Squid Division

A Rudimentary Poll: PC or Consoles and your gaming background

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Basically I'm wondering what your preferred mode of gaming is, and what was your preferred mode during your 'formative' gaming years?

I myself am about 50/50 PC and consoles. Depending on what sort of releases are out, I'm 100% one or the other for a period of time, but it eventually swings back the other way.

This seems to match up with how I grew up gaming. I started out on the PC since all we had was an NES, which I'm horrible at. I played learning games and eventually moved on to some adventure games, but none of the famous ones. Then one year I got an N64 for Christmas and from then on it was a cycle of going back and forth; Goldeneye, Starcraft, Perfect Dark, Age of Empires, Timesplitters, Total War, etc.

What about you?

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My formative years were spent with the Commodore 64, switching to a 486 in my early teens (at that point also getting a Game Boy, then an NES), then an SNES, then a self-built Pentium that was primarily a gaming machine. I was a full-fledged PC gamer for the era of Curse of Monkey Island, Blade Runner, Grim Fandango, Half-Life, Deus Ex, and System Shock 2.

But keeping a gaming PC up to date is expensive, and I loathed using Windows for anything else. I soon became a Mac convert—and missed out on most games 2001-2005. (I played Halo and Return to Castle Wolfenstein on my Mac Mini. Fun!)

When Half-Life 2 came out, instead of buying a PC, I bought an Xbox—my first console since the SNES—and a copy of Half-Life 2. Most of my other Xbox purchases were also PC conversions: Deus Ex 2, Thief: Deadly Shadows and Arx Fatalis. This was my first time using a console game pad, but I had no problem leaving the world of WASD behind.

When did I upgrade to the Xbox 360? When The Orange Box came out.

I can't see myself going back to PC gaming, even when this podcast does such a great job of making current PC gaming sound exciting.

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PC was absolutely the formative platform for me, to absolutely nobody surprise. Some of the earliest games I played were SimCity, Civilization, and LucasArts and Sierra adventure games. I know I played a bunch of other PC stuff before that, but it wasn't as impactful or memorable. I went on to play pretty much everything LucasArts, Blizzard, and id made in the 90s, as well as plenty of other stuff.

These days I predominantly play games on PC, but it hasn't been like that nonstop. In the late 90s I got a PlayStation, which was my first console other than a Game Boy. I didn't actually end up using it very much, though. I played a few Square Enix RPGs. The only one I ever beat was Xenogears, weirdly. I played a few other random things, like the first couple Legacy of Kain games, but for whatever reason they didn't make much of an impression on me.

So, during that time I was still mainly PC. At that point I got really into the Quake multiplayer and mod scene, which was a big departure from what I'd been playing up until that point. Then Thief and Half-Life came out, and those were huge deals for me.

It wasn't until the PS2 that I started playing much on consoles. I got a PS2 because of the Grand Theft Auto III series, which was similar to a lot of other people, except that I had already played and loved the first two GTA games on PC. For the next few years I waffled between PC and consoles, accruing an Xbox and GameCube over time, both of which I ended up using a lot more than the PS2, and during the height of those consoles I did much less PC stuff, outside of core PC developers.

In the current generation I've gone back to PC heavily. I'm really starting to tire of having to think about four hundred million platforms simultaneously. In the last generation, I owned every single home and portable console, and this generation I do too (except for DSi), but that's just such an insane collection of shit to have to manage that it's caused me to bounce back in the other direction and just focus on one box. Obviously I'm more than happy to play console-exclusive games if they seem essential, but for the most part I feel like I'm done endlessly juggling discs and machines.

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I guess I'm more like you Squid, maybe always been sort of 50/50, even though there have been times in my life where I have focused more on one or the other.

Since my dad was always a computer repairman, he was always finding parts for cheap or at job sites, just general things other job sites wouldn't end up using or didn't want. So he stayed kind of current for a while there until the late 90s when the company got bought out. Also that whole time, he and his coworkers regularly shared software, so basically my whole life I've had a lot of somewhat free PC exposure. Although these days I keep my PC mostly for doing artwork and downloadan, while a lot of games get played, mostly retro or emulated though.

Consoles were all kind of lucked upon or gotten half a decade or more later when prices went down and my parents could afford to get me a console for Christmas. So I went NES, Genesis, Gameboy, up to saving up money for a Dreamcast on release date by mowing a bunch of lawns in the 7th grade. Getting a job the last two years of my high school life left me with all three consoles eventually of last generation, and since then I've been buying tons of useless (but fun!) junk that I had missed out on screwing around on Ebay or checking out flea markets.

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Mostly PC. I only have a PS3 and NDS. When I was a kid we used to rent a SNES or NES during school vacations, and then we would complete the game we rented with it within a week. But I'm mostly a PC gamer, I only buy console exclusives for my PS3. Consoles have quite often terrible controls and camera movement. It mostly applies to first or third person games. The gamepad is great for fixed perspective games like classic platform games. But it's just terrible to aim with these gamepads.

I also think that the PC has a lot more interesting games. This could probably a cost issue, as developing for the PC is quite cheap. Although these days with PSN and XBLA the consoles have been getting interesting games too.

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I started out with PC for sure. I think my first game was something on the Atari, but I did most of my early gaming on the computer. I had a PS1 but was still gaming mostly on PC and then when the PS2 came around, dropped out of the PC vidcard arms race (and switched to using laptops as my main computer) and, aside from less system intensive type stuff (turn based or 2d adventure games), have gone PS2 to Xbox 360 and, recently, PS3 Slim and done the majority of my gaming on console now. I also have a launch/fat PSP but I literally only play Pro Evo/Winning Eleven on it. Will be getting an Iphone 4 when it's available in Canada; it'll be my first smartphone.

I had an NES when it launched back in the day too, but again mostly was gaming on PC at the time. Had a SNES and a Saturn for a time as well, but looong after they were new (I think I picked them up second hand for like $40 a piece with some games).

Missed Gamecube, N64, the first Xbox, & Wii (although funnily enough my folks wanted a Wii so I got one for them, but they never use it now).

Even though they weren't the earliest PC games I played, the stuff that's made the strongest impression on me has been the Sierra (especially the Quest for Glory stuff, oh man those were great) & Lucasarts adventure games, the Infinity Engine stuff, Star Control 2, Twinsen's LBA 2, and Fallout 1 & 2.

Nowadays it's mostly PS3 Slim over the 360 for the free online (not a XBL Gold person) plus I like the controller on the PS3 better because I don't have ginormous hands (I do wish the PS3 controller had triggers instead of the 2nd set of should bumpers though).

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I didn't have access to a PC during my formative years, so I was a "console kid" through and through. Interestingly, I was afraid of arcade games as a kid. I loved watching my dad see how far he could take a quarter in R-Type or 1943 at the local bowling alley, but every time he offered me a quarter I refused. We were a very, very poor family, (hence the lack of PC) and as I recall, it was my opinion that wasting a whole quarter just so I could try and make it 1/25th as far in a game as he could seemed like an unacceptable waste. Looking back, I had weird completionist "forest through the trees" tendencies even back then, ha ha!

I didn't know this part of the story at the time, but when my best friend at the time got a console for his birthday, the exposure to gaming without the fear of wasting quarters opened me up in ways that even my parents could see. I would come home and immediately start creating my own Super Mario Brothers levels on big pieces of butcher paper my Dad had salvaged to save money on drawing paper. My parents (Father and Grandmother) saw what was going to happen- My fairly well-to-do Mom (divorced) would probably get me a console that year, and in their eyes, whoever was responsible for this gift would indirectly be responsible for shaping who I would eventually become. It was THAT obvious that I was going to attempt to create video games when i grew up. So, they sold and risked all sorts of shit, literally broke the piggy bank that I never knew about in order to get me an NES. Not tying the concept of losing the game to losing a quarter allowed me to forget our money troubles and love gaming, but I had no idea how much more they risked simply to possess a parent's pride at having obtained the thing that changed their child's life.

We didn't even have a color television at the time, so the games that relatives sent me occasionally would have color-dependent gameplay components- I strongly remember fiddling with the knobs in some vain attempt to make the red and blue pills in Dr. Mario look different so I wouldn't have to guess any more! To this day I am quite irate that most games that have red/green health bars or whatever lack colorblind modes, despite my personal ability to see all colors.

The NES was my first gaming love, so naturally I had a very Nintendo-centric view of the industry. I wasn't impressed by what little exposure to the Sega brand I had at friends' houses, and like any good little early console war child I vehemently defended "my choice" to justify it.

Later, I would earn enough money to help my family survive and build a gaming PC by dropping out of high school to work at a fast food restaurant. I was late to the PC party, but it soon ate up as much of my gaming time as the PS2 I was able to afford.

These days, I tend to divide my time up fairly evenly in the grand scheme of things, but it's odd; I tend to become very console or PC-centric in bursts of a week or a month at a time. No idea why, but if I have a few solid experiences with my 360 I'll get in the habit of turning that on instead for a bit, before something I've been waiting to play on the PC comes out and things will lean in the other direction for a while.

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Xeneth's post made me think I should mention the circumstances that led to my being weaned on PC rather than consoles.

We were never an impoverished family but we had a lot of really difficult financial situations that resulted in us moving around a lot when I was a kid, based on where my parents were able to get jobs (not that I had any understanding of that at the time). Eventually, in a particularly lucky break after my dad had lost his most recent job, my mom got a job at a real estate company in San Diego, so we moved there and that became our longest-lasting city.

Financial issues aside, my parents were the type who didn't let my brother or me have video games or watch much TV, and so on. They had us regularly check out books from the library, learn to play music, that kind of thing. So, for me, consoles were entirely devices that lived at friends' houses. I never really thought about the possibility of owning one myself.

However, because of that job my mom got in San Diego, she had to learn spreadsheet and word processing software like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. So, she would borrow an extra computer from work and bring it home, and I got totally obsessed with just typing shit into it until I got stuff to work. This mainly consisted of figuring out how to change text properties in WordPerfect (which, at the time, was represented by putting the text in different colors on the screen, since there was only one actual display font). I never had the slightest clue what Lotus 1-2-3 was for.

I also fooled around in DOS, though, and I was really pleased when I got to the point where I could navigate around the file structure and bring up a list of files and run them.

Eventually at school I met a kid whose dad had some kind of computer related job, and this kid would always have access to lots of computer games, so I started to borrow some from him and covertly install them on my mom's borrowed work PC, which was an IBM XT. I think it was already an old machine at the time, but most games back then would let you select display modes going down to 16 colors, and that kind of thing.

At a certain point, we were able to keep for ourselves an IBM 486 that the office no longer needed. That was the computer that I really got into gaming on. I used it to play stuff like Civ, X-Wing, all the LucasArts games, WarCraft, Doom, and so on, most of which I traded around with friends.

Anyway, it wasn't until probably five years ago or so that I actually had a nice "gaming" PC. Whenever I talk about growing up a PC gamer, people always say things like "Oh yeah, I could never afford that," but the implications of that sentence run totally counter to my experience.

I had friends with consoles who, to me, just seemed to be swimming in expensive shit. They would have consoles, all of these new games their parents would buy them for $60-$70 each, tons of peripherals, associated toys, just all of this shit. Meanwhile I had a out-of-date hand-me-down PC, and I'd get games in hilarious ways because my parents never once bought me a video game. I remember saving up to order a copy of TIE Fighter for $15 from the back of a PC Gamer--you used to be able to buy used PC games from sketchy game dealers who advertised in magazines. They would literally say things like "Two in stock," in the print ad. It was absurd, but I didn't realize that at the time.

None of the PC gaming friends I had as a kid had pumped-up insane rigs. People always seem to assume that was the case, but I don't think that's a common experience at all for young PC gamers. You never needed that to run games in the era before 3D acceleration. Hell, you probably still don't now. I'm sure there are lots of kids growing up now with the same kind of parents I had, and they're finding ways to play video games on the family computer. I sure hope there are, anyway.

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I sure hope there are, anyway.

I was about to type that I have a fear that they're just playing Facebook games or crap like that. But then I remembered how I used to play all the awesome flash games on Newgrounds, and how there are undoubtedly a TON of flash games out there for people to play for free; Neptune's Pride for example. So I'd say that with browser based games (even Quake now) and (unfortunately) torrents and file sharing, people with even less money are probably more games even.

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I'm very 50/50. My earliest memories are of loads of boys (me usually the youngest and always losing) huddled over Worms, Descent and Warcraft 2 on other people's PCs, and pack-in shareware CDs on my Dad's PC, and I mostly play PC at the moment, but I longed for consoles early on and only came back to PC in a major way the last couple of years.

My brother and I saved up for an N64 in 1998 which got a lot of use, but from 2001-2004 I didn't play a lot of games, just a few emulated SNES RPGs and a repeatedly borrowed copy of Deus Ex. My parents always hated games and said I was too old for them, but I was too young to be able buy them myself.

In 2004, armed with money from a saturday job I started messing around with eBay and bought a few N64 games I'd wanted back in the day like Majora's Mask. I then became pretty obsessed with 'catching up' and gradually bought, played and resold shedloads of games and consoles from Saturn to Xbox. Hundreds of classic games in just a few years. Briefly in 2007 I had the following all hooked up simultaneously: Mega Drive, Saturn, N64, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, and on a monitor: 360, Dreamcast and PC. Jesus. I eventually settled mostly on the 360 for a while.

In 2008 I built myself a PC to explore that side of things properly. Since then I've leaned towards it more and more, largely due to the practicality of it as a student, the lower cost of games and digital distribution. I've been studying in Paris this year and only brought the PC with me (in pieces).

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Anyway, it wasn't until probably five years ago or so that I actually had a nice "gaming" PC. Whenever I talk about growing up a PC gamer, people always say things like "Oh yeah, I could never afford that," but the implications of that sentence run totally counter to my experience.

To be fair, if you were completely legit about it, getting a great gaming type PC in the 80s might run you thousands of dollars, and I'm pretty sure it took a while to get the things in the hundreds sometime in the mid 90s, although I could be wrong.

However, as you said, you could sort of luck out into getting one, making pirated software not too far behind. I don't know, my dad never actually bought us any games unless he was picking them up from the bargain bin, causing a lot of games we actually owned to end up being pretty bad. He was big on those 1000 in 1 game packs when CDs were new and cool. I can't even look up half of that awful shit I played just to confirm some of those games existed. I always wished he had just pirated the terrible games and just saved up and bought the good ones.

An NES was only $200 in comparison, but I understand the games still might run $70 and up. I think most people with one just rented. My uncle had given me his when I was not even in school yet, because I think he got a girlfriend that made him get rid of it. Then I just used to pester my parents to rent. But I have some old Sierra catalogs as well that seem to say that some Sierra games were selling at $90 for a while and remember an early Adventurer charging $70 for Secret of Monkey Island on CD.

None of the PC gaming friends I had as a kid had pumped-up insane rigs. People always seem to assume that was the case, but I don't think that's a common experience at all for young PC gamers. You never needed that to run games in the era before 3D acceleration. Hell, you probably still don't now. I'm sure there are lots of kids growing up now with the same kind of parents I had, and they're finding ways to play video games on the family computer. I sure hope there are, anyway.

That's strange, I remember almost nothing but problems even before the 3D era for the games with lots of graphics or animation. If you had a 386 you had to push the turbo button hoping it might get the game to work as if you had owned a 486. Then you find out your computer doesn't have enough memory for some game and later you realize you can't run almost anything without a Pentium chip.

A lot of those circumstances is what caused me to keep revisiting older games and being a primary PC user during my adolescent and teen years instead of even bothering to get the newest game, since I knew it wouldn't run. I also found GameTZ which meant I could just send what cash I gathered in an envelope to people and essentially purchase things on the internet without telling my parents. I'm surprised no one ever ripped me off.

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I have so many memories of playing demos from borrowed PC magazine demo discs that barely ran on my Dad's PCs over the years. The Half Life demo in particular, I remember it was justabout playable at around 5fps (head crabs were a nightmare), until you came to a scripted explosion when it would just grind to a halt and chug out a frame every couple of seconds and you just had to wait. Probably played through that about a dozen times even so.

That might be why we played a lot of RTS at that point. They were still 2D with pretty low requirements.

I also remember double page mail-order ads in late 90s PC magazines with just lists in tiny writing of quite old dos games for just a couple of quid on floppy disc. Pretty sure they were new rather than used. You don't see anything like that anymore.

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My father got a PC (386) for work one day. During my childhood I generally leaned more towards PC, because where I lived, my friends, it was more of a PC culture. We'd just constantly be exchanging games by floppy and copy these game disks from the local library.

I didn't start buying PC games until we got a brandspanking new PC (P166) It had a CD-ROM drive and Windows 95! It came with one of those Windows multimedia introduction CD's, that had the 3D bumpercar/maze game and that Weezer music clip. Anyway, to skip ahead a bit, I got a job and I always bought games that were cheap and on sale. At the time I was 16, I'd sometimes buy 4+ games at a time. I would basically spend every dime I earned on games; I had very little other interests as a kid.

Honestly, I think was a little bit spoiled as a younger child; me and my brother got an NES (don't remember why) and I still have like 20 NES games and no idea how I got them. Eventually, that must've stopped. When you're 10 and your allowance is 2 bucks a week, that sort of rules out console games.

I did read Club Nintendo and I was completely hyped about the N64 and started saving my money for that thing. I managed, so I got that. The games were so expensive that I only ever got them on Christmas and my birthday. It's why I only have a grand total of 5 N64 games.

History goes something like this:

- 386

- NES

- P166mhz (Half-Life at ~5 fps, mmmm)

- N64

- P800mhz (166 one died by lightning strike)

I held onto that last one until I moved out of the house. At that point I started building my own custom PC's.

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To be fair, if you were completely legit about it, getting a great gaming type PC in the 80s might run you thousands of dollars, and I'm pretty sure it took a while to get the things in the hundreds sometime in the mid 90s, although I could be wrong.

See, I don't even know what a "gaming type PC in the 80s" means, though. I mean I ran tons of stuff on just a straight up "computer" that was leftover from an office. At the time I had almost no clue what was inside it. So many games back then would let you run graphics in modes down to 16 colors, and with sound ranging anywhere from no sound to PC speaker, to adlib/soundblaster/whatever, and so on. I'm not talking about playing games at the bleeding edge, I'm talking about just playing games.

An NES was only $200 in comparison, but I understand the games still might run $70 and up. I think most people with one just rented. My uncle had given me his when I was not even in school yet, because I think he got a girlfriend that made him get rid of it. Then I just used to pester my parents to rent. But I have some old Sierra catalogs as well that seem to say that some Sierra games were selling at $90 for a while and remember an early Adventurer charging $70 for Secret of Monkey Island on CD.

Yeah, games have always been unusually expensive entertainment items across the board. But cartridges were, on average, more expensive than diskettes, and as you indicate, there were cheaper ways on all platforms. On the PC, for example, you could borrow a friend's game and install it.

That's strange, I remember almost nothing but problems even before the 3D era for the games with lots of graphics or animation. If you had a 386 you had to push the turbo button hoping it might get the game to work as if you had owned a 486. Then you find out your computer doesn't have enough memory for some game and later you realize you can't run almost anything without a Pentium chip.

Well, there's a difference between something being sort of problematic and something being expensive. I mean, I had to learn my way around DOS configuration files as a PC gamer, sure. But I had basically zero disposable income. I managed to play a ton of games despite not once ever upgrading a part in a PC. The Pentium came out in 1993, but it was years until that became a requirement. I first got a 486 in 1993, and I used that thing for ages. Like I said, lots of games--particularly DOS games--would come with a big range of sound and display options. And even in the 3D acceleration era, most games (including Quake et al) had a software rendering mode.

I specifically remember the first time I ever couldn't run a PC game, for any reason whatsoever. It was Grim Fandango, which required 3D acceleration in 1998. That was the first game I ever owned that had that requirement. I went many, many years with dated hardware, still playing games, and even today I couldn't tell you if I was actually missing any substantial features.

Even past that point, I was able to keep going for a while until I got a 3D accelerated PC.

A lot of those circumstances is what caused me to keep revisiting older games and being a primary PC user during my adolescent and teen years instead of even bothering to get the newest game, since I knew it wouldn't run. I also found GameTZ which meant I could just send what cash I gathered in an envelope to people and essentially purchase things on the internet without telling my parents. I'm surprised no one ever ripped me off.

It's possible I was just trying to play different games than you were, and having better luck with requirements. I played a lot of strategy games, adventure games, action games in the id Software vein, and so on. I don't know what the more demanding ones were. But my memories of the 90s are that I never had to think about requirements. It wasn't until the 2000s that it became a bigger deal.

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See, I don't even know what a "gaming type PC in the 80s" means, though. I mean I ran tons of stuff on just a straight up "computer" that was leftover from an office. At the time I had almost no clue what was inside it. So many games back then would let you run graphics in modes down to 16 colors, and with sound ranging anywhere from no sound to PC speaker, to adlib/soundblaster/whatever, and so on. I'm not talking about playing games at the bleeding edge, I'm talking about just playing games.

I just meant like a current PC at the time, with a soundcard and enough memory, would cost you in the thousands. Buying a lower end PC would help you fare much better compared to consoles. In my experience, I think this is what caused a lot of the other kids I knew growing up to not play games on the PC because either their parents didn't own one or if they did, their dad or someone wouldn't let them touch it because they didn't want their kids fucking up that new expensive piece of equipment they bought. If any of my friends were playing PC games I had played and enjoyed, it only seemed it was because I was forcing it on them. ;(

It's possible I was just trying to play different games than you were, and having better luck with requirements. I played a lot of strategy games, adventure games, action games in the id Software vein, and so on. I don't know what the more demanding ones were. But my memories of the 90s are that I never had to think about requirements. It wasn't until the 2000s that it became a bigger deal.

I think it was probably just different games, even with the configuration options. Maybe you didn't play as many Sierra games? I remember always having problems with those, even the 16 color ones (not so much the AGI ones though). Long load times, memory running out and the game crashing, or just sluggish. I also remember Coktel Vision and Dynamix games being ridiculously hard to get to run nice and smooth as well as the Kyrandia games giving me a lot of trouble. Really I think if you were playing a lot more of the LucasArts games as your primary adventure source, now that I think about it, the SCUMM system seemed ridiculously well optimized. I don't recall ever having problems with SCUMM games outside of when the The Dig came out, where my 486 was just too slow to play the movies without skipping. I borrowed Full Throttle from someone though around that same time and it ran just fine.

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I played msx and famicom exclusively when I was very little... then I started reading CGW around 1990. My family was never in great financial situation but I was too young to grasp the concept of money (plus I was a spoiled little brat), so I begged my parents to get me the latest and the greatest PCs/upgrades year after year. With gaming PCs and local network setup in my own room, I didn't have a reason to look elsewhere for my gaming fix. It wasn't until xbox/ps2 era that I realized I've been missing out on some great console exclusives. Now I have pretty much every major console but 99% of my gaming is still done on a PC.

Now that I think about it, had I subscribed to Nintendo Power or something instead of CGW, my life might have turned out very different. Maybe even become something other than a programmer!

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PC. I started gaming on the SNES going through Megadrive, N64 and a few other consoles up to the current gen.

I get games for my consoles but once I complete them, I go back to playing on my PC which has a much larger library of good games for it.

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I too grew up pretty poor; my dad was a carpenter who worked from home and my mom didn't work for most of my childhood. We never had a game console, I think my mom widely frowned upon video games, but if we had enough money we would rent a Nintendo console the week before Christmas. We almost never had enough money, though, so I think we only did it about three Christmases, and I'm pretty sure those weren't sequential. Besides playing SNES at my neighbor's house, I played very little console games as a kid. When I was about eight or so we somehow managed to get a PC (I think a Tandy 286) and we would connect to a BBS run by the local newspaper. Through the BBS I would download crazy free games like Gorillas and Snake for QBasic and at some point even learned how to program really simple QBasic programs. I'm not sure if the computer we had was just antiquated or if it was the norm at the time (I'm guessing around 1993, my childhood memories are kind of a scramble), but we had a two-tone computer monitor and I was super-fluent in DOS. Here's a picture of me from that time period:

4008436769_53d0fbfc97_o.jpg

At probably around 13 or 14 we got a better computer and I got into more graphically oriented games, sinking countless hours into Age or Empires and a lot of the Sim games, including SimCity, SimCopter, and Streets of SimCity (fuck the haters, I loved that game). I pretty much continued to be a PC gamer until about 2003 or so, I played a ton of the Thief 1 and 2, Max Payne, the Sims, and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, I even managed to play and beat the Blade Runner adventure game, though I never played a LucasArts adventure game until I started listening to Idle Thumbs. In 2001 my parents inherited a bit of money and I got a laptop, which was the beginning of the end of my PC gaming. Since I couldn't upgrade my laptop's graphics card, I was soon left pretty far behind current game minimum specs and by 2003 I was completely dependent upon consoles for all my gaming needs. I really put the nail in the coffin when I became a Mac guy about five years ago. I've managed to slowly accumulate all the consoles from the past two generations, so I didn't really think twice about abandoning PC gaming until I started listening to GFW Radio back in the 2008, and became really convinced to get into PC gaming when I started listening to Thumbs about a year ago. I bought myself a pretty bitchin' gaming PC in late June, and now I'm pretty solidly converted back to being a PC gamer. During the Steam sale I bought a ton of games, a good number of which I already owned for console, and sold off a few of my console copies.

So, yeah, I'm the prodigal son of PC gaming.

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Though some of the specific details and order of games played is different, the basic overall situation and trajectory described by MysteriousLeg is incredibly similar to mine. I connected to local BBSes right around that same time frame; we also owned a 286 right around that time. In San Diego there was a free weekly magazine called ComputorEdge (spelled that way), and in the back, they had a directory of local BBS numbers. It was rad.

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Thanks for sharing in more detail Chris, and everyone really- Some great stories and memories.

It's funny how your family's financial state when you're growing up has such a big bearing on your gaming experience. I hadn't really thought that much before about how this stuff takes place on hardware... Who gets it and how has a really big formative impact. I guess what I'm trying to say is I really like this thread.

I'm totally aware of how atypical my experience was, and I can confirm that it was the rich kids on the block that had the console games in spades and the poor ones that had Commodores or IBMs to play around with. What was weird about the experience I outlined above was that my family didn't really have money for EITHER, but my parents felt like their hand was forced at that one crucial point. I imagine we also would have had some sort of PC if only my parents had any reason to have one in the house. My Dad used computers at work sometimes, but not in any capacities that would ever send one home.

I think one of the reasons I'm as big of a PC gamer now as I am despite the console-only upbringing was that when I finally saved up enough to bring a powerful machine into the house, it was beast of my own design. I remember being so chafed that my Dad wanted to use it for email and stuff... I probably shouldn't be revealing this, but to this day I'm fairly neurotic about PCs. I kinda freak out about other people using my computer, or even my workstation...

Anyway, even though I was a "Nintendo Kid", the money thing made it so that I got between 2 to 4 games a year- The Birthday and Christmas waypoints for this were HUGE, and I'd spend MONTHS poring over screenshots and articles in Nintendo Power figuring out which game I could conceivably be satisfied with for 6 months. (Fun fact: I stopped celebrating my birthday entirely once I was in control of my own gaming purchases. The holiday literally meant nothing to me beyond having one more game to play.) Those few games I had got learned and beaten in ways that I dream of today.

I actually have some pretty serious backlog problems now that I don't have artificial caps on how many games I can own. The play habits I formed as a kid are proving to be weirdly detrimental as I pump hours into something like Spelunky or League of Legends, trying to learn every corner of games that have no real limits on that aspect due to random design or elements of play, when I should be getting more finite experiences out of the way.

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On average, I've been 50/50, but this has had several major swing periods.

As Chris said, back in the 90s you get a lot of games to run on run-of-the-mill family/work PCs. So adventure games and other miscellaneous software became a staple for me. At the same time, I was a mindless Nintendo fanboy for much of that time, for no real reason. My brother and I convinced our parents to buy us a Super Nintendo, but we never even had that many games for it. By the time the N64 came out, we owned maybe 8 games for the SNES. But renting was much bigger back then - we definitely used the console more for rentals than anything else.

During high school, I got really into PC hardware and programming, and so PC games became much more pre-dominant - mostly strategy games. So for about four years, I was spending money on PC parts and cobbling together "better and better" gaming machines. (In retrospect, not that much money, but probably more than a high schooler should have been spending.)

Then college came, and I realized I had better things to do with my time and money than build computers and curse loudly when they didn't work. PC gaming in the 2000s seemed to be increasingly obsessive about graphics hardware and upgrade cycles, and I just couldn't deal with. So, I largely gave up on that rat race and settled for playing old adventure games again on whatever hardware I had at the time. I also bought a GameCube and that was my main gaming platform for most of that decade. (Although I also had a GBA during my semester abroad.) Later, I also got an Xbox 360 for the more "hardcore" games I was missing by not having a PC.

The last year or so, I've become receptive to the PC again, as it seems the "rat race" aspect has calmed down and adventure games have picked up again. Also online flash-style games (Dragon Age Journeys!) that run on even my Linux work computer are appealing, so that helps.

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I was practically born with a NES controller in my hand, but in the end I have accepted the fact that I am just a PC gamer. My dad got an NES as a gift (I think it was as a joke, I can't remember what the exact circumstances were) when I was about 3. Some of my fondest memories of he and I are playing Dragon Warrior together. Being 5 in 1988 was about the greatest time of my life. All my friends lived either next door or across the street and all we did is fuck around and play NES.

Both of my grandparents had PC's, one an Amiga and the other a C64. Whenever I would visit they mesmerized me in ways I can't really explain. I don't have many memories of the games I would play other than some stupid muppets game on the C64 and an afterburner clone on the amiga. I do, however have many memories of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? on the Amiga.

I think it was in 1992 when our family got our first PC. It was a Pionex 486 @ 25mhz with 4mb of ram. That christmas my grandmother gave me Kings Quest IV and some helicopter game. Aside from the fact that I was lured to the PC even without games this just entangled me even more. Games like the Police Quest series, King's Quest, Return to Zork, X-wing/Tie Fighter, X-com. My first Lucas adventure was Sam & Max courtesy of my best friend/neighbor, then on to the Indy series, then DotT, I didn't play the MI series until later when I got some CD with the first 2 on it (I think it came with Grim Fandango)

I eventually got a Genesis, I'm not sure why I picked it over the SNES... It was probably because of Road Rash. I played the SNES extensively at friends house, some stand-outs being Shadow Run and A Link to the Past. Other than that I don't really feel like anything really inspired me.

At this point Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL and other services were proliferating. My first online-gaming experience was Air Warrior. That consumed my life for sometime. Then Quake came. Before Quake I wasn't a complete FPS freak, but at that time the genre barely existed I guess.

My first exposure to Quake was at a computer camp I went to at Emory Univ. one summer when I was in 6th grade, I think... The Quake demo (as had WC2) came out at that point. All I can say is that it was awesome, and that was probably the nerdiest point of my life. I still had the now shitty Pionex, even though it had been upgraded to capacity (my dad had put in a dx2 @ 66mhz and 40mb of ram (absurd at that time) and for one christmas I got a 1 gig hard drive. I'm not sure how much time passed but eventually my family got a new PC. I think the first thing I did was install Quake and Airwarrior. Quakeworld was around, TF had just come out, oh and then Fallout. It was glorious. And then Tribes came and blew my mind even further.

It wasn't really until I got my PS1 that I think I started to become more of a console player. Other than Dragon Warrior, I didn't really have any exposure to JRPG's. The N64/PS1&2 era was about the prime for me in terms of consoles. I was heavily entrenched in that. Metal Gear, FF7&8, GT, GTA, Zelda, Goldeneye/PD, etc. My PC menu just consisted of CS & Tribes.

After that I feel like it went downhill for me. I first bought a Gamecube and eventually an x-box playing halo, zelda, & the like. I began to play the PC more once HL2 came out and it just snowballed after that. My last real console time was spent in college playing Time Splitters and Guitar Hero. Oh and I did buy an SNES my last semester and played through Breath of Fire as well as a bunch of other games I felt like I missed out on.

I bought a 360 for GTAIV when it first came out and to this day that is all I have except for 2 xbox live games that I bought. I have pondered over buying a ps3 for Drakes Fortune and Metal Gear, but I haven't found the motivation yet.

There's something about the PC that makes me feel more comfortable. It is certainly more immersive. I was also introduced in to modding/mapmaking via quakED and perhaps even more influenced by a turn based strat by the name of Soldiers at War.

As of the past few years I really just play TF2 and games of the past (I'm currently replaying Deus Ex)

I totally forgot to mention my MMO background... but it's probably not worth mentioning (unless you count Airwarrior/Aces High/WWIIOL... oh and Starwars Galaxies)

I have had to come to terms to the fact that I am really just a FPS gamer but I think that the market is just saturated with them, mostly on the PC.

I started out with adventure games, sims and RTS' and in this day and age there isn't a whole lot of that out there. It's a shame.

I will say this though, if I never got my hands on QuakeED... I don't have any idea what I would be doing for a living. I'm not in the gaming industry, but in architecture. I would like modding to remain a hobby.

With that said, I don't feel like I am missing a whole lot with consoles. I surely don't have the motivation to sit on the couch and go at it, I just wish I did.

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I didn't own a computer until 2000 (I was eleven then,) so growing up, the only games I played were on consoles. The first time I can remember playing a game was Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! I was about three, and my sister had to pretty much hold my hands on the controller before I could beat Glass Joe. Gaming didn't start eating up my free time until I got a Playstation.

It was my sister's originally, and the only games I remembered us having were Gex the Gecko and 2xtreme, neither of which were very good. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 was a revelation, though. We played just the demo for hours. Later on I picked up games like Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy Tactics and Metal Gear Solid, and I was pretty much hooked forever.

For a long time, I was pretty much exclusively a Console Gamer, with a handful of exceptions (Everquest, Baldur's Gate, Civilization and Sim City,) but in the last couple of years I've shifted a lot more towards the PC, definitely due to Steam. I haven't bought a hard copy of a PC game in years, but I have almost a hundred games on Steam.

I have a Playstation 3 and a 360, and I think I pretty much split time between them and the PC equally.

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When I was young, I never really sought out ways to play games. Being 18 right now, I grew up in the 90s. I dont really remember what kind of computer we had when I was little, but there is this one game we had on our PC that was some dumb game that I can't remember the name of, where I had to nail shingles onto a roof, and if I got the timing off, the character would accidentally hit his thumb and he would get hurt. This was when I was around 2 years old. I think.

After that, there were many years where I didn't really own any games. I remember going to my friend's house a lot and playing his SNES (which I only knew of as the thing with the fun Ninja Turtles game.

I can't really remember which came first, but at around 9 years old, we got a Nintendo 64, and I also got a Gameboy Color. I used to play Pokemon Blue for hours on end, and I must have beat it more times than I can remember. On the N64, the one game that really stands out as taking most of my system playtime was Ocarina of Time. When I first played it, I guess I was still young enough to not get how to proceed past the starting area, so I used to just run around and find rupees. At some point, I finally understood how to play it, and my friend and I would spend countless hours trying to figure out how to get through the various temples (FUCK the Water Temple!).

As I was growing up, we never really had a computer that was good enough to play new games. Well, actually I was able to play Need For Speed Underground when it first came out, but after that, new games quickly outgrew our bad PC. I played a fair amount of Age of Empires 2, Starcraft, and Warcraft 3.

So yeah, up until about 6 years ago when I got my DS when it first came out, I had been a kind of behind-the-times gamer. My family got a gamecube right around when the Xbox 360 was coming out, and I got a 360 a couple of years ago. Around that time was when I first started to really keep track of the gaming industry and know about new games that were coming out. Until about a month ago when I got my Macbook Pro, PC gaming has always been this sort of forbidden fruit for me. Now that I can actually run current PC games, I'm so happy because I can finally access all of these games that I heard about through podcasts and such over the years but never really got to play. I just put Windows 7 on bootcamp on my Macbook, so I can play all of those awesome games I bought during that most recent Steam sale (Hell yeah, THQ pack!). Not that Steam for Mac isn't out now, but I find that games still run better on Windows.

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I am almost entirely a console gamer. The only recent games I have played on PC were Kingdom of Loathing and Crysis: Warhead. I am not fond of PC playing, regardless of the responsiveness of mouse and keyboard, I much prefer the laid back nature of console playing (I sit at a desk and computer all day, the last thing I want to do when I get home is repeat that experience).

I started out on a BBC Micro Computer in 1984, my Dad was a teacher at a school that got closed down so he got the parts for cheap. I pretty much stuck with that until around 1990. Me and a couple of friends did some monkeying around with programming but the time it took to create stuff just bored me. It is funny because I just finished reading a book called Extra Life and I can draw a lot of parallels with it. More specifically when the exact point was that I could identify not being interested in making games from an architectural perspective and only interested in games from an aesthetic point of view. It was about the time that I first started playing the NES at my buddies' place. Soon after I got a Megadrive with Altered Beast, Sonic and Quackshot.

Very much like everyone else here, I didn't get more than one or two games a year so it took hours of studying Mean Machines SEGA to decide which one I was going to go for. I become obsessed with bullet hell type games and hard as nails arcade ports. I was living in Portugal where the arcade scene was reasonably vibrant and would practice at home before going to the arcades to show off. By contrast my friends who had mucked about on the BBC, got into the Amiga (and introduced me to Speedball 2, Secret of Monkey Island and Chaos Engine) then PC (introducing me to Dune 2) and much later went on into programming.

My parents got a PC in 1995 (pentium 133) and for about two years I played PC games until the number of patches and updates required to play anything current turned me off gaming until near the end 1999.

For the next couple of years I played Dreamcast and Neo Geo Pocket colour exclusively until my parents bought me a laptop to work on my novel. It was then that I played Heroes of Might and Magic 3. I loved it but it was way too time consuming so in the end I had to delete it from my hard drive as I would literally end up playing for 8 hours straight without a concept of time.

Since then it has been console only and I aim to keep it that way.

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