Gaming Epochs through the ages: Part One - My First PC.

This is an image of the circuit board that started it all for me. A S3 Diamond Chip, with 2MB of memory, paired with my first ever computer. I was in my 8th, or 9th year of life, and had previously only experienced gaming via a classic Nintendo Entertainment System, hideously rigged up to a tiny black and white TV.

This paltry GPU, paired with a Pentium clocked at a blistering 200MHz, occupied a first party, Intel manufactured board. I think there was 16 or 32MB of RAM on the system, and it ran Windows 95. When my parents brought the PC home, I was a little disappointing that it wasn't a Macintosh. That was the only type of computer I'd used prior to getting this beast. I was told that it was for school, it was for homework; but it was not long until the game started to get played.

I don't remember how big the hard disk was, but I do not recall ever running out of space. So, what did I play?

First, a lot of Doom. The shareware version of Doom. I was amazed by the visuals, the sound track, and was happy to play the same levels over and over and over again; not realizing that at some point, I needed to turn godmode off to progress further in the game.

The way in which one of my first tastes of PC gaming touched me was a violent and unforgiving one. The primitive Nintendo Entertainment System, which had migrated to the second TV in the house, gathered dust.

Another classic that enthralled me in my first epoch of PC gaming was Sim City. This title consumed oodles of my time, and I fondly remember optimizing every single element of my city: the electrical grid, the plumbing, and the road networks all had to be perfect. I even turned disasters off, and seemed to never tire of the game. I'd start again and again in order to build a better, more profitable city.

Then, something life changing happened. I got a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic II , and started to dream in pixels. At first, the complexity of this game absolutely awes me, with the exploration, base building, combat, hero spells, and plot providing hundreds of hours of excitement. I enjoyed necromancy the most, raising the armies from my fallen foes.

When I say that I dreamt in pixels while playing Heroes of Might and Magic II, these pixels were of the prettiest, most fearsome armies of the dead, absolutely stomping on all the foes that I came across. I loved the overwhelming feeling of power, and the utter devastation I could unleash upon my foes, as I snowballed my way to victory each and every time. It was glorious.

I knew how to play games. I enjoyed playing games. I didn't know how to install windows, or navigate MS-DOS. This caused problems when I started to break things, and my beloved computer needed to go away and be reformatted. It wasn't long before I learned the art of reformatting myself. Soon, I was dabbling in MS-DOS and learned about the wonders of Q-Basic Gorillas. It was simple, but brilliant.

Then, the Unreal engine launched, and with it, so many great titles. My PC struggled to get a playable framerate on any of them, and it was (after about 3 years) that the computer wouldn't boot properly into Windows. I could still access some DOS stuff, but it was dead as far as Windows was concerned. A trip to the computer store revealed that the cache on the CPU had physically burnt out.

Disabling the cache in the BIOS gave the machine a new lease on life, but it was on its last legs, and wouldn't run anything without the cache. It's incredible how much of a different cache makes on a CPU. I was still young, and my parents didn't have a lot of money, so I dealt with it for a very long time, before the next PC came.

In the next installment of holoz0r's gaming epochs, (to come) we'll learn about my second ever computer, and the games that defined that machine.

What was your first computer, and how did it meet its downfall?