Gets in old man chair.......
I remember playing with myself, then later my parents bought us kids a Nintendo.
After that a Super nintendo, then a Play station. I started playing PC games around 15 a ****ty old Gateway with blazing fast 56K and playing some game I can't remember the name of. Then someone mentioned MechWarrior 2, and I remember getting a RAGE card to play it on, as it wouldn't play for **** otherwise. Then my mom bought Civ2, I had played the original CIV and it was OK, but CIV 2 with windows graphics made me appreciate the finer things in staying up till 2 or 3 doing the whole "just one more turn" thing. I still do that too, bugs the **** out of my wife.
About that time I found that drinking with friends was cool, and met some girls, so the late night training paid off. Bada boom, very little time left for gaming.
I moved out on my own, and quit the computer scene for awhile. Later in life as I began to notice the things were becoming quite popular I got another old one. 486DX, and it played Civ2 but just barely. This is about the time **** went wrong for me, but that is another issues, and led to my current employment. So it wasn't all that bad I guess. But on with it. At teh time I only dreamed of some of the games at the store like Need for Speed 2 even though it was dated, and Need for speed High Stakes. It was at that time I made the leap into the box again. AMD K6-2 350 that was used along with a newer Soyo board, and 256MB of ram running Win 95. I had a Cirrus PCI adapter for video, and a Creative sound card. Next up was a move to 512MB of RAM, a 450Mhz chip, and a used video card. I have no idea what video card that was.
At 20 I got a new toy. Radeon 7500 AGP moved up to Windows 98, bought my first CD-R. I played games, overclocked, tried dry ice, regular ice, and even the flat bottom of a cup with lots of silicon based TIM and icewater. Thank god that the silicon stuff wasn't conductive or capacitive, I had no idea about what I was really doing.
I took pride in the fact that I could dismantle, reassemble, and hack windows to pieces, including breaking the registry and fixing it.
As time went on I played more and more games, moving from the MS-DOS and a old clacky keyboard to the ones that required a mouse too (ohh the excitement) and then a controler. I thought that I was the ****. Till 2001.
A friend led me into the dark side, late nights of playing GTA 3 and drinking beer. It was awesome (PS2). Beating down the ho's and driving around through the whole place, like a racing with the adventures of zelda and whores and violence all thrown in a blender. Damn it was good. Once you beat it a few times and discovered everything it grew boring.
Civ 3 was out so I was back to playing that, I moved up to XP as Need for speed hot persuit would lock up on my system, XP helped that. About that time there were many other games I dabbled in, but none really grew on me. GTA:VC was good on the PS2, but wouldn't run on my PC later. In 2003 I managed to get a Coppermine P3 700 and kept my 7500 AGP, got a 40GB hard drive, and later moved up to a 8000 series ATI card. I upgraded my CD-R to a faster one and got a ultra speed CD-ROM for copying CD's and other stuff. Later the Ultra speed died with my Civ2 game inside, the disk blowing apart, so much for that ****.
Soon after I sold the system to a friend and bought a Celery 1.8Ghz and built around that, using my 8500. My system is still running in our other store, it had to have the HS/F replaced last week. Around this time there were stirrings about the next big game EVAR. And so I began my drooling crazed love of HL2. I got as much money as I could together and got me a new system ready, the last piece in place was a 9600XT that came with a HL2 coupon. All in my brand new Preshotttttt system.
Now I have a gaming grade mouse, keyboard, controller, steering wheel, 5.1 surround sound, headset with mic, and the rest of my system all made for gaming.
So where did we start? 486DX and a MS-DOS game.
Where are we now? 3800+ X2 overclocked. HD3870 512MB Overclocked, 2GB RAM Overclocked.
Everything overclocked that can be. Now we has the toys we only dreamed about back in the day.