Both Stormbolter and myself started playing video games back 
in the very early eighties, I had a Commodore Vic20 whilst Stormbolter started out with the long forgotten Dragon 32. No wobbly RAM packs hanging off the back of Sinclair ZX81s for us!
Before long, 
and realising that although the fantastic Dragon 32 was obviously the future of computing, Stormbolter got a BBC B. Now you have to remember that at the time, this was the microcomputer, the one the whole of the UK were taught to use in schools and had all the best games. Not to be tempted
by the glitz and glamour, I stayed with Commodore and got the all conquering C64 with the brilliant SID chip (Google it to find out more)! We even got floppy disk drives for each of our machines (eventually). By this point we were both quite into coding as well as playing. Elite on the Beeb may have been the original, but the C64 had auto-docking music! We played tons of games during this time, way too many to recount, but Elite is where we both lost several years, often playin
g alongside each other, one as the pilot (with the Quickfire 2 joystick) the other on the keyboard. I managed to get up to Dangerous in the end, Stormbolter made it to Deadly (he sometimes tries to make me believe he got to Elite – Right on Commander!)
Stormbolter then did the impossible, he got a PC! An actual PC! This was in the day when Windows 3.1 had just come out, and most games had to be run in DOS instead. Again, not to be lured by the temptations of the spawn of the Big Blue, I got a Commod
ore Amiga 500. The A500 was an amazing machine for it’s time and was run from a Windows like operating system which unbelievably was actually ahead of both Windows and Apple machines at the time (this time, I’m not kidding).
A time went on, and poor old Commodore died like so many other early 80s micro machine companies, I got myself a PC. Time passed along with us playing on the PS1, 2, 3 and now 4. Stormbolter occasionally dips into coding whilst I made it my career.
LucasArts games were some of the best, X-Wing, Jedi Knight, Secret of Monkey Island and all of the other arcade adventues are just some of them we played. I eventually got taken in by Morrowind and have visited every other Elder Scrolls games since, but Fallout 3 blew me away (literally too many times).
Online shooters such as Call of Duty are great fun, but the Battlefield series is way better – the thinking man’s bang, bang I shot you game. I’m not a great fan of GTA but WatchDogs and Far Cry (for all their flaws) are far more engaging, as is the Thief series (yes even the latest one).
Veteran Gamers UK 