Long post but the memories gaming brings are important to me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm turning 35 in a month and I swear none of us (apart from a select few older than me) are old enough to truly have been gamers in Gen 1. I recall my first ever console being a Mega Drive when I was 4...
That said:
Generation One : Atari 2600, Intellvision, Vectrex, None of those. Infamous American Game Crash !
This is the only one I've had any experience of as we had one of these in the cupboard I dusted it off and only knowing an old CRT screen up to the late stage of playing Halo 3 with Paul and Dan I had no problems hooking it up. It was awful but then what console from the late 70s to very early 80s wasn't?
Generation Two : NES, Sega Master System, Commodore 64, Amstrad. None of those. DOS, you disgusting console philistines. None, Gameboy.
Lots to choose from here. NES I never had, never had a SNES either but went back and played them afterwards as an adult and loved both. Master System also had great titles though many of the ones I love spring to mind as re-released or updated and re-released on Megadrive too. If you didn't love playing DOS games in school, you had no joy in your childhood - POP! POP! Also Gameboy! This spanned a long period up to the GBA, of course the various iterations were popular later on. Though nothing beat the Brick for when a sibling fight got out of hand
Generation Three : Sega Mega Drive/ Genesis, SNES, CD-i, Neo- Geo, TurboGrafx. None of those. Didn't you hear me before ? DOS.
I had the Megadrive 2, I loved it. I brought a SNES as an adult, old school FF games, Zelda, other RPG games we never even thought of on SNES tough call. Of course, I still played DOS games in school but I recall them getting a bit finer at this point. Never had a Neo-Geo, CDI or TurboGrafx but none lived past this generation for a reason
Generation Four: Atari Jaguar, PSONE, Sega Saturn, N64. PC baby !
This was the life. 2 years after the PS1's release in 1997, FF7 gets released and my Mum finally began to cave to the idea that I really wanted this and it would be massively different to the Atari Jaguar my brother had brought himself that I occassionally got to play on. My friends, my mother was not a rich mother being a single mum working multiple jobs to put food on the table. It was not until Christmas 1999 she relented and agreed I could have one. I wasn't allowed an easter or birthday present in return but finally I was allowed one. The first game I ever got brand new with celophane on was FF8 at the same time, a game I had been pestering my mum for for an entire year at this point, 2 if you count my obsession with FF7's adverts. My older cousin was a bit miffed that my mum was buying his PS1 second hand from him for me despite buying a brand new one for my younger nephews along with an additional controller, memory card and 3 new release games the christmas before! (they are 7 and 9 years younger than me respectively). So he threw in extra controllers, memory cards and all his games for me. I ended up with what I consider the greatest game lineup for a console when you first get it, aged 13, the likes of FF7 + FF8, Tenchu Stealth Assassins, Resident Evil 1 & 2, Gran Turismo 1 and 2 (he had brought 2 specifically for me but told my mum he had it for ages), Tomb Raider 1, 2 and 3, Grand Theft Auto 1, 2 and London, Colony Wars? All of these along with classics like Spyro, Crash and Gex. Overshare? Perhaps but you have no idea how much I loved and still do love my cousin for this generosity. Apart from Colony Wars Red Sun, FF9 and Front Mission 3 I can't recall buying a new PS1 game ever.
N64 was a classic at my friends house. How many hours we spent sat on the floor of his bedroom playing on his N64? Me, him, his neighbour and little brother... God help us it was amazing. I loved it. I never owned one but I learnt that if you wanted to cause a rage, you secretly set your character as Oddjob when your mates went to get drinks/use loo. Then run around with the golden gun shooting them in the dick. I think this was my first real time trolling and I was in love like Cartman secretly is with Kyle the whole time whilst crying with laughter and pain as they beat me up for it. FLAWLESS VICTORY! But smurf Turok 64, smurf that game in it's god damn awful arse.
Lastly, PC. Windows 95 and 98 had changed everything with PC gaming. I was always looking forward to travelling to my older brothers as he had one of these. I hadn't got any games until I was in my final few years of high school. But I had the demos for Theme Hospital, Star Craft and many others. I can't begin to tell you how much I knew the demo level of Star Craft from opening load screen to final pixel. When I eventually was given cracked copies of it, brood wars, counter strike, diablo 2, age of empires, fallout 1 and 2... I actually cried with joy and at first found Star Craft a disappointment because the tactic I had used so methodically with the demo of building a huge creeping army of siege tanks and vultures backed up by SCVs wasn't exactly possible to use the whole way through. Sad I know but that was the joys of growing up poor
Generation Five : Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox. PC Master Race !
I had a dreamcast, I had 3 in fact they all died on me, they were second hand, one had died on another person but persistence and care got it working again. But god damn it Soul Calibur 2 was the greatest beat 'em up ever and I had to master characters to win the daily contests at the local video game store where they had a Dreamcast pod and the only game we ever wanted to play was SC2. Thankfully this was in the days when Independent video game stores were a thing. I played the Gamecube there and aside from a few titles (FF Crystal Chronicles was it? and PN.03 I wasn't much endeared to it. PS2 was the a damn given for me, I had the old S3000 fat boy. Good thing I did too because I can repair that with my eyes closed these days and it means it still works to this date. I got it as soon as I could I'd spent so many hours in love with my precious FF games at this point I couldn't think of anything other than a PS2. I remember doing all kinds of stupid challenges, MGS2 European Extreme being one of them. I eventually finished that but I won't tell you how often I saved or how often I failed. It essentially spawned though my love of doing things the hard way.
That was until I met Master Chief. The Master Chief. Halo on the Xbox, sold me. I didn't care how big the controllers were, how smurfed up the game run was, I wanted Master Chief in my life RIGHT then. Halo, Halo 2, Mechwarrior, Jaeger (closest I could get to the Colony Wars Games), Phantom Crash (Gran Turismo mixed with a Mech Combat game, mixed with a Japanese Skateboarder punk cool). These were the games I played the most on my Xbox I was never online with Xbox Original so never knew that LASO was a thing, but I did it for Halo 2 when I needed additional challenge.
Did I mention PC last time and my tears of joy at getting games given to me for free by the geeky guy who may as well have been Gandalf to my young, impressionable mind? I built my first PC from junk parts around this time, it sounded like an entire squadron of fighter jets taking off. It overheated and died more times than I care to count, it didn't always like to recognize the zombie medley of parts it had. But it was mine and it worked. Cue many more tears, tears of frustration, joy and rage. It was also the time I first learnt how to rip a CD pre-Windows Media Player.
Generation Six: XBox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, None PC, None PSP/ DS.
Following the Xbox dominating my life and pushing my PS2 to the side like I was in favour of my younger nephews (ooh darkness my old friend!) I knew I had to continue down the Xbox trend. This was the very first home console I had brought with my own money brand spanking new. Everything else had been a discard/hand-me-down or the like. I went big, I brought the 20GB hard-drive option Halo 3 and Gears. I was a poor student working part time in a video game store. I couldn't buy many games. Thankfully Dan and Paul were ahead of me on Halo and with them, Hux and a medley of others (Special mention to Kari who got secret late night chats with me and Paul, where we were DICKS to her "Turn Around... Bright Eyes" on Cold Storage being a firm favourite of ours or The "Can we time our kill hits perfectly to get her every respawn with these ghosts?" turned out, yes, yes we could!) the 6 months I had just 2 games didn't feel too bad.... Then everything changed with Mass Effect, Gears 3 and Minecraft. Call Of Duty Modern Warfare and it's sequels also provided an endearing change of pace. I was better at COD than Halo 3 but Halo Reach, Something about that DMR sang in my blood and I was genuinely good. I remember changing from a CRT to LCD TV during the Halo 3 days and realising the game could display an entire head where before I had been sniping at a single pixel on my screen. It was mind blowing.
I played most of the critical games on the PS3 because family members all had them including my now not youngest nephew but my sister's eldest child. If he ever misbehaved I got to "confiscate" his PS3. Poor family, poor solutions.
Now I'm hyping up the poor family, poor gamer a bit I confess, by this point I was an adult who was working 30+ hours a week. I wasn't earning great but I was earning. I was still a PC fiend but my dear old zombie could just about run Open Office needed to do my classwork in college. I couldn't afford to upgrade it so the PC games were all the same. It was about this time I got addicted to a browser game though as it never needed me to install anything.
I later got my hands on a Laptop or two, or three (one literally melted down internally on my lap it got so hot. We're talking over 100degrees C internally AFTER it had been off for an hour or more). They were all second hand, never new. So always trout from the get go. But they were mine and games wise at least I was self sufficient. I did get a DS it was second hand and I remember trading in my trusty GBA SP for it. Big mistake as it was one of those made from Bakelite in the first generation. The hinges on that thing became a fused mess of superglue in months. Still it worked and up to the point I was gifted a DS lite because one of my elder nephews broke my DS I had many fond memories of the thing.
Generation Seven: Wii U, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch. None PC Master Race !, None PSP Vita/ 3DS.
By this point I was PC Master Race. I had built a couple of good PC's by this stage and brought better laptops including some brand new. God knows what I believed I was going to play on a £450 laptop but I was going to play it. That said most of the games I loved at the time were 10 - 15 years old and so some worked. Through work I was gifted a 3DS (I was the key sales person responsible for making Nintendo's midnight launch on oxford street not a withering failure) direct from Nintendo and got to meet the directors of Nintendo Europe so they could thank me for my hard work. I had been awake at this point for 2.5 days and just wanted sleep I think I mumbled my way through a "you're so kind" and then stood there looking gormless. PSP was without doubt the better platform than 3DS, even Zelda 64 re-made couldn't save it from that but I had one at least. In the end I sold it to pay for a night out drinking. I think I got the better end of that deal.
I'm now firmly in the PC camp. I built a half decent gaming rig a couple of years back. It chugs a bit when I demand it plays GTA V or other newer games with high demands on a cheap PC, but it does run... eventually and mostly stable. I'm surprised the number of Mods on my average Rimworld playthrough (not because base game is dull, but I love what modders bring to the table) doesn't kill it but I've only had it refuse to generate a world and run once and that turned out to be conflict errors. I'm not ready to make a fresh one just yet I think I have a year or so in this rig still... (A lie, I want to build a water cooled nightmare machine, but financially I'm not ready to bust my arsehole on that because everything will need to be new and carefully thought out to future proof me for at least 3 years if not longer if the right upgrades remain optionable) but I'm aware it's on borrowed time as a competent gaming rig. I've debated getting a console to play games with family and friends but most of my friends have bigger and better PCs than I do and family is over-rated. Not to mention, my video game taste has become more RPG/Colony Sim single player type than before. I just wish my Steam/Epic games friends would pipe up more about playing together... you know you're on here reading this! PIPE UP! I'd love to go build a farm together or install a FPS and get shot in the face repeatedly with you.
