I’ve been following Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s “Gaming Made Me” series for the past week or so now, and I’ve really enjoyed reading nostalgic tales from different people in the industry about which games most influenced them. The series has inspired me to go back and re-evaluate which games most inspired me as I grew up.

My first game console was the Atari 2600 my father brought home when I was eight. I spent countless hours playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Demons to Diamonds, and Warlords. I even loved that crappy Raiders of the Lost Ark game. But the one I probably spent the most time with was Video Pinball. Never before and never since have I obsessed so much about a numeric score in a video game. I developed a pattern whereby I could repeatedly nudge the ball – gently, so as to not tilt – and bounce it back and forth, watching the score go up and up.

A few years later, and after a brief stint with a Timex-Sinclair PC and an Atari 800XL PC, my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I do not jest when I say that the Commodore 64 changed my life. It got me interested in programming, which many years later led to a career. But 90% of the time, if I was on the Commodore, I was playing games. Defender of the Crown. Pool of Radiance. Autoduel. Maniac Mansion. The Racing Destruction Set. Wishbringer. Wasteland. Mail Order Monsters. Super Giana Sisters. Forbidden Forest. I could easily write about all of them. I had dozens of 5.25 floppies, and they all saw a lot of use.

I still remember vividly the day I got my copy of Bards’ Tale 2 via UPS. Cash on Delivery. Words cannot express the excitement I had as I broke open the packaging, slid that floppy into my 1541 disk drive, and typed LOAD”*”,8,1 – to this day, when I type that, my fingers try to hit shift-2 to get the quote.

I never did complete Bards’ Tale 2, although I likely spent hundreds of hours in its dungeons. That distinction goes to Ultima V, which was the most epic game I ever played on the Commodore. The NPCs had daily routines – the shopkeepers would close shop for lunch and walk to the bar to eat. I could have conversations with just about anyone in the game and ask them their names and their jobs. I could pilot ships and balloons, learn area effect spells, relocate moongates, and track the movements of the Shadowlords. I had to travel the world to learn the magical entrance words to open various dungeons so that I could travel to the underworld, battling mongbats, sand traps, and gazers along the way. When I finally made my way to the dungeon Doom in the center of the underworld and rescued Lord British, it was such a momentous event in my young life that I wrote it on the calendar and celebrated for a number of years afterwards.

While Ultima V is undoubtedly my most fondly-remembered Commodore 64 game, Wasteland isn’t far behind. It took the top-down style from Ultima, and mixed it with Bards Tale’s battle system to create an awesome mesh of the two. You could split your party during battle to have the melee fighters run up while the gunslingers stayed back. The game’s atmosphere was what later inspired the first Fallout game, but Wasteland was far edgier. The battle descriptions had you exploding foes like a blood sausage and spinning them into a dance of death, and a later mission in the game had you battling nuns with machine guns. You could even hire a hooker and contract Wasteland Herpes. And my favorite part of the game was the over-the-top robots you’d battle at Base Cochise. The robots you’d fight had names like Sonar-targetted Proton Carbine, Life-seeking Flamethrower, and VTOL Auto-fire Robot.

Fast forward to 1996. I’d just broken off an engagement, and I was depressed. I hadn’t played games much in the past few years, and my friend Rich talked me into buying myself a Playstation. One of the first games I played was Resident Evil 2, and it blew me away. To this day, no other game defines survival horror like Resident Evil 2 does. There are moments in Dead Space that come close, but the storyline in Resident Evil 2, while very complex, is the best of any game in the franchise. Also, the T-103 zombie is by far the best Resident Evil villain ever.

After that, I became primarily a PC Gamer, moving on to games like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Mechwarrior. But I’ll always have fond memories of that Commodore 64.