which ive still got), N64, Xbox, Game Cube, PS2 and the rest is history.

The best Christmas present I ever had as a child was in '91 - Dad bought a 5" Floppy drive for the C64 and had transferred all of the tape games we had to disk.

 

(The disks were clearly 'borrowed' from his work as they were all Rolls Royce branded)

 

It took the loading time down to about 10 seconds from 30 minutes!

[Zoom7000]

My first gaming memory was Pong on the Atari PONG. What a machine that was!

 

 

Following that, it was Way of the Exploding Fist on the Commodore 64.

 

Neither computers/consoles were mine. Played them both at relatives houses.

 

My first computer/console was the Amstrad CPC464. Gotta love the memories of my parents allowing me to go play on the computer for 1 hour and the game taking 55 minutes to load! Kids these days will never know such pain!

[Syman_a]

Worm on a BBC micro in first year of high school

Then my first "personal computer" was a ZX81 playing the hobbit text adventure.

[DalekSec]

Been a keen gamer all my life!

 

Have memories of being around 6-7 playing Diablo 2 on my Child minders windows 98 PC at the time! (My parents didnt know i was playing an 18 rated game!) along with Age of Empires 2. Both games i still play (on console now, had to sell my PC due to change of circumstances).

 

Would love to win this bundle and be able to get back into PC gaming, few years off before i can afford one myself with a new born on the way.

[Iain.Faulkner]

For me it was the ZX Spectrum as well, I would probably have been around 5-6 at the time I would guess. I have great memories of playing a game called "Colin the cleaner" who's job was to clear a museum of all the rubbish that visitors had left behind at the end of the day. From what I remember he could only walk upstairs (you'd lose a life if he went downstairs!) but he could go down ladders. Great memories :-)

[mikeprice]

I vaguely remember playing Pong with my friends on their telly - not often though

 

My first game that I really remember was Scramble64 on my first Commodore 64

had a weird system to stop you copying it = even for a backup

Stuff that!

I found out that it was written in basic and found the code that did the anti copying check and changed it so I could create copies

 

Never gave/lent it to anyone else but it did save me when the original tape (of course it was a tape!!!) broke - but my backups were fine

 

much later on I played GunShip2000 on an Amiga - love the Amiga but I eventually had to give up on it and play GprixEGA on my PC supplied by work so I could dial in out of hours

 

 

I also remember having to give up on Wolfenstein after a while because I started getting headaches and feeling dizzy all the time

Initially blamed it on decaf coffee - I had just switched to it - turned out to the game

actually had trouble walking around the office without tripping over things until I banned myself from playing to over lunch!!

 

ANyway - many years ago!!!

[Mrluckhurst]

My first memory was hooking up a Commodore 4 (I think) to a black and white TV, rewinding the tape so it was in the correct spot and then dodging snowballs falling from the top of the screen. It used to take me about 20 minutes to get to a point where I could play but I haven't looked back since!

[Mako]

My dad was a gamer of his era. ZX Spectrum and Atari ST were what we had, and a good old PC. I was never allowed to play, because those computers were expensive, although I was allowed to play on Hyperpaint and draw pictures sometimes. He used to stay up late trying to beat whatever game was flavour of the month, and sometimes he'd be crashed out on the sofa.

 

It must have been 1991-92. I remember coming down one morning for my cereal and the game was left on the TV. He was zonked. The game was Mega-lo-Mania on the Atari ST, it seemed he'd reached a stalemate. The little men were running around and had probably been doing so for a number of hours. The mouse was there. I sat down and started clicking. I'd watched him enough times to know roughly what to click on, but no real idea what I was doing. I kept looking back to see if he was going to wake up but no signs of life. Eventually I forgot to keep checking and just got lost in the game. Must have been an hour or two before he woke up. I managed to beat the level, probably through pure luck.

 

I thought he would be mad. He wasn't. He was proud I managed to beat the level.

 

But then he told me to clear off because the bike racing was on.

Edited March 21, 2023 by Mako

[TechMonkey]

Very vague memory of an Oric but not what games we played, just the wonderful keyboard.

Then we had an Atari 2600. Kaboom was one of my favourite games. Used a paddle controller and you had to catch bombs in 3 buckets and it got faster and faster until it was ridiculous. The aerial socket started failing so we had to prop it up with a game cartridge to get full contact.

Then moved onto an Amstrad CPC. Biggest memory of that one as a massive helicopter game, Gunship I think. It was all wire frame and low refresh rate, but the manual was a literal book and my brother would fly and I would try and find the right page for what we had to do!! The fun of loading up from tape, the sound that would drive our parents crazy but you couldn't turn the sound all the way off otherwise you wouldn't know when it was done or if there was a problem.

 

Great times.

[Al_Balone]

One of my earliest memories was playing around on my dad's Viglen 286 PC and finding 'wolf.exe', which turned out to be Wolfenstein 3D. He wasn't impressed when he caught me.

[Ironside]

Well this is awkward, everyone else is remembering the microcomputers and I'm about to say the Playstation 2! Fond memories of Fifa 06, Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction and Sonic Heroes.