That’s pretty similar to my story. My first machine after my Amiga was a 386/33 that I bought almost totally to play Wing Commander.
Luckily I was already working as a PC support person, so I had plenty of experience setting up memory and batch files.
The game stores still sucked back then, BTW. They didn’t have a ton of new stuff, so they’d just keep the back stock on the shelves for ever and ever. Combine that with the surly wierdos that often ran the places, and it was almost always a sub-par experience.
The closest thing to it I see these days are the “independent” Mac stores that always seem to be hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
Picking up classic EA games for my Commodore at Waldenbooks…who had a nice selection. Picking up C-64 Ogre at a local Spokane store and getting not only a fat instruction manual, but a huge behind-the-scenes-look at the A.I. booklet, AND a radiation badge which I still have, somewhere.
Going to a wierd indy store in Orlando, FL, and picking up my first Amiga games: F/A-18 Interceptor and Breach.
Buying SWOTL & Aces of the Pacific BEFORE I had a PC.
I managed to hold out and get a 486-33. Built in mathco!
I remember the giddy elation of going from my C64 to glorious 256 color VGA! Ultima VI even ran too fast because it was built for a 286 IIRC. However, Wing Commander ran just fine. It still took a while for the PC to catch up on game quality compared to the C64, though. There were some blockbuster hits, but there was a ton of crap and the PC couldn’t do action (console style) games worth crap. Really, it never did. There were a few years where id and some other guys released some decent shareware (commander keen, jazz, omf) but that market seemed to transition directly from the 8-bit computers to consoles.
Once I got Syndicate, though, all was forgiven. (Would have been summer 93 I believe?)
Software Etc was where I bought most of my PC games back in the old days. They had a pretty liberal exchange policy too where you could return/exchange opened PC software.
Really, it never did. There were a few years where id and some other guys released some decent shareware (commander keen, jazz, omf) but that market seemed to transition directly from the 8-bit computers to consoles.
I heard Abuse was good, and I rather liked that Pitfall update (“The Mayan Adventure” if memory serves) that Activision did around '95. But yeah, it was never the bulk of content on the PC.
For me, it was Atari almost all the way, except I learned computers on a Commodore PET. Afterwards, it was my very own Atari 400 (I can touchtype hexadecimal on that flat keyboard! 3 pages of Compute! listings takes me about 1 hour to type in.), 800xl, 1040ST.
Then, in 1993 or 4, I finally got a PC, which begot DOOM, Duke Nukem, Descent, Sam 'n Max, Tie Fighter…and so on for the next 10 years. Those were great times. I’ve kept some PC Gamer magazines from back then to remind me just how I wasted my time.
Oh, back on topic…the EB near my home in Canada is actually still very well stocked with PC games. It used to have a rather large selection of used PC games, but they all disappeared recently. I wonder if they can be written off?
All Commodore here. My family contemplated getting an Atari ST as our first 16 bit computer (having had the C64 for several years), but when we saw Faery Tale Adventure on display in a computer store, we were swayed to get an Amiga instead.
Wow. I remember typing in those listings and getting so annoyed when there was a typo… Sometimes you could fix the problem yourself (good programming education), sometimes you had to wait for the issue with the “Caput!” errata section.
Really bugged me when they went to MLX. Yeah, it had a checksum, but hex wasn’t exactly easy to type on a computer with no numeric keypad…
My first post-college job was at COMPUTE!. But by then (1989) Compute’s Gazzette was the only publication that still had type-in listings.
There was an old program for the C64 called S.A.M. (Software Automated Mouth.) I remember feeding a text file with the extended list of George Carlin’s dirty words (about 200 phrases) into the thing. My whole college dorm floor thought that was the funniest thing ever.*
Another Commodore person here. My switch happened in 1992 when I saw Civilization for the first time. I called Microprose and was told they had no plans to make it for the Amiga. That summer I put my whole Amiga 500 system, including 40MB hard drive, up for sale at a commission place. After a whole summer of no gaming, I bought my first PC, a 386/40 system. The next day I went into the store to find a game to play while I waited for my mail order Civ to arrive and saw Civ for the Amiga on the shelf. :-)
Another Atari 8-bit user here (a 130XE), though my preferred magazines for listings were Antic and ANALOG.
It was towards the end of the 8-bit’s life though, and it was getting harder to find stuff for it. There were a couple Trade 'N Play stores where I bought the majority of my games (I’ve still got some of the floppies around here), but that was about it for retail places and I did a bit of trading and copying at school and on BBSes. Most of the other stores had moved on to ST and Amiga stuff and didn’t deal with consoles; Trade 'N Play is the only one I can remember that really focused on games.
Something must of been wrong then. I have a Rendition Verite as well and it was sweet… for about 6 months. It ran Quake at 640 x 480 with all the options turned on at around 40 frames per second. Then the Voodoo 1 card came out and could run quake at 800x600 at 60+ fps. It was over.
I still used it for awhile. The Rendition had far better color and filtering than the Voodoo and sometimes games would run better on it. Activisions Battlezone comes to mind.
That brings back memories. I use to shop for some of my first computer software at book stores like Waldenbooks and Greetings and Readings. I remember back when Microprose was selling the first F15 strike eagle. I walked into Greetings and Readings and a guy there got me to buy F15 Strike Eagle. That guy was Sid Meier.
Which reminds me that Talonsoft’s offices were across the street from a local mall. They’d all take lunch together wearing the same Talonsoft shirts and park their butts outside of the Electronics Boutique. I use to let them pressure me into buying all their games.
(ps: you guys are making feel guilt about playing my 360 all the time)
At one point I had all the Antic magazines, except for #1-3 and #5. I was so sad that I threw them all out when I moved to Ottawa from Toronto.
Atari 8bit had a good life in Toronto. Many different stores carried Atari goods, some of which were even Atari-only. But Commodore had all the shelf space in department stores, so that’s the one most people got. Well, except for my other friend with his Tandy Colour Computer.
Hey, Civilization for the ST was the last game I bought for it! So Civ got ported everywhere!
I was an Atari 800 lover. It was the fact that members of those team had worked on the Amiga that led me to my Amiga 1000.
I held onto that for a while, and it was great for games, but honestly I should have bought a macintosh for school. Support for Wordperfect was spotty at best, but at least I had a spell checker once it came out. I think my college average would have been a half point higher if I’d had that, and if I’d bought a Mac I woulda.
BUT, since I now make games for a living, I can’t really complain.
