I bought a Sega Master System II sometime between the ages of 9 and 14. I played a lot of Alex Kidd and Sonic 2 and Bart vs. the Space Mutants, and rented Mortal Kombat and Chuck Rock quite a bit. My best friend at the time had a NES, so I played a decent amount of Super Mario Bros and Adventure Island. I knew some kids with the TMNT NES game, as well.
As the 90s rolled on I played a fair bit of Mortal Kombat in the arcade. And then I scored myself a Sega Mega Drive 2 (aka Genesis 2), and played a lot of Mortal Kombat (DULLARD, ABACABB) and MK3 (ACUBUBAD, BADLADCRUD, CRALAUx2). I also rented NBA Jam T.E. quite a bit, because it had the best cheat codes of any game ever. Some family friends also had Ecco, Bubsy, and Desert Strike. During the 16-bit era one of my best friends had a SNES, so we spent a lot of time being beaten at Killer Instinct and Bomberman, and co-playing Secret of Mana.
Then when I was around 16 or 17 I bought a PC, second-hand from one of my friends. It was a Pentium 100 with 32MB RAM, and already had Quake installed. It also had, or we soon acquired, Grand Theft Auto, Red Alert, Worms+, and Carmageddon. Previously I'd played a fair bit of Jetpack and Scorched Earth and Wacky Wheels with another friend, on his 386, so I grabbed copies of those too.
Mostly I played Quake.
I was the first in my group to add +mlook to my autoexec.cfg (I used MOUSE2 for +forward, X/V for strafe, Z for backpedal, and D/C for swim up/down). I used to pwn the Omicron bots, even before pwning was a thing. I recorded demos, some of which I still see floating around the youtubes from time to time. I used Qoole and Worldcraft to create maps and levels. I got a QuakeC compiler (not a standard one, the syntax was different; maybe qfcc?) and created my own mods -- monster-seeking rockets, lobbed rockets, laser pointers, monsters that hated other types of monsters more than the player, ... I also played the CTF and Team Fortress mods back in the days, but because this predated reliable internet it was strictly LAN-only.
During that decade I also caused irreparable damage to my right (mouse) wrist, and have been using an ergonomic keyboard and trackball ever since. I can't play tennis any more, either. Thanks idSoftware.
After a couple of years Half-Life came out, so I gradually migrated from Quake. I finished the main game, and Opposing Force, and P.O.V (the one where you played as a vort). Never got around to getting/playing Blue Shift, for some reason. Scientist Hunt was a hoot. I kept hacking up levels with Worldcraft. I also switched up to TFC, and messed around with Counter-Strike. I moved to the US for the better part of 2001 and managed to play some real online matches, on real cable internet, which was brilliant.
Then when I came back to Australia and settled in to finish my degree, I fell in with a group who were quite into Operation Flashpoint (Cold War Crisis and Resistance) and some of the Delta Force games -- Blackhawk Down, Joint Operations (Typhoon Rising and Escalation). There was seriously nothing greater than all night "game on" sessions, slogging through protracted multiple-hour Flashpoint missions, or trying out some of the insane Joint Ops missions from the net. I continued my thing of hacking the buggery out of all my favourite games, acquiring a terrain/texture editor for Flashpoint, and NILE for Joint Ops.
However not long afterwards I graduated, and got a job, and had kids. I played WoW a bit, but I wanted a sandbox world while everyone else wanted me to play an RPG. Some time in between I'd acquired an N64 with the Star Wars pod racing game, and bought/finished Ocarina of Time. I can't remember what happened to that console. Then my wife bought me a PS2, and I played The Getaway (which I still haven't bothered finishing) and Return of the King and We <3 Katamari. And Gran Turismo 3 & 4, and a bunch of SingStar games, etc. However I never had much time to spend on the playstation, especially after having kids.
Then, relatively recently, we bought a Wii. So now I play Mario Kart Wii and Super Mario Bros Wii and some old classics from the Wii store with my daughters, which is great, and dream of a time when I can afford to buy a computer relevant to this decade and try out some of the new big games that are already old.
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