Please don't murder flame me for self-promoting here, because that's really not my intention. Back in late 2011, I started this little retrospective of what was basically my life story as told through the games I was playing at the time (along with other generally geeky eccentricities), but life eventually got in the way, and I abandoned it for a few years.

But then the GOG Insomnia Twitch stream happened, and I met a bunch of cool GOG folks who inspired me to get back to it. It's a fun little thing to write, and I hope it's fun to read. Which is why I'm posting it here, even though forums scare me. They tend to get angry for inexplicable reasons, but the GOG Community (at least so far as I've seen in the Twitch chats) is aces, so I'm hoping you good folks in the forums will also be the exception to the rule of Horrible Internet People.

I don't publicize my stuff much, and most of my friends aren't lifelong gamers, so I don't get a lot of feedback with this sort of thing. What I'm interested in is other people's stories, really. The games you guys were playing when Things Happened in life, or some memory associated with this game or that game. It's interesting how my memory really is closely tied to whatever games I was playing at the time, and going back to old games is equal parts rose-tinted glasses and bitter remembrance, not just of the games, but of whatever was going on in my life at the time.

Nostalgia is weird that way.

Anyway, here's the link. There's a little intro and three "chapters" so far, which I'll be adding to every couple of days until it's done. If this is terrible violation of forum etiquette or something, I apologize in advance. Please don't stab my in my tender bits or anything.

Life Bytes: Growing Up Geek In The '80s
http://www.coqdiddles.com/2011/12/29/life-bytes/

I'll read through your link a bit later, still watching the stream - but I was the guy prompting you to start posting on the forums in twitch chat when you mentioned finding a fondness for the community. So welcome!

Sounds thought provoking and there's definitely a few milestones in my life in which I can directly relate to whatever I was playing, I had a rough childhood and gaming was my escapism. I look forward to reading it.

And here I am trying to forget the 80s! :P

Though I do miss endless nights of Aztec on my Apple//.

*murder flames *

i grew up in the 90's though with mario and sonic and the ps1 and where everything was extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeme !!!!111 eleventyone

the 80's by comparison are ...quaint lay of the eye of newt booze tinyP

I didn't become a worthless drunk until the late 90s.

You too, huh? I grew up in the '80s, but became an adult in the mid '90s (21 in '96). That was when The Age Of Alcohol truly began.

This won't stay in the '80s. It'll eventually go up through to present day, which means I'll have to pass through the X-TREME '90s X-TREME!

muh-muh-muh-MONSTER KILL!

And so on...

XD Thank god you didn't get pissed at my little rant there. Thanks for the link and I will for sure check it out.

i never touched alcohol the age of alcohol is a non starter for me

I touched it in college, mostly. Because college.

Now days, on the rare occasion when I actually have a drink, I just get sleepy and start looking for a place to lie down and take a nap.

Can't bring myself to click on a link taking me to a site named coqdiddles lol

Good luck with it tho :)

It's actually more of a word nerd URL, so you should be safe. BE NOT AFRAID! :)

How about early 90s? Sorry, that's just when some memorable stuff game-wise was going on for me.

Some shipboard memories stand out. We had recently gotten a 486 of some flavor (maybe a Compaq?) onboard in our small shop. No great shakes but me and another game dork modified it a bit for a long trip away from our home port. I snagged the Ad Lib card from my rig at home and also brought along a full stereo component system, so we were hooked-up on the sound front. He brought the joystick and a few other goodies.

He obtained Doom from the guys in the IT shop (they also had a small network setup for multiplayer, which they let us try briefly) and we had that on the machine along with Simcity, World Circuit, Red Storm Rising, and a couple others. We had very little hard drive space, what with making room for that pesky Navy shit that we had to have on there, so we got a few of the games to automatically unpack using DriveSpace in a batch file. Managed to squeeze a couple more games in that way.

Doom on-board a ship. Hoo boy. Actually, this is probably true with any first-person game: the eyes and the inner ears come to some serious disagreements, with the result being a queasy stomach in no time. I'd get in maybe 20 minutes before having to run outside to right myself. Didn't help that Doom has this sort of sway as you're running around, and it surely does NOT match the timing of that big ship's slow roll.

For World Circuit, we'd key in the names of the previous season's lineup and then race "against" them and each other. That game had sort of a ghost car deal so one player would run the race and then the other would encounter his run when he took the next turn. We'd "accidentally" wipe out the first guy's run so even if he had won he'd end up losing. Mostly it was our incompetence behind the virtual wheel, treating it more like bumper cars. We'd crank the stereo up loud for that trademark 1990s F1 sound.

As I get older, I'm not really associating games to any particular time in life. These days it's more difficult to eke out a few hours to play, and as often as not it's on a game where the involvement is on the lower scale. But those earlier years, from 18 to around 30...

Wow, thanks for that story. I'd never thought about the disorienting factor of trying to play a FPS on a ship with competing motion before. Really, that's very interesting. The older FPS games like Doom had a lot of sway, so I imagine it could get pretty nauseating pretty quickly!

That's an interesting read. Also I identify with you, except I grew up in the 90s (best decade ever) and was born in '86, but pretty much the same after that xD Specially the "playing games with bad graphics" part ='D Waiting for chapter 4 ;)