Gaming past

I look at most of my younger friends going crazy for Pokemon Sun and Moon these days and realize, they don’t know anything outside the realm of Nintendo, Sony Playstation and XBox.  It’s like there wasn’t a gaming history prior to the time when the NES came out.

Given the videogame market crash of 1983, it’s somewhat not surprising.

For someone of my generation – yes I know how that sounds, there were a lot more options.  My collective group of friends not only were into NES and SNES, but we were also into our Amigas and Ataris – ST that is, not just the 2600.

Games like Worms (Team 17), Super Stardust (Team 17), Wipeout (Psygnosis) and pretty much anything out of Sony Studio Liverpool  (which was formerly Psygnosis) would be no where today without the Amiga.

There are some fantastic games such as Zool, The Lost Vikings, James Pond, etc. that came out during that time period.  Simply fantastic, that people seem to have forgotten and simply don’t seem to care about except for those of us who lived it.  Which is sad because there are some real gems.

I’ve owned, in my lifetime, two CD32s, picking up the latest one about two years ago, and I own a fully working Amiga CDTV completely with a hard drive. I’m slowly refurbishing the CD32, which at this point needs a replacement CD spindle to work.  Everything else on it seems perfect.

Which brings me to an interesting quandary.  I can perfectly emulate the CD32 on my Surface or MacBook. Do I really need the original hardware?  There is something to be said for owning a piece of iconic history, especially if you can keep it going.