Gaming
I've been playing computer games since the mid-80s. Things were different then.
Home Computers
Back then I had a Commodore 16. Commercial games came on tape cassettes. There were also plenty of magazines that had a game or two in them. They were either printed in source code (BASIC) or in machine code. It generally meant that one had to type in 5 - 25 pages worth of hexadecimal codes. Over time, the technology improved. For instance, checksums were introduced that would confirm whether a line of hex codes was entered correctly. Hot damn, technology is amazing.
Aside from playing Mr. Puniverse and other Mastertronic games, I also spent a good amount of time familiarizing myself with BASIC. The Commodore 16 was running BASIC v3.5, which was an improvement from BASIC 2.0 the older, but beefier Commodore 64 had, at least in terms of programming vocabulary. Less peek and poke. Anyway.
Raketenstart is one of the games that I spent a lot of time with. It was written in BASIC, quite fun to play, and even more fun to modify and see what would happen.
A few years later I upgraded to a Commodore 128D, which had BASIC v7.0, a built-in sprite editor, used floppies and was much more fun to program with. Although I also spent a good amount of time in the built-in C64 mode, since games were much more available for it. LOAD”$”,8, baby. The Atari 600XL was another computer I played games on.
PC Gaming
The first few PC games ran on my Commodore PC10-II with Hercules graphics card. Hey, at least it wasn't CGA. Later on, Games such as Commander Keen, Jack Jazz Rabbit, Jill of the Jungle and Wolfenstein 3D ran on my 386. Doom on my 486. Quake on my Pentium. Yeah, this section is a bit thin, I may elaborate on it later. 
I also played Team Fortress, which many younger gamers today don't even know about and mistakenly recognize as a Half-Life modification. I was playing via a 56k modem on the "30+ Old Folks Home" Quake Server which was hosted a few towns over in Cleveland, Ohio and gave me an acceptable ping (sub-250ms was amazing, then). The original Team Fortress mod was a Quake World mod. Once Half-Life was near release in '98, it was promised that Team Fortress II would ship with it. Valve then announced that Team Fortress II would ship later as a mod. A little while later yet another announcement claimed that Team Fortress II would become its own game. Instead, Valve released Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life as more of an apology than anything else. Team Fortress 2 has since been kept quiet about as Valve Software was busy marketing (and milking) the highly successful Counter-Strike mod and discussions about TF2 only recently (and briefly) re-appeared when Half-Life 2 was released in Q4 of 2004.
But once QWTF was fading away, Starsiege: Tribes caught my attention. And I could wax on about Tribes for a while. That's why it has (and deserves, really) its own page.
The next year in 2002 was rather quiet as I was busy doing all the leg work to start a business, but of course there was still room for a bit of MoH:AA and Battlefield 1942. Once 2003 came around Planetside got me hooked — at least for a few months. After that, I made the switch to Star Wars Galaxies.
2004 was promising when Tribes: Vengeance was announced and I was looking to bring The Moops back to life. That was rather short lived, though. For one, most of us (including me) had lives outside of gaming, and second, Tribes: Vengeance just didn't feel right to most of us — indeed, it felt more like a Unreal Tournament mod since it's based on the UT engine, and earned nicknames such as "UT:V" and "UT with Jetpacks". Third, the game was marketed hardly at all, and fourth, the Tribes games have always had a steep learning curve which made it a niche game. Eventually an auto-aim cheat surfaced that drove gamers away with the final nail in the coffin provided by Vivendi Universal when they cut their losses and canceled the patch that was to implement the Punkbuster cheat detector. The game was abandoned by its own developer / publisher a little longer than three months after release — Just enough time for the return warranty to expire.
I played Battlefield 2 for a while starting September 2005. Various other mainstream shooter came and went, but none of it was really quite as appealing as the Tribes games. Eventually, I found out about Legions, an InstantAction produced game using GarageGames' Torque engine, which essentially is an evolved game engine minus the Tribes 2-specific code. Check it out if you like. My account on there is graydoubt.
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