I don't know when I grew up.

It may have started when my parents bought me a Sinclair Spectrum for Christmas 1983, or when I was sitting my O Levels, or even when I started my A Levels and discovered beer and women, or even when I left home to work in the big city. It could even be when I got married and started to settle down to a life of breeding and mortgages...

How, and even when, it happened I still can't say, but grow up I did and one day arcades just weren't that important to me any more. I had replaced Missile Command, Robotron and Galaga with Lemmings, Tetris and Kings Quest.

I would still wander into arcades occasionally, and if there was a game in a pub or late night kebab place I would pump a few coins into it while waiting for my mates, but the overriding passion for arcade games and everything they represented was gone. The classic games I loved were becoming scarcer and I just couldn't bring myself to like Vendetta, Contra, Cabal and their ilk. Even the new breed of fighting games represented best by the warring factions of SNK and Capcom left me cold.

Innovation had moved firmly out of the arcade and into the home. Sonic and Mario were battling it out for the hearts and minds of the console hordes, while the computer gamers on the Amiga, Atari ST and even the PC were being subjected to such thrills as Speedball, Civilisation and Monkey Island. Here there was depth of gameplay that was unheard of in the arcade. Games you could, were expected to, immerse yourself in utterly. Where was the arcade game that could offer so much?

The arcade industry in the late 80's and early 90's was in the doldrums. Games were somehow managing to be both increasingly derivative and increasingly expensive, and for possibly the first time the home alternatives could not only equal arcade games graphically and sonically but could be said to surpass them. So I, along with the rest of the western world, began to look to the home machines for my gaming fix.

And yet, along with devoting weeks, months and in extreme cases years to the likes of Kings Quest, Zork and Maniac Mansion, I would still hanker after those seemingly lost days when 10p would buy you a few minutes of simple shooty goodness.

And yet the PC, for I had somehow graduated from the humble Sinclair Spectrum to the boring grey world of the IBM compatible PC by this stage, wasn't best suited to arcade style games. Friends with Commodore Amigas or Atari STs would regale me with stories of parallax scrolling, multiple sprites and polyphonic musical scores while I had to make do with Captain Comic and the CGA only wonders of sopwith.com (a game which, rendered entirely in Cyan and Magenta wouldn't have looked out of place on the Sinclair Spectrum)

It was not a good time to be a PC gamer. In fact, there were barely enough PC games for me to be a PC gamer. There was certainly nowhere in the UK where you could buy PC games, we relied, samizdat style, on much copied disks, dodgy shareware distributors and the occasional parcel from the US.

It wasn't until the introduction of the VGA card that things started picking up. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, some of the games that I had long coveted from afar were becoming available on the PC! Xenon 2 Megablast was a particular highlight of those early days of PC VGA gaming, followed swiftly by a marvellous version of Arkanoid II. Finally, it seemed, I had my arcade gaming fix sorted

The PC remained my gaming platform of choice throughout the 90's and I, almost, forgot about my younger obsession with the arcades. I gave myself over to the PC utterly and, for it has to be said, had a fantastic time battling through various iterations of Ultima, Wing Commander and Civilisation.

Little was I to know that something lurked just around the corner waiting to draw me back to my first love...

Cheers
Chris

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