I remember when I used to be amused by filling the screen with coloured blocks on my ZX Spectrum. Those were the days. My little brother won’t settle for something so dull now.
I remember my mum typing out a load of code on our green screen Amstrad 464. She didn’t seem very impressed after all the typing it took.
I totally agree… It’s impossible to count the hours I spend typing code from magazines into my old c64 and amiga - mostly for gaming purpose!
From my point of view it did not only enhance my programming skills - until nowadays there a few people who can match my speed at typing (even if I never took any typing class)! 
Microsoft MineSweeper:
expert: 89 seconds … beat that 
gosh, I must be a n00b. I owned an atari2600 as a kid but didn’t get into computers until I was in the US Marines. We had an old dual 5/25 machines that ran EnableOA (database/spreadsheet/docs). That got me started then I saw Prince of Persia on another PC on deployment. That’s when I knew I wanted to write games for a living.
Have been a developer for 15+ years now, but haven’t written one game.
How about you talk about a bit todays game development. Its more interesting since whole teams write great games for us. People like me who are not in the gaming industry just like to know how they do big projects, how they separate coding tasks between each other.
Mine was a Atari 800. Learned to program debugging the games I had to type in myself out of magazines.
Ahhhh… Still miss those days. Computers were still fun not a job…
Your first sentence made my jaw drop, because up until now I thought I was a rarity. I got my start in MS-DOS 5.0, edit.exe, and QBASIC. I perused the code for “gorillas” and read MS-DOS “help” until I was able to create “3d” drawings (rendered painfully slow) of ship landing on a small moon. I also tried to create a computer version of “Battleship” (but it never quite worked properly). I was 9 or 10 years old at the time.
My grandparents gave me a TI console, but once I figured out that I wasn’t able to save my work I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. The Packard Bell 386 was much faster, and I could save my work!
I begged for 4 months to get a TI994a for christmas and finally did.
I started going to the local users group meetings at the library, but we never got to the point of being able to program anything much.
I think my dad had hoped he’d figure it out, but didn’t and soon became frustrated. I was hoping he’d teach me some, and I eventually just became a game player.
I loved Hunt the Wumpus - I had it too!
I think that early frustration with wanting to program as a kid, but not being able to and not having someone to guide me, eventually led me to learning to be a programmer at school.
so, though we come by slightly different roads, we do have that in common - in a sense.
TRS-80 here, same stories for the most part, when i was 7 i was typing in code from “More Color Computing” to simulate a traffic jam. We were lucky and had the tape recorder so I could at least atempt to load code that I had written. Good times… it really is amazing how things have evolved so much since those days.
Started with a ZX81, then a ZX-Spectrum – loved programming them from the start. I still have the manuals from my Spectrum. They were great. Told you about Procrustes when discussing string allocation, and had a chapter on how to add machine-code to your program. (You had to put machine-code in a REM statement at the start of your program because that was the only fixed point in your listing)
I remember spending some time copying listings out of books and magazines (I remember translating Dave Ahl’s games from MS-Basic to Sinclair basic). Then you could start tweaking them - add your own catastrophes to Hamurabi, changing the population growth rate, and so on.
This led to writing my own games - I so wanted to be able to write a light-cycle game like Tron, but the closest I came was good old SNAKE.
I can completely relate. When I was 7 my dad got sick of helping me with the Apple IIe and as a joke threw a BASIC programming book at me and said “this will tell you everything you ever need to know.” I read that book and got my mom to me buy me a subscription to COMPUTE (so I could type in BASIC code to get games) and the seed for a future programming career was planted.
Like so many others I can completely relate. I think I must of been one of the earliest people to ever learn to read on a computer. I was 5 and in 1979 I was so fascinated by my dad’s 8k PET that it is what really turned me on to reading. I was programming simple basic routines when I was 6.
What upsets me is that the whole concept of kids and computers has changed. When I was a kid having a computer meant programming it in addition to simply playing games. I would recieve books for my birthday with stories and code interspersed. To follow along in the book I had to type in the code samples. Things like this just don’t seem to exist anymore. Just recently I was at one of the big books stores and I couldn’t find a single programming book targetted at children. I worry that ours might be the only generation to learn programming when we are young.
Thanks for the memories!
For me it was a TRS-80 and an Apple ][+ clone. Ah, the good old days…
For a programmer, analyzing games is almost as fun as playing them
If I could just convince my boss of that, I’d have much more fun this afternoon that I think I’m going to.
Marc
Ah yes, the good ol’ TI-99/4A. I spent most of the time playing games (Parsec with the speech synthesizer rocked) but also did a bit of programming. Typed in a lot of program listings from Enter magazine. As a budding piano student, my own creations were primarily music. My crowning achievement was coding the entire theme to MacGyver. 3-note polyphony FTW!
That is so wild!
I was handed a TI-99 4a back in 1982 and all it had was a manual on how to write BASIC. I was 15 and had no working knowledge of computers and so I didn’t even know you could buy software or anything! I thought if you wanted it to do something, you had to code it yourself!!! I coded around on that thing for two years!
I went on to a Commodore64 and 128D and finally to a real PC(286).
I’ve programmed about every version of BASIC ever released since and am today a .NET VB/C# programmer.
I have to say, I don’t get a whole lot of credit for all that work I did before VB3. But it is comforting to know that I wasn’t the only one to start out that way.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
My parents bought me a TRS-80 instead of an Atari 2600 as well and the result is about the same 
Megabug Pacman
1985 with an Apple II+ and the book “Computer Monsters” - I never minded being an only child after that.
My programming career started of with games as well. In particular the original quake, and its little scripting language (you’d probably call it a DSL nowdays) that allowed you to make complex key and mouse bindings. It was all down hill from there