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The first game I ever played is a memory strain but for the sake of argument (and the fact that I can't find any information on the earlier games I seem to remember playing) I'm posting it as the original Duke Nukem. I was about five and my family had, for some reason, been handed this old computer- a black box with a blue screen and no real OS to speak of, beautiful. For the many that have skipped the originals and jumped straight into Duke Nukem 3d and for those that have never heard of any of these and should therefore go rethink your life while having someone tell you over and over how crap you are, Duke Nukem was set in the near future (1996) and served as a sides crolling platform game, involving the shooting of aliens. I think it was a year or so later and I played my first console game, Sonic the Hedgehog- I've saved myself and the couple of readers that may or may-not drop by the trouble of reading through fifty pages of me verbally humping a hedgehog by giving you the edited version- I enjoyed it. There's not a huge amount of retrospect going on when I think about these games, all of the console games for example i still play on a fairly regular basis, even some of the old PC games I had like "Dune II" and "Prince of Persia" get revived from time to time. I'm writing this in between playing Skate on the ps3 and trying to work out whats kept me playing games this long, I don't want to get into any sort of crap about escapism or fantasism cos that wouldn't be true. I've always loved games, I like to play and I like to be challenged, these aspects have have been channeled into the game culture that I'm now a part of.


As I'm sure everyone who's started this project knows the first digitalized game was made in 1952 by A.S Douglas- naughts and crosses. I'm hesitant to call this the dawn of computer games as I'm sure when it was made there was no notion of fun in mind whatsoever. Also you can't say that without it we wouldn't have the fine-yet-soon-to-be-obsolete range of games we have today. I think one of the first steps towards using a computer for entertainment would be made in 1958 by William Higinbotham with "Tennis for Two". Unlike Douglas' version of naughts and crosses, Tennis for Two was designed to relieve boredom giving it status as one of the first true milestones in genre of computer games. I've actually played Tennis for Two at a history of computer games festival in London (got the high score on Space Invaders!) and it plays pretty well, however the controllers which seem determined on giving you such a severe case of arthritis you'll never be able to hold another controller again.

Now, who decided computers should be fun? Me. Silly question, no one person stood up and shook the world with the unfathomable concept of making computers fun, computer games are a byproduct of exploration, as with anything else I suppose. Using the newest wave of technology as a marketable entertainment product was an inevitability. Pound signs aside though, looking into making this new math-box available to a select few laboratories "fun" was a result of the vigilant programmers who saw its potential, decided to muck around with it and get ideas they wanted to try out. "What if?"
Cheers to the people that make things happen.