Thanks for sharing
. As promised I'll chip in too.
Our family got a computer when I was a kid, though it wasn't a gaming powerhouse like the Commodore64 or even a ZX Spectrum, but a nice educational BBC Micro. We did nevertheless have a bunch of (probably pirated) arcade classics for it, but for some reason the games that really grabbed me were the text based adventures. I know I played a bunch, but the only one that really sticks in my mind was The Lord of the Rings. Partly because I loved that I could become one of the four hobbits and set out with my friends for Rivendell. And partly because I lost all my inventory when loading the second of, iirc, four cassette tapes it came on and could never finish the blasted thing. I'm totally going to try it using an
emulator now I've thought about it again.
My teenage years were given over to ... other stuff ... so it was only at uni where one of my mates had one of these newfangled (to me) PC thingies and I watched with envy as he played, in particular, party-based RPG Wizardry VII and point and click adventure Day of the Tentacle that my interest in video games was revived.
I didn't play either of those games myself until years later (DotT was reissued a few years back and I reckon stands up remarkably well, for Wizardry VII I'd guess you probably need to have been there). But when after uni I lived in a shared house with access to a PC, the first games I chose to play myself tended to be RTSs and sims. Sim City 2000, Civilization II, Command & Conquer, Warcraft, Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park were the first games I recall playing lots of.
It was only when the PlayStation was released and I read reviews of this game called Final Fantasy VII that I returned to RPGs. And so when this new party based RPG called Baldur's Gate was released a year or so after I'd played and adored FFVII, I thought of that and back to Wizardry VII, and probably also to the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon I'd enjoyed as a kid, and decided to give it a go. So I created my paladin, rolled the dice for stats (probably just once without changing them as I had no idea what I was doing) and ventured forth ... and fell in love with the game, the setting and the genre.
