My Gaming Life (Part 1): Life Before Gaming

Posted by Mark Stevens on Nov 12, 2009 in Ye Olde Posts | 3 comments

For anyone under the age of twenty, a world without cell phones, laptops, netbooks, widescreen TVs, ebook readers and mp3 players must seem like something from the Dark Ages.

Step a little further back in time–barely more than a decade–and we’re in an even bleaker realm where it takes months to send a letter halfway across the world, where it’s almost impossible to watch a movie from the comfort of your sofa and (perhaps most importantly for us) the home video game market is nonexistent.

How on earth did kids pass the time without the abundance of digital distractions available to us today? While I can’t speak for every kid who made the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s relatively unscathed, I came up with a list of pre-gaming diversions that managed to keep me entertained. At least until home computers and game consoles entered our home. Things were never quite the same after that.

Any of these sound familiar?

Lego

If there’s one toy that monopolized my attention as a kid, it’s got to be Lego.

I suspect the multi-colored building blocks need little introduction around here. They’re one of the few children’s toys that are just as popular today as they were thirty years ago. Why? Quite simply, they encourage children to use their imagination (something many of today’s toy manufacturers tend to neglect).

For a good five years or so, each birthday and Christmas would bring about new additions to my ever-growing mountain of Lego. My favorite? Undoubtedly the Lego Castle, which I suspect my dad may have enjoyed a little bit more than me, given that he painstakingly spent the evening before my birthday constructing the thing. Naturally, I knocked it down pretty quickly and started from scratch. Well, c’mon!  Half the fun of Lego is that initial construction phase.

My next major Lego fix came in the form of Lego Space. Moon buggies, laser guns, space suited figures and lunar landscapes were the order of the day. Once again, my brother and I accumulated numerous kits which would inevitably be used to reenact scenes from Stars Wars, Battlestar Galactica or whatever episode of Doctor Who had aired that week. I daresay generous helpings of gore and extreme violence were also added to the mix.

The last time I dabbled with Lego was probably back in the early 80s. It goes without saying that video games gradually began to usurp my time and energy. However, I look forward to the day I have kids of my own to whom I can introduce the wonderful world of Lego.

Lego themselves are no stranger to moving with the times. They’re one of the few toy manufacturers who’ve not only survived the onslaught of the video game industry but actually managed to take advantage of it; Lego Mindstorm, Lego Digital Designer and the various Lego video game franchises wouldn’t have been possible without the proliferation of home computers and games consoles.

Subbuteo

If you grew up in Europe during the 1980s and had more than a passing interest in football (that’s soccer to you colonials), chances are you’ve at least heard of Subbuteo and maybe even played it.

For those with a Subbuteo-shaped hole in your life, here’s the deal:

• 1 x green felt cloth with white markings to represent the footie pitch
• 2 x teams of 11 players on a weebly-wobbly base, at least one of which would be broken out of the box
• 2 x goals, including nets, in which your goalie would become inextricably entangled
• 1 x football which, if it were to scale, would be about six feet in diameter

Players took it in turns to flick/shove/throw their players around in such a manner that they’d connect with the ball. Occasionally the ball would go in the net. Repeat until someone got frustrated, threw everything up in the air and stormed off to their bedroom in disgust.

Good fun and a great way to spend some time with your mates.

Once again, the dark spectre of the video game industry slowly encroached upon Subbuteo’s turf. Sports simulations had been around since the year dot and it was only a matter of time before video game technology progressed to the point where it offered a more realistic and enjoyable take on the beautiful game. Nevertheless, Subbuteo sets and accessories are still manufactured today and annual competitions continue to be held annually by bald, sweaty men in their late 40s.

Dice League

Another take on football, only this time one needed little more than a paper, pencil and a six-sided dice.

I’m not sure where my brother and I picked up the concept of “dice league”. I guess we thought it was something of our own invention, but a little bit of digging around revealed that it wasn’t an uncommon game for kids to play.

At its very basic level, you created a small league (or World Cup tournament) containing your favorite football teams, devised a fixture list, and then simply rolled a die to determine the score. Maybe re-rolling if your favorite team failed to score. (A six represented no goals scored. If you rolled five, you could roll again. If you then rolled a six, you’d score an extra goal and get another free roll. Anything else would end the match. A cunning system—at least for a seven-year-old—that allowed for high-scoring games but also ensured they were relatively rare.)

You’d eventually realise that this wasn’t a very accurate simulation of the game (especially if Manchester United and Arsenal were consistently thrashed by all the crappy teams) and so you’d begin to introduce a number of modifiers to create more realistic results. Before long, you’d be bringing things like player stats, weather and pitch conditions into consideration.

At one point I even went as far as writing a basic program on the BBC Micro to handle all the variables and generate the results. Then someone called Kevin Toms came along, showing off with his new-fangled Football Manager game and thus the school exercise books, pencils and dice were retired.

Sports management games are two a penny these days and a great way to encourage some analytical thinking. But if you want to give your kids some basic math practice and trick them into having fun at the same time, you could do a lot worse than introduce them to the wonders of Dice League (it can easily be modified for most sports) before it’s too late.

Fighting Fantasy

Developed by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were the UK’s answer to the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Unlike the CYOAs, which were (mostly) grounded in our world demanded little more of the player than merely making a narrative choice, the FF books (mostly) took place in a rich fantasy or science fiction setting and featured Dungeons & Dragons-esque character stats and dice-based combat.

Admittedly, the first FF book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, was published in 1982, by which time the fledgling computer & video game industry had been up and running for a while, but these books nevertheless offered a worthwhile alternative when it came to filling gaps between gaming sessions.

Having already begun to explore science fiction and fantasy novels as a kid, the Fighting Fantasy books were a natural extension of that interest.

The Fighting Fantasy books were a natural extension of my interest in science fiction & fantasy books, TV shows and movies at that time, but they weren’t my first introduction to tabletop gaming. My parents had given me a Dungeons & Dragons set for Christmas a few years earlier, although my friends were never really the D&D types. Nevertheless, I familiarised myself with the system and would eventually run a few play-by-email games online.

The Fighting Fantasy phenomenon continued well into the 1990s–spawning no end of spin-offs and rip-offs–but it’s fair to say it peaked during the mid-80s. Not surprisingly, a number of video game publishers converted some of the earlier books into text adventure games, but they did little to enhance the experience of the original books.

The has been some resurgence of interest in Fighting Fantasy in recent years. Its most devoted followers are now parents themselves, hoping their childhood interests will rub off on their kids. Wizard Books currently own the rights to the series and are actively reprinting old classics in addition to publishing brand new titles. It’s encouraging to see kids still enjoying this series in its original form. Not an easy task given the allure of contemporary computer-based roleplaying games.

As an aside, I had a bit of a geeky thrill when I had the opportunity to playtest Black & White for Lionhead Studios back in the summer of 2000 and got to meet Steve Jackson. A thoroughly nice guy, who seemed impressed that I was one of the few people not to immediately mistake him for the other legendary Steve Jackson.

Comics

British comics often differed from the US comic book. They’d usually be printed using a 2-color process (commonly red/blue and black) on magazine sized paper. And whereas a typical US comic book would be devoted to a single character, British comics would feature multiple characters. (US comic books were hard to come by in the UK, but would often be compiled into single volumes and sold in book stores.)

Like most kids, I was a big fan of both The Beano and Dandy, two behemoths that were first published in the 1930s and continue to entertain kids today. Other early favorites included Whoopee!, Wow! and Whizzer and Chips.

Whizzer and Chips did something a little bit different. The comic was split into two halves, each with its own set of characters and an antagonistic attitude to the other half. Each week, one character from each faction would “raid” a rival’s cartoon. It was up to the readers to spot the interloper. I must admit, my loyalty swung between the Whizzer and Chip camps fairly often, depending on who had the funnier strips that week.

When I turned ten, the more juvenile comics would be abandoned in favor of edgier titles. Step forward Tiger (sports), Battle (war and gore, most strips featuring Jerry getting his arse kicked by Tommy), Scream (gore galore!), 2000 AD (sci-fi gore!) and Roy of the Rovers (erm, football). Classic 1950s comic Eagle was relaunched in the early 1980s. One of the books I regularly swiped from my dad’s bookcase was an anthology of old Eagle comics, so I was understandably excited about the relaunch. Unfortunately the new Eagle became dominated by tacky photo stories (although Doomlord emerged as the most readable). Dan Dare continued to be drawn traditionally (initially by Oliver Frey, no doubt familiar to readers of Crash and Zzap! 64) and remained the comic’s saving grace, even if it couldn’t save it from eventual

2000 AD is still around today. In fact, I bought it very consistently between 1990 and 2003, stopping only when I moved to the States. Now I’ve recently discovered that 2000 AD is available in digital format, so I might have to pick up the ol’ habit again.

So, those are some of my pre-gaming memories. Can you remember what you did before video games assimilated your free time?