Posted October 04, 2011
18 years ago (wow, has it been that long?) I was being taken by my grandparents to Sluis, a Dutch border town where they would buy cheap butter and such things. To "reward" me for going with them (mostly to help carry the stuff to the car), they took me to a newsagent where I could pick anything I wanted.
You had the regular Belgian comic books (Suske & Wiske, Jommeke, etc.) and all sorts of magazines to pick from. I remember my eye catching one cover in particular: Indiana Jones on the front of a magazine called PC Review along with two coverdisks which made my eyes light up - half a year before, my father had bought a PC for my stepbrother because he was flunking in IT class. At the time I was 13, my knowledge of English quite limited, and yet there I was, asking my grandparents to buy this thick glossy magazine, Harrison Ford with his whip out, catwoman behind him, on a red backdrop along with the full version of a game called Ancients.
So I took it home and browsed through it and ... wow. I had been reading the official Nintendo magazine before that, but this .... this just blew every console in existence away. No childish platform games, no crappy looking arcade action - no, you had creepy horror games (BloodNET & Alone in the Dark), you had brilliant adventure games (Fate of Atlantis), you had amazingly realistic flight sims, strategy games, etc. etc. Gone were my plans to beg for a Super Nintendo console. Suddenly, it seemed so simple, so childish, so silly compared to what the PC had on offer. This was a machine for MEN, not kids! Even the rather average RPG Ancients (which I still have a soft spot for), gave me many hours of fun so I couldn't wait to try these other, greater, games!
And so, a month and a half later, after having read every page of the PC Review issue (the only one I ever bought) several times over, I stepped into a newsagent after finishing the last day of exams at school. Dark outside, drizzling rain and quite cold, 3 days before Christmas, yet I was determined to sample another magazine. And there it was: a black cover, two cover disks, a picture of the Star Trek's Enterprise and a comic strip panel. I was sold - handing over my 300 Belgian franks (€7.5 these days or $10) I eagerly took the game home. It turned out this was the very first issue of ... PC GAMER.
On the cover disks were several demos that turned my life around - Krusty's Super Funhouse was a fun and smooth platform game, but the real games to blow me away, were Micro Machines (the demo having offered dozens of fun hours with me and my friend in co-op mode) and ... Beneath A Steel Sky. A game which would become my favorite game and still is. After all the sickingly cute Nintendo games, a dark brooding adventure game with twisted humour, violence and gore felt incredibly appealing and the game did not disappoint. The uniquely-made-for-PC-Gamer demo made me want the complete game more than I ever wanted anything else. And so a new PC gamer was born - me!
18 years later, and looking back, I get a fuzzy feeling, remembering how I felt when, month after month, I discovered new games that kept blowing me away. I now own over 2500 PC games (on disk, CD or digitally bought) and own every issue from PC Gamer from issue 0 (a rare test issue I managed to get my hands on) to issue 120 and these issues gave me a wealth of knowledge before the Internet took over.
So this is my story - who else has some?
You had the regular Belgian comic books (Suske & Wiske, Jommeke, etc.) and all sorts of magazines to pick from. I remember my eye catching one cover in particular: Indiana Jones on the front of a magazine called PC Review along with two coverdisks which made my eyes light up - half a year before, my father had bought a PC for my stepbrother because he was flunking in IT class. At the time I was 13, my knowledge of English quite limited, and yet there I was, asking my grandparents to buy this thick glossy magazine, Harrison Ford with his whip out, catwoman behind him, on a red backdrop along with the full version of a game called Ancients.
So I took it home and browsed through it and ... wow. I had been reading the official Nintendo magazine before that, but this .... this just blew every console in existence away. No childish platform games, no crappy looking arcade action - no, you had creepy horror games (BloodNET & Alone in the Dark), you had brilliant adventure games (Fate of Atlantis), you had amazingly realistic flight sims, strategy games, etc. etc. Gone were my plans to beg for a Super Nintendo console. Suddenly, it seemed so simple, so childish, so silly compared to what the PC had on offer. This was a machine for MEN, not kids! Even the rather average RPG Ancients (which I still have a soft spot for), gave me many hours of fun so I couldn't wait to try these other, greater, games!
And so, a month and a half later, after having read every page of the PC Review issue (the only one I ever bought) several times over, I stepped into a newsagent after finishing the last day of exams at school. Dark outside, drizzling rain and quite cold, 3 days before Christmas, yet I was determined to sample another magazine. And there it was: a black cover, two cover disks, a picture of the Star Trek's Enterprise and a comic strip panel. I was sold - handing over my 300 Belgian franks (€7.5 these days or $10) I eagerly took the game home. It turned out this was the very first issue of ... PC GAMER.
On the cover disks were several demos that turned my life around - Krusty's Super Funhouse was a fun and smooth platform game, but the real games to blow me away, were Micro Machines (the demo having offered dozens of fun hours with me and my friend in co-op mode) and ... Beneath A Steel Sky. A game which would become my favorite game and still is. After all the sickingly cute Nintendo games, a dark brooding adventure game with twisted humour, violence and gore felt incredibly appealing and the game did not disappoint. The uniquely-made-for-PC-Gamer demo made me want the complete game more than I ever wanted anything else. And so a new PC gamer was born - me!
18 years later, and looking back, I get a fuzzy feeling, remembering how I felt when, month after month, I discovered new games that kept blowing me away. I now own over 2500 PC games (on disk, CD or digitally bought) and own every issue from PC Gamer from issue 0 (a rare test issue I managed to get my hands on) to issue 120 and these issues gave me a wealth of knowledge before the Internet took over.
So this is my story - who else has some?
