In my case we need to go back to the 70's... ;-)

I used to live in a small town called Tinwald, about 60 minutes drive from the only place I knew of that had a Pong machine Christchurch airport. After years of looking forward to picking up relatives from the North Island just so I could play pong we finally moved to Christchurch in 1976. My brothers and I used to get $10 saved up and then go for a day of Pinballing... until that fateful day in '78 when our favourite Pinball parlour got its first space invaders machine. You had to queue up for around 30 minutes to get a go on this new fangled spacies machine. Needless to say I was hooked and over the next 8 years spent virtually all my spare time and my pocket money playing every single game I could. The next big thing to happen was Galaga. After that the next huge game of impact for me was Defender. Everyone I know was absolutely blown away by it. The years rolled on and I spent 2.5 years at University majoring in video games before I dropped out to start earning some real money in the computer industry. Even now, if you exclude the Neo-Geo games there are very few games in Mame that I don't remember playing in my youth, although my top 5 favourites in order would have to be:

1) Bomb Jack (one day I'll do that 10 million+ recording ;-) 2) Galaga (need I say more) 3= Xevious 3= Gyruss 4) Gunsmoke 5) Wonderboy

Ok, so that was 6 and there are at least a dozen more that could have made it into the top 5. With so many great games from this era its just too damn hard to pick a top 5 but these ones will have to do. :-(

There's my brief history in the life of gaming. Oh yeah, and my investment in gaming to date excluding hardware/software purchases would be around $15000 to $20000.... and that's a lot of 20's. (Translation for our North American friends.... that's a lot of quarters.)

Cheers, BeeJay.

PS: My oldest son loves playing 1943 with me now. He's 6 years old and drives the MS Sidewinder Gamepad better than I can. His favourite trick of course is to hit the C button and destroy everything on screen. I therefore have a target to aim for.... be able to score more points than him on any game for as long as possible and be gracious in defeat when he finally starts beating me....... and looking at the way he plays already it will happen one day. :-(

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