There’s a question guaranteed to send anyone of a certain age spiralling back into the mists of time, when gaming meant a television, a cassette player, a rubber-keyed computer and an almost religious belief that, if you waited long enough, something would eventually happen.

What was your first ever videogame?

For many of us, the answer was probably Horace Goes Skiing. Or perhaps it was one of those games you spent hours typing into a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, carefully copying lines of code from a magazine, desperately hoping you hadn’t missed a comma, a number or one of those mysterious little symbols that could bring the whole thing crashing down.

Either way, getting to the actual game was an adventure in itself.

Loading… Please Wait

If you were lucky enough to own a Spectrum, you’ll remember the ritual. You connected the cassette player, typed LOAD "", pressed Enter and hit Play. Then you waited.

And waited.

And listened to that extraordinary electronic noise that sounded like a robot having an argument with a fax machine.

There was always that moment when you wondered whether it was working. Was the volume too high? Too low? Had the tape stretched? Was the computer about to reward your patience, or were you going to have to rewind the cassette and start all over again?

You could make a cup of tea in the time it took some games to load. You could probably make the tea, drink it and wash the cup before the title screen appeared.

And heaven help you if the game failed at 99%.

That wasn’t a minor inconvenience. That was a personal tragedy.

Enter Horace

For those of us who remember him, Horace Goes Skiing was a classic of its time. Released in the early eighties, it offered the chance to guide our unfortunate hero across a busy road, hire his skis and head for the slopes.

Simple enough, you might think. Except that crossing the road was a challenge in itself, and every unfortunate collision ate into Horace’s limited funds. You could spend more time trying to reach the ski hut than actually skiing.

It was maddening. It was addictive. And when you finally got going, it felt like you’d achieved something genuinely worthwhile.

Which, in fairness, you had. You’d survived the loading process, mastered the controls and negotiated a road system that would have given the average driving examiner nightmares.

And if you crashed? Well, you had another go.

There was no hand-holding, no friendly tutorial explaining what to do next, no convenient checkpoint waiting just around the corner. You learned by playing, failing and playing again. Sometimes you learned by shouting at the screen.

Mostly, you learned that trees were not your friends.

The Games We Built Ourselves

Of course, not everyone had a cassette with a shiny label and proper instructions.

Some of us had a magazine, a keyboard and an unhealthy amount of optimism.

You’d sit there typing in a program, line after line, convinced you were doing something terribly clever. And you were, to be fair. The Spectrum was a wonderful little machine, and learning to make it do things felt a bit like having your own personal magic box.

But there was a catch.

One typo.

One missing line.

One misplaced character.

And suddenly, instead of a glorious new game, you had a screen full of error messages and an afternoon’s work to do all over again.

Still, there was something special about it. You weren’t just playing games. You were learning how they worked, even if you didn’t fully appreciate it at the time.

And when you finally got the thing running?

Blimey.

You’d practically invented the internet.

Well, not quite. But you know what I mean.

Here’s the thing that really strikes me when I think back to those early gaming days.

There were no save points.

You didn’t get to save your progress before the difficult bit. There was no autosave, no checkpoint, no helpful message telling you that your progress had been preserved.

If you ran out of lives, that was it.

If you switched the computer off, that was it.

And if Mum decided she’d had enough of the television being occupied and wanted to watch something else, well, your gaming career had just been terminated without consultation.

You started again.

And again.

And again.

We became remarkably good at accepting failure, dusting ourselves off and having another go. Perhaps that’s one of the things those old games taught us without us even realising it.

Although, in fairness, some of us also learned some rather colourful language.

I still think there’s something wonderful about those early games. Not because they were technically superior to what we have today, but because of what they represented.

They were new.

They were exciting.

They were ours.

We didn’t have online guides, walkthrough videos or somebody on YouTube explaining the entire game before we’d even loaded it. We figured things out ourselves, usually through trial and error, and occasionally through sheer bloody-minded determination.

Today, we have games with extraordinary graphics, enormous open worlds, cinematic storytelling and enough features to fill a small instruction manual.

And they’re brilliant.

But sometimes I wonder whether we’ve lost a little of that old magic.

That feeling of finally getting a game to load after half an hour of electronic screeching. That little thrill when you discovered how to get past a difficult section. That sense of achievement when you’d spent an entire afternoon trying to beat your previous score.

No downloads.

No day-one patches.

No subscription required to access your own memories.

Just a computer, a cassette tape and a few hours to spare.

And if the game crashed?

Well, you learned to live with disappointment.

Or you threatened to throw the Spectrum out of the window.

Usually both.

For me, the question isn’t simply which game came first. It’s about remembering a time when playing a videogame was an event in itself.

Maybe it was Horace Goes Skiing. Maybe it was Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, or one of those home-coded adventures that took longer to type in than they did to play.

Perhaps your first game wasn’t on a Spectrum at all. Maybe it was an Atari, a Commodore 64, a BBC Micro or something else entirely.

Whatever it was, I’d wager you remember more about the experience than you do about the graphics.

Because those games weren’t just games.

They were afternoons spent with friends, arguments over whose turn it was, the frustration of losing your progress and the excitement of discovering something new.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, a generation of us became gamers.

Stay safe.

BC