I would say I am as “Old As Dirt,” but Jim Hunter has that mug on his desk. With age hopefully yields experience. The gaming industry is a big business now, but it didn’t start that way. Gaming transended from pinball machines to PC's and was counter to the business culture but it has come a long way since then. You young gamers may have grown up on console gaming but I started out on an Apple IIC (circa 1985).
The “C” in Apple IIC stood for Color Graphics, Oooooooo. It was pretty advanced for its time but this computer didn’t even have a hard disk. It loaded games via a 5 ¼” floppy disk drive. It even had a MOUSE! Now that was advanced because PC’s have had GUI (Graphical User Interface) since 1973 with the Xerox ALTO but the PC mouse wasn’t popular until Windows 3.0 GUI in 1990. I wonder what happened to the GUI for the 17 previous years? No matter, the Apple IIC had some pretty advanced graphics for its days especially since business PC’s were not commonly color until several years later.
My favorite game on the IIC was Mario Brothers I believe. I didn’t play it a lot because I had two young kids and was going to night school, but it was fun to play when I had the time. The kids, although young, loved the video games. The Mario Bro’s game has stood the test of time - it is still popular.
Several computers later, when I finally dropped the dollars down for a new PC, I got a one with a spec like this:
Intel 386 SX/16MHz
2MB RAM Windows 3.1
42MB hd(84MB using Stacker)
5-1/4" floppy
14" SVGA monitor
Panasonic KPX-1180? Dot-Matrix B/W
Now gaming would take on an new level of performance.
Next I will talk about some of the original games that became famous.