Amiga

My Mum bought herself an Amiga to do some work on when I was little.  It soon became more predominantly a games machine for my siblings and me and provided a good decade or so of fun.  I still marvel at how far games have come in my lifetime, certainly in terms of graphics.

I recently obtained an Amiga emulator to be able to play all the games I have from when I was growing up.  Some of the games I initially tried were not quite as good as I remembered, some hadn't overtly been effected by nostalgia.  These were the beat 'em ups and platform games I'd spend hours getting nowhere with.  Then there are some truly classic games like Elite and Civilization.  The game play and content of these games is so well realised that merely updating the graphics would put them on par with many new releases (I realise that Civilization has had many sequels which have seen the basic design expanded upon, because I love these games and only stopped playing them due to time constraints).

I was surprised to learn that as a games machine, for a time the Amiga was a fairly heavy hitter.  I always longed for a console like the Megadrive or SNES and never quite realised at the time what a marvellous machine we already had.  Nevertheless, I think the Amiga sparked my interests in computers and creatively inspired my imagination.