I got my first pc (an amstrad cpc6128 with only green colours!!!) when i was 10 years old, 16 years ago. The game that i was most amazed with was the platform Jet set Willy in which Willy, after a night of partying in his mansion, decides to go to sleep, but his wife orders him to leave the bedroom so as to collect all of the dishes that the guests used during the party. Due to this order Willy, for the first time, gets to travel to the entire house, which before was mostly unknown to him, and is revealed to be a vast, multi-leveled world where many strange creatures leave, and follow their own small routes, from the yaught of the family, to the dark Abyss in the lower level of the mansion.
The soundtrack featured also Beethoven's "moonlight sonata' which at the time i thought was composed for the game itself, and it added very much to the overall melancholic mood.
2 years later, in the beggining of the first year of highschool, i bought an amiga 500. Centurion: defender of Rome, Prehistoric, and Rodland, were my first games for that computer, and ofcourse compared to Amstrad everything was incredible... However the games that really influenced my imaginary world were adventure games.
The first was Lure of the temptress. The game's intro depicted a battle between some human factions; the monarch of the feud was aiming at crushing a relatively small rebellion, and victory seemed certain, however he along with his soldiers discovered in horror that the army which was attacking them did not consist of the peasants they expected to see, but of beast-like creatures, called 'the Skorl'. The Skorl massacred the monarch's army, and the rebellious citadel now fell under the joined command of the Temptress, and the Skorls.
I then discovered Delphine. A relatively small, french company, dwarfed next to the main houses of the era, like Psygnosis and Ocean, Delphine quickly made a name for itself with adventure games like Cruise for a corpse, and Another World.
Both of these games fashinated me. I played Cruise for a corpse for endless hours, without ever managing to solve the final riddles (only years later i did, with the help of a walkthrough) but was perfectly happy strolling at the decks and looking for clues as to who had killed the owner of the ship, and host, Niklos Karaburjan. Imagining being sunk in some of the comfortable armchairs in the ship's lounge, carried me away from my room, and the problems of early puberty, or the family affairs.
But Another World was by far the game which amazed me the most, and can be compared only to Jet set Willy as far as its actual influence on my imaginary world goes. The story of a young man who found himself in a different world, without realising how it had happened, and in that world almost instantly was greated with danger, in the form of a black violent monster that run after him, symbolised many things in my own life, and so i found myself playing this game over and over again. The feeling of isolation in a hostile world, and the ultimate captivation by those who in theory were at the same time saving the person from the dark monster, was only a prelude of the magnificent world found here, which although being another world, still seemed purer, and more personal.
The soundtrack featured also Beethoven's "moonlight sonata' which at the time i thought was composed for the game itself, and it added very much to the overall melancholic mood.
2 years later, in the beggining of the first year of highschool, i bought an amiga 500. Centurion: defender of Rome, Prehistoric, and Rodland, were my first games for that computer, and ofcourse compared to Amstrad everything was incredible... However the games that really influenced my imaginary world were adventure games.
The first was Lure of the temptress. The game's intro depicted a battle between some human factions; the monarch of the feud was aiming at crushing a relatively small rebellion, and victory seemed certain, however he along with his soldiers discovered in horror that the army which was attacking them did not consist of the peasants they expected to see, but of beast-like creatures, called 'the Skorl'. The Skorl massacred the monarch's army, and the rebellious citadel now fell under the joined command of the Temptress, and the Skorls.
I then discovered Delphine. A relatively small, french company, dwarfed next to the main houses of the era, like Psygnosis and Ocean, Delphine quickly made a name for itself with adventure games like Cruise for a corpse, and Another World.
Both of these games fashinated me. I played Cruise for a corpse for endless hours, without ever managing to solve the final riddles (only years later i did, with the help of a walkthrough) but was perfectly happy strolling at the decks and looking for clues as to who had killed the owner of the ship, and host, Niklos Karaburjan. Imagining being sunk in some of the comfortable armchairs in the ship's lounge, carried me away from my room, and the problems of early puberty, or the family affairs.
But Another World was by far the game which amazed me the most, and can be compared only to Jet set Willy as far as its actual influence on my imaginary world goes. The story of a young man who found himself in a different world, without realising how it had happened, and in that world almost instantly was greated with danger, in the form of a black violent monster that run after him, symbolised many things in my own life, and so i found myself playing this game over and over again. The feeling of isolation in a hostile world, and the ultimate captivation by those who in theory were at the same time saving the person from the dark monster, was only a prelude of the magnificent world found here, which although being another world, still seemed purer, and more personal.
