Memory Lane - Part 1

Hello again my dearest readers!

This is the first part in a new ongoing series I'm going to do about my formative gaming experiences. Welcome to Memory Lane. In this article I cover my earliest gaming memories up to the first major milestone, the game Doom.

Let's have at it!

My earliest memories of playing video games were of playing the games on my dad's computer back in the late 1980s. My dad was the quintessential computer hobbyist type of that era. He had subscriptions to computer magazines and at one point even built a television from scratch using parts and instructions he got from some mail-order catalog.

That was all before I came along, of course. There is still a box of old Atari computer magazines in the attic though, to this day.

I don't remember exactly what kind of computer it was only that it eventually had a 286 hertz processor and a 2400 baud modem used to connect to what was then known as the Internet, a collection of bulletin boards, email lists and public and private databases. The processor was very fast for the time and allowed the computer to render graphics with ease, making it the ideal gaming machine.

My older sister used to the computer to log in to BBSes to play her favorite games, text-based multi-user dungeons known as MUDs, where players would congregate, create characters and level them up fighting goblins and the like while socializing using the game's chat function.

MUDs were a mystery to me because I couldn't read yet and didn't care to play with other people. I played games like Miner 2049er and Ghostbusters. I was really into Ghostbusters but I was terrible at the game.

All I remember of it was that it had an overhead view of the city, you played as the car, Ecto-1, and the goal was to drive around and avoid the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I could never make it off that first screen.

I also played Q*Bert, a port of an arcade game that was popular during the golden age of arcade games. This was a single-screen game where you controlled a funny looking character who had to climb down a pyramid made of blocks. Each time you jumped onto a block it would change color and the goal was to change all the blocks while avoiding the snakes that bounced around after you.

By the Christmas season of 1989 my dad's father, my grandfather, gifted our family with a Nintendo Entertainment System, which came with a copy of Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt. My sister and I spent a lot of time getting to know that one but for a long time it was the only game we owned for the system.

At that time there were a few places in town where we could go to rent movies on video cassette tapes to watch on our video cassette recording and playback device, called a VCR. These video tape rental stores also had NES games to rent.

Sometimes I got to rent a game when we went and I often rented stuff like Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a platformer starring Bugs Bunny and other Looney Toons characters, or Super Mario Bros. 2, a Mario-themed reskin of an obscure Japanese platformer called Doki Doki Panic!.

By 1990 the shareware revolution on PC was exploding and I was playing a game on dad's computer that was a lot like Super Mario Bros. only made with a distinctly Western feel. It was a game about a little boy with a magic football helmet that allowed him to travel, via his imagination, to strange new worlds. It was called Commander Keen.

Commander Keen was a colorful platformer featuring maze-like levels to explore and Pepsi cans for power-ups. It had been made possible by technology developed by John Carmack that allowed the level to be rendered smoothly on screen without any hitches, so the screen could scroll like in Super Mario Bros.

Commander Keen was kind of America's answer to Super Mario Bros. in a way. Keen was published by a company known as Apogee who also published a lot of other games at the time, like Bio Menace and Duke Nukem, both 2D action platformer games.

During the fall of 1990 one of the local video rental stores went out of business and had a fire sale. My parents were able to snap up a lot of NES games on the cheap and gave them to me and my sister that Christmas.

Suddenly we had a library of games for the NES. I got to know Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon and Lolo's Adventure 2 quite well. I never completed any of those games.

Then my parents bought The Legend of Zelda, a vast adventure game that came with a large fold-out map of its world and a guide book that led you through the first dungeon. We spent a lot of time with Zelda, and Super Mario Bros. 3 when that came out, but I would not complete either of those games until I was a teenager.

Meanwhile on the PC things were still happening at an alarming rate. The people who had made Commander Keen had made a new game, set in a first person view, about killing Nazis. The game was graphic for its time but my parents did not seem to mind me playing it.

Wolfenstein 3D got a lot of play at my house by pretty much everyone except for my mother. She wasn't much on video games in general though she would occasionally play a bit of Super Mario Bros. My cousin and I used to tease my sister for not wanting to shoot the German shepherds in Wolf3D.

I used to have those old floppy discs that had the shareware games on them, each of them labelled with titles like Blake Stone, Soltrio Solitaire, Wolf3D, Keen, Catacombs 3D, etc. Even though I haven't owned a computer with a floppy disc drive in probably over a decade I still sometimes I wish I had those discs, just as keepsakes of a bygone era.

It was an era that was all too fleeting while it lasted, mainly because it was a transitionary period between today, which is the future, and the past, which is the eternal present my mind has rooted itself in, all defined by the upward accelerating advance of computer technology as represented by video games.

Then came Doom.

Doom was a major turning point in a lot of ways. It seemed like it came out of nowhere and just took the whole world by storm. The way it was programmed made super fast paced action games possible on home computers and the way it was distributed outside the mainstream publishing model was just a foreshadowing of what was to come two decades later with crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding.

Doom became the foundation for a lot of practices and norms that are now taken for granted by the gaming community and society at large. It was the first action game to feature networked multiplayer over the internet, it basically started the whole multiplayer scene beyond things like MUDs.

It was designed such that fans could easily modify it and make their own games using it as a base, which led to the creation of the mod community.

Not to mention it was a great game, in itself. Its beauty is in its simplicity. Find the key, kill the monsters, reach the exit. That's the entire goal for every level but as you get further in the game the levels get more sprawling and mazelike, the keys and the exit become better hidden and the monsters become more and more numerous.

During the early to middle 1990s I played a lot of Doom and its sequel, Doom 2. It wasn't just me though. My dad liked the game as well, though he never got as far in it as I did. He had to work during the day, of course, and his free time was divided between things other than video games.

I had more free time being a child and I spent it mainly watching cartoons and playing with my Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joes in the backyard, but games like Super Mario Bros. and Doom were regular staples of my media consumption alongside the cartoons I watched.

I feel like I should write a book about Doom and its impacts but so many other people already have. I don't know what I'd say that hasn't already been said, other than maybe that the Doom Effect is still rippling out across space and time even today. We literally are living in a future of which certain aspects were only made possible by this one video game.

There's too much to write about Doom for one article so I'll have to leave it there for now. Suffice to say Doom was a big part of my gaming childhood. It became a permanent fixture and it still is.

I was playing the version of Ultimate Doom that came with the PS3 copy of Doom 3 some months back. My 12 year old nephew was watching me and assumed I was playing it because having it run on the PS3 was offering some kind of new experience to me. He thought the PS3 was why the game was running so fast.

I had to correct him and tell him that, no, Doom actually had always run that fast. That was actually what made Doom such a big deal at the time, was how fast and smooth it ran. The only thing new I was getting out of it on the PS3 was being able to play it with a controller instead of a keyboard.

That made me feel kind of old for a moment but not really. It just made me aware of the passage of time, which we all go out of way to ignore as best we can.

When I return to this series I'll pick back up with what I was playing in the middle 1990s and into the early 2000s.

Thanks for reading.