Around 1986 my family bought an Amstrad PCW 8256 in Derry. I suppose at this distance it is OK to recall it was hidden under a blanket in the back seat of the car (and I suppose this sort of thing may happen again) At that point, computers meant games to me and my brother, rather than the all-purpose panopticon of our lives they have become. Unfortunately, the PCW was not a games machine by any stretch of the imagination. A few years later, I discovered 8000 Plus , a magazine for PCWs, which opened my eyes to a whole world of PCW software (as well as David Langford’s wonderful column) – especially text adventures, but also the likes of Starglider.
However, in the years between getting a PCW and finding out that, actually, games did exist for it, I tended to try and use the word processor Locoscript to “make games” – basically word processor files full of symbol characters which I would move the cursor around (with the arrow keys, naturally) as “gameplay.” I am sure this was very good for my imagination. Recently I discovered a old project notebook from those days in which I had written out three possible games.
The first was “MiG-25.” This was the Cold War, don’t forget, and the library was full of worthy books about the possibility of nuclear war. Therefore a game based on the Soviet jet was not that much of an outlier
It was over a decade before “Gladiator” but, as well as Soviet weaponry, all things Rome fascinated me. Still does, I guess. However, my spelling needed work – here was “Colossuem”
Finally there is “Mental Mills.” I must admit to finding this one hard to relate to any interest I had then or have now, or any other context, except evidently I wanted to “neutrailise” atom bombs.
Séamus Sweeney 