For me, my love of games and gaming developed thanks to how much I admired my older brother as a child. He’s my half brother, and 12 years older than me, so we never had anything to fight over. I didn’t exactly have a stable family life so throughout my early years he was my only positive male role model. As a grubby little 6 year old I spent a lot of time hanging onto his coat-tails. Thankfully this was greeted more with amusement than frustration for which I am eternally grateful.
So as soon as I was old enough to understand how they worked, I was asking my brother to teach me how to play games on his Amiga. To this day I still have vivid memories of playing games with him. Even if I can’t remember what they were called.

I actually tried to look up what games we used to play on Wikipedia, but there’s such an exhaustive list, and I’m at such a loss to recall what their names were I don’t even know where to start. I remember there was one game where you would fly across a side-scrolling landscape and either bomb or pick stuff up? But you flew on top of animals and magic carpets? Even to me this sounds like it never existed. One of the few games which I recall the title is Brutal Sports Football, I can’t say for certain that this is the exact game we played, but it was something very like this.

By far the game which had the most impact on me as a little proto-nerd was Wing Commander. I remember playing this without my brother when I was about seven or eight, and when I died, the game genuinely upset me. I’ll explain for those unfamiliar with Wing Commander. When you die on any mission in Wing Commander, first of all you see your characters ship explode, pretty standard right? But then, you don’t simply get to try the level again, you have to watch the characters space funeral. Ending with your coffin being shot out into the void to a five gun salute.

This was probably the first time that I came face to face with the emotional side of death as a child. Sure I’d played Brutal Sports Football, you kill untold numbers of people in that, but it’s different, that’s the instant-respawn-it’s-not-really-there-death-doesn’t-happen kind of death.

I can definitely tell you that as a child I was unequipped to deal with the kind of emotions the game threw at me. Thinking back, this may even have been the moment in which games became the equal of any other art medium in my eyes. If a game can make me feel like that, why is it any less than a novel or a film?

I think Wing Comander planted the seed of role-playing games in me, and it’s a game I still think about to this day. So I grew up playing Amiga with my brother and talking about games with my friends in school. My friends had Playstations, but I was convinced I knew where the good stuff was and pleaded with my mum for a Nintendo.

My parent finally gave in to pester power at Christmas 1997 and bought me my first ever console. The Nintendo 64. To this day, the N64 holds a special place in my heart, along with my first ever game of my own, Super Mario 64. The N64 really influenced my taste in games. I spent a lot of my formative years on playing Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart and Pokémon Stadium.

My mum has always been au fait with technology, and so we’ve always had a PC in the house and it only seemed natural to me that eventually I would play games on this as well. I’m not sure what it was but something about gaming with a mouse and keyboard just seemed right. And thus my future was decided, from then on, I was to be a PC gamer.

I still remember our first PC, the image of orange text on the monitor, “It is now safe to turn off your computer.” will forever stay imprinted on my mind. It ran Windows 95, but this was in the days before the internet, and I wasn’t allowed to play games on the computer.

The first PC game I played was Age of Empires 2, it began my love affair with Real Time strategy, and inspired me to get into a lot of new games. It’s strange, pretty much every genre which I enjoy today has some roots in my childhood playing experience.

I like FPS, and I played a lot of Goldeneye. I like fighting games, and I played a lot of Tekken (at friends houses) and Smash Bros. I like RPGs, and I played Wing Commander, and later, Baldurs Gate. I like RTS, and I’ve been playing them constantly ever since Age of Empires 2.

The more I think back on my life as a gamer, the clearer it is that for a long time, games had a very personal function for me. They were a form of escapism, being able to disappear from an unhappy situation, and be the hero for once.

It’s a pattern that’s dogged me throughout life, and one in which I still engage today on the odd occasion. If I have a lot of work to do, I’ll frequently find myself playing StarCraft or Skyrim, with no justification of why I’m not working.

And yet. I firmly believe that games make us better people. That by playing games we gain skills which help us in all areas of society. Games can make us laugh, or cry, feel proud, or ashamed. They are the most important medium of our time. Games have the potential to change the world. And that’s why despite everything, I’m proud to call myself a gamer.

And you should be too.

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