To @Bhaal_Spawn, the world of Ultima VII became like a second home – one worth revisiting again and again, for its bonus magic and murder.

As a shy, 13-year-old in the mid-90s, exploring the fantasy realms of Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992) wasn’t just like playing the hero in a story of mystery and adventure; it was an opportunity to be the type of person I didn’t have the confidence to be in real life.

Ultima VII was an open-world role-playing game viewed from above, but it had you playing as yourself.

The main character is you, in your home, at your computer and with your life, but with the tiny difference that in Ultima, you entered another world through a magical portal in your garden to become a hero of legend.

Like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the game’s very premise invited you to imagine that a world of heroism and adventure was within your reach.

Scenes from a small school

Picture the scene: it was the early 90s, and for three years I’d been enjoying life as ‘the quiet one’ at an all-girl secondary school in the south of England. It would probably remind you of a baby Hogwarts given its dark wood panelling, Victorian servant buttons, old portraits and dusty book shelves. I mean, we ate lunch in a gallery, for crying out loud.

There were only 11 of us in my entire year, and so we were a close-knit team when at school itself; in truth, however, I rarely saw anyone outside of it. Rhythm may have been a dancer, and teen spirit may have had a noteworthy smell, but I was too busy juggling my books and pencils or floating upon the tides of my own thoughts in my parents’ garden to notice such things, or to socialise with those that did. But that was fine – being in such a small school, and despite our varied personalities, we all knew each other and got on well.

I was already a PC gaming fan by this time; there were one or two girls into console gaming, which was cool and all, but there was no one I could challenge to a death match to see who could free up the most conventional memory.

In my third year – 1993, when I was 14 – our school became mixed and expanded in size. A whole host of interesting and random berks were parachuted in from other schools, directly into my year. Naturally, my instinct was so avoid anyone new, but soon after the new arrangement, I remember idly noticing an inoffensive-looking boy in the library hiding behind a PC Review or White Dwarf, the Warhammer magazine.

In retrospect, the reason we’d end up getting on so well was because we had very similar personalities – so it probably also explains why we were apparently too afraid to talk to each other for weeks. Nevertheless, I’d eventually have someone I could share PC gaming with, learning of an all-new title that I just had to get at home.

A taste for more

When I first saw Ultima VII running on my new friend’s 486 SX, I practically spat out my orange juice. It didn’t seem like a computer game – it was a living, breathing world. A group of warriors stood in the middle of a forest. They weren’t moving – my friend was downstairs making me lunch – but around them it was the forest that seemed to move. A fox skittered past and insects buzzed in the corner of the screen. A deer appeared to bend its neck to sniff the ground. The warrior in red complained about being hungry or needing alcohol. Remember, this game was born in 1992.

After this taster experience, I badgered my dad to get the game for weeks. It would look down at me from the computer shop shelves, in a sleek, black box that absorbed light as much as it teased my eyes, until I could bear it no longer. I’m not saying I went on hunger strike, but I could sulk for England. I wasn’t usually like that, but this was important – desperate times called for desperate measures.

I remember sitting in the back seat of my dad’s car with my new prize weighing heavily on my lap. “Ultima VII: The Black Gate” was almost the only marking on the otherwise pitch-black box. With the sounds of traffic as a soundtrack and with the feel of the leather seats on my skin, I opened it with a creak to reveal its contents. There was a cloth map, a silver coin and a good, old-fashioned weighty tome of a manual. The box had that new-game smell and the manuals had that new-game-manual smell. Breathe it in through your mind; you know exactly what I mean.

When I first tried to play the game at home, the sound didn’t work. I tried everything. It was a simple IRQ problem, but I didn’t know about that sort of thing at the time, and my dad thought computers ran on hamster wheels powered by witchcraft, so he was useless. The PC went to the computer shop and when we went to pick it up, the guys there showed us the start of the intro to prove it worked. Butterflies and pleasant music played and was unceremoniously turned off.

Back at home, and with the full experience finally in front of us, my friend and I sat watching the intro again. Eager as little beavers, we watched the butterflies, the pleasant music and then silence. The screen went fuzzy… a giant red muppet face loomed out of the monitor, and the game’s antagonist boomed my character’s name and directly threatened us from my speakers. I squeaked and spilled my drink over my shoulder. I’d like to say this led to a moment of shared hilarity… but it was a new top and I was livid. Right then, I wanted to smack my friend in his silly laughing face.

Welcome to Britannia

The game opened with you, still reeling from the taunting from your monitor, being summoned to the spooky red gate in your garden and materialising in the centre of a town in the land of Britannia. The townsfolk widened their eyes at both your sudden arrival and at your character’s 90s fantasy-hero good looks.

You were greeted by your old friend Iolo and learned that although only a few years had passed on Earth, in this world, 200 years had passed since the events of Ultima VI. People had forgotten you, magic in the world was dying and a horrific killing had taken place in a nearby barn.

The town mayor didn’t believe you were the hero of Britannian legend, but asked for your help. Wondering if this is why you were there, you donned the deerstalker hat and pipe.

This was perfect for me, really. When I was at primary school, I was in a club comprising a whopping three of us, which we called the Detective Team. It was rubbish; all we would do is plant little clues, usually about whomever it was at school we liked the most, and then take it in turns to do the treasure hunt and solve the answer. My day job now isn’t too far removed from the investigations scene either, so unsurprisingly, the murder mystery story of Ultima VII really appealed.

Nowadays, the sight of this ritualistic bloody dismemberment brings nostalgic joy to my heart. Bless! But at the time? Oh wow – gosh… I felt kinda sick. I mean, what was the age rating on this game?

Surrounding the body was a bucket of blood, candles, and a key. Bloody footsteps led out the back. Your first task was to find a lead for the murderer. Those were your clues and that was the trail you had to follow.

A living world

Ultima VII was no ordinary role-playing game. You moved your characters within an open world with no loading screens; there was a free, frolicking flow between towns, cities, forests, deserts and oceans. Once you left the locale of the opening town, almost everywhere was available to explore, even across the sea, assuming you could find enough money to purchase a ship! Similarly, there was no user interface to speak of – no icons or other commands you needed to use. It was simple: you navigated using the mouse, double clicked to use objects or interact with people, and you dragged and dropped items into your inventory.

The game world was supremely detailed, too. Game worlds in most games, even ones from 2018, are a lesson in illusion. If you look down a street in Grand Theft Auto V, for example, you’ll see a lot of expertly animated people going about their business. It looks alive – but it is really just skin deep. Following someone will lead nowhere, and they’re no different to crowd members in a game like FIFA – part of the scenery, like the pretend doors that inhabit so many games.

It was the NPCs that made the world of Ultima VII come alive. Each of them had a job they trudged off to at certain times of the day. They each had a place to sleep, somewhere to eat and people to meet. Several times I struggled to find a particular person I needed to speak to – potentially a negative point in any other game – only to find that they enjoyed a walk by the shrine at noon, or were having an affair with another NPC and sleep in the wrong bed. The same can also be said of the animals of the world, who can be both inquisitive forest-dwellers as well as reclusively delicious.

Dinner times were therefore quite a convenient time to find people. The local pub became a hive of activity at meal times. I remember sitting in my dad’s office one evening with my friend looking for a gargoyle that I needed to find for a quest.

“What are you doing, guys?”

My dad had appeared behind me with his own friend. I explained.

He had no interest in, or knowledge of, computer games besides knowing that it was something I enjoyed, but he could instantly see what was happening on screen.

He chuckled. “Everyone is in the pub, Dave.”

“Sounds like a good idea!” His friend replied, before they moved off. We rolled our eyes and went back to the game. I went to get some supplies from the kitchen… we had more important concerns than real life!

In a Britannian pub, people came and went, they sat and ate. They would shout for food, which would then be placed in front of them, then they’d consume it with a burp. Amusingly, if you ate the food directly off their plate, the locals considered it so rude, the entire place would erupt into a murderous bloodbath.

But at the end of the night, those who visited would head off back to their beds, while others would return to plotting in the local religious hall, finishing a ship or having a night-time stroll in the woods.

Each had their own schedule, and their own life.

Even more than met the eye

The world of Ultima VII had a certain solidity to it. There was a basic physics engine and a real three-dimensional quality to it. Objects could be moved about and even stacked.

As well as being functional, the objects prevalent throughout the world added to the feeling of realism. Dusty books watched you from high upon shelves (and could be read), while cutlery and plates waited with anticipation upon tables. Candles gazed out into dark areas and cupboards were stuffed with clothes.

You could craft in Ultima VII, too, but there were no tutorials – you learned by watching the people work, or by working for them. For example, by mixing water with flour to make dough and putting it into the oven, you could bake bread; you just had to stand in the baker’s shop and watch as it is done to learn the trade and earn a wage.

It worked because the game was created to be a huge sandbox. I liked to commandeer a house for myself, picking a non-essential NPC to murder (“Sorry!”) and then stealing their home. Once the house was mine, I picked up pretty trinkets along my travels and brought my favourite things or trophies back home. As for the former occupant, hopefully the local guard wouldn’t look under the bridge down the road. Or… in the bank vault, where I stashed the body of the bank manager.

It’s all completely normal.

In any case, and like more recent games such as Skyrim, the game was detailed enough that you could almost live there, earning a wage collecting eggs and spending your money on new equipment or in the pub.

Meet the new world, same as your own world

The plot to Ultima VII wasn’t straightforward, but it hit impressively close to home on a few fronts, exploring themes such as organised religion, class division and the inevitable death of old beliefs. And smacking huge dragons in the face with pointy weapons.

As well as slumming it in dungeons, forests and deserts, you got to meet time lords, crazed wizards and a host of other interesting weirdoes.

The problems in this land were not obvious. With magic on a big downer and the Avatar (you) having been absent for 200 years, people turned to religion: the Fellowship, to be exact. Although there was nothing immediately evil about these people, it soon became clear that all was not as it first appeared. Murders aside, chaos stalked the land and was clouded by a seductive veil of progress and normality.

I was passionate to get further into the game as early as possible – and with the sun almost set I reached the capital city. I can still remember seeing its lights shimmering in front of me. I had been travelling north and by the time I’d reached its perimeter, it was night time. Rain was pouring from the sky and lightning flashed above me.

Unfortunately, although Ultima VII did have a day and night cycle alongside complex weather systems, the storm in question was in the real world, the capital city was London and I was in the back seat of my mum and dad’s car. We were on our way north from our home in Kent to visit family in Derbyshire. It was dark, and I was depressed. I looked up through the rain-splattered glass and watched the motorway lights gliding through the night overhead, sparkling orange in the rain drops on the window panes and sending shadows sweeping through the car interior. The weather was awful, and for reasons I don’t remember, we’d left far too late in the day.

I’d been forced to end my game just when I was about to arrive in the Britannian capital city, so I was in a bad mood. I laid on the back seat of the car against my brother and thought of the new world I had just discovered back home. The game’s manual was on my lap but, frustratingly, it was too dark to read. I could only make out a few words every few seconds as they were illuminated briefly with each passing sweep of an overhead motorway light.

We only made it to the M25 before my dad broke the “bad” news: it was too late, the weather was too poor and we had to turn back home. The party up north was a failed mission – I remember feeling so happy.

Gaming at the back, House Party at the front

When we returned home, my brother sat down in front of Noel’s House Party and I went into the back room and settled into the chair at my dad’s PC. Even better than the cup of hot chocolate and my dad’s warm fireplace – and above and beyond the joy of my narrow escape from forced, awkward small talk with people who shared my genes – was the music and light spilling from the door of the Britannian Inn on screen. It promised the most welcome digital hug.

My characters had travelled from the town I first arrived in to the capital, and now I finally had the chance to enter its bustling inn and greet the raucous denizens of this night-time metropolis. A rest and some music was just what the doctor ordered, and I leant back, my hot chocolate warming my hands. I liked to role-play these sorts of situations, so I had each of my party members drink about six bottles of wine in celebration. Just like real life!

The first task in Ultima VII’s big city was to learn about what ailed the land – Lord British, Britannia’s ruler, asked that you mingled, worked, settled down, broke bread and got to know the people.

New world disorder

The task – and story – picked up pace quickly. As you picked up the trail of the murderer, you slowly uncovered details of a conspiracy to brainwash the populous and unleash evil into the land. What’s more, it was happening right under the noses, and with the unwitting complicity, of the people who were there to protect the people. With more murders and revelations taking place along your travels, you were soon infiltrating the Fellowship, releasing demons and chatting to magical creatures.

The majority of the game revolved around uncovering the sinister truth behind the new religion on this world and the true, unspeakable purpose of what they wanted to achieve.

It wasn’t too complex to follow, but I must admit I spent quite a few evenings lying with the phone on my bed like a ridiculous teen cliché though with the key difference being that I wasn’t discussing who was going out with who but interrogating my friend about where the ritualistic killers would dismember someone next.

“Oh, hi!” He said. “Are you calling about this weekend? I thought we could-”

“Where is the Demon Sword?!” I demanded.

“Tilly, get off the phone!” It was my dad.

“Dad, I just need to find out who is going to be murdered next.”

“OK, well… – wait, what?”

Fighting spirit

Along the way, there were plenty of battles to be had. Now, I think it’s fair to say that the combat was Ultima VII’s weakest aspect. Manual combat was nigh-on impossible, despite being an option, so you were forced to turn on auto combat. With the switch flicked on, and with enemies nearby, you only had to hit the C key and your party would scatter, charging this way and that, arrows flying and swords swinging at anything hostile. If enemies reached a critical health value, they would flee with a cry of ‘Mercy!’ or ‘Take pity!’, shedding weapons and armour as they ran from your compatriots. Dropping their weapons made sense, but I’ve still never quite understood why a heavily armoured warrior would drop his trousers as they made their escape. But they did.

It was completely chaotic, and you had zero control over anything until you pressed the C key again and your friends returned to you, swords dripping with blood. I thought it was hilarious fun.

University challenges

It must have taken me a year, on and off, to complete the game. With my appetite being utterly insatiable, I immediately moved on to the excellent semi-sequel (Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle – yes really, it’s that big it came in two parts) and then Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, the first-person Ultima games. I probably spent half of my GCSE and A-Level years playing these games, and the rest of the time talking about them with my school friend.

Several years later, it was time to go to university and my friend from school moved away, as did I. I spent much of my first year of uni with my books and hardly left my room, until, after an overheard conversation across the dinner table, I was adopted by a small group of slightly awkward PC gaming guys from another block. Soon, they would ring and invite me over to their block to play Worms United or to join them at the local karaoke bar, student night or another potential source of embarrassment. Later on, when we shared a house and a network, I would quite frankly own them on Unreal Tournament. Despite that, most remain among my best friends to this day.

Eventually, my mum came to pick me up after my first term of university. I’d just started seeing the guys I would later know well and, with renewed optimism, I listened to a midi version of the Ultima VII song Stones on my PC, the last thing I’d pack up and take home.

From that term, and until my more sociable days, I remained a world-class introvert and found university quite an isolating place in those first few months. During that time I found comfort in the familiarity and sheer character of Ultima VII. Playing the game made me feel comforted and at home. I felt like a 13-year-old in my dad’s study again – the worries would melt away – and, like that familiar magical door leading to another world, I could step through to my childhood, and more carefree times.

As soon as she spotted a demo of Star Wars: X-Wing in PC World in the early 90s, @Bhaal_Spawn knew that she was powerless to resist. You could say that it was her destiny.

People used to talk a lot about so-called ‘interactive movies’ – the 1990s Holy Grail of video games.

Back then, many games developers seemed to think we all dreamed of being in control of the latest cinematic blockbuster. Perhaps we did, but more often than not, what we actually got was grainy FMV of the older brother from The Wonder Years, failing to act his way out of a paper bag.

In 1993, when I was (just!) a teenager, I finally saw a REAL interactive movie. It’s not often that you get to experience real magic, but in possibly the first-ever PC World store in Croydon, I did.

Star Wars: X-Wing by LucasArts was a space-combat flight simulator and the first instalment of the best series of Star Wars games of all time. Taking on the role of a rebel pilot during the year leading up to the destruction of the Death Star, you fought the Empire in a series of story-connected missions.

When I first saw it in action, it was the moment I realised the future had arrived.

Real magic

When my dad bought our first PC in 1990, purely for business, I was still in primary school. I was disappointed because my friend had an Atari ST and tons of cool games. But despite our own machine being larger than our car and dumber than a rock, I very quickly became obsessed with it, editing its start-up files and building Lotus 123 spreadsheets to maintain my Christmas list.

I was a strange kitten, it’s true! I scoured PC magazines and would conspire to develop more elaborate ways for my dad to part with his money. I kept a notebook of my dream computer fantasies, complete with heart-adorned drawings of the monolithic, blinking grey boxes with accompanying lists of specifications to drool over. A trip to a computer shop felt like a treat.

I don’t remember why my dad took me to PC World on that cold day in 1993; I might have wanted a new mouse or something like that. I’d spent the morning lying on the carpet in front of the TV, and as the end credits of BBC1’s Live and Kicking filled the room, and host Andi Peters waved us goodbye, I was soon skipping down our steps to my dad’s car.

In the days before internet shopping reduced its relevance, PC World was like the Toys R Us of computers. Row upon row of PCs greeted us, with confused shoppers gazing at labels and pretending to understand their new, digital overlords. Each PC would have Windows 3.1 on its screen. With its crisp lines and geometry, they looked like members of a corporate, robotic clone army.

Scanning the shelves for what we needed, my eyes passed over boxes of mice and keyboards. But between them and beyond, I spotted something immediately: a small group of people were clustered around one table in particular. They moved away, leaving it all to me as I approached. A 486 with a large cathode ray tube monitor was alive with light and sound. My eyes danced in its reflection, sparkling at the scene in front of me. Star Wars was instantly recognisable, and to me it looked just as good as the movie.

The X-Wing intro was enough to set my heart racing. It ended and then repeated and I must’ve stood on that 90s carpet and watched it three or four times more, taking it all in.

Imperials conspired aboard their Star Destroyer and watched as their turbo lasers battered the rebel fleet. Meanwhile, an orange fish-faced weirdo (Admiral Ackbar) blurted out his orders to launch the X-Wing fighters which then criss-crossed the screen, barking instructions at each other, hunting TIE Fighters. And then, with one final explosion and starfighter fly-by, the triumphant Star Wars logo and story crawled up the screen. It was something to behold!

Recruited for the Rebellion

It would be a while until I got my hands on X-Wing for myself. But in the mean-time, my nerdy school friend Gavin was acting as smug as a casino magician. He always had the best computers and computer games, so when I’d been raving about what I’d seen in PC World, of course my friend had already been bought the game.

He was excited to get me involved and I was keen to play too. What I hadn’t been expecting was to essentially be recruited as wingman, and given a sheet of the game’s keyboard commands to learn, as if we didn’t get enough homework already! I was tested on it, too; my friend would literally quiz me at lunch, or approach me in computer club (which I usually spent drawing in Deluxe Paint II on the school’s Amiga 500s), and would interrogate me about random keys.

“What does this one do? Assign next target or order wingman to attack?” Then, “…No! Go away and relearn it!” he would shout, backhanding my mouse across the desk. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little. But essentially, the boy was stark-raving mad.

As weird as it was, this was all good preparation for my visit to Gavin’s house that weekend. I loved doing this, because he practically lived in a mansion and had so much cool stuff in his room: a Warhammer 40,000 table, an epic PC, a huge TV. His mum was really nice too, although amusingly she would often walk in unannounced to check up on us without having any good reason to be there (in hindsight, I suspect is was to make sure we weren’t up to any ‘shenanigans’… ew).

It was at my friend’s PC in these opulent surroundings that I leant back in my seat to watch X-Wing being played for the first time.

Amongst the stars at last

Your career as Imperial target practice began on the deck of the Mon Calamari Star Cruiser, Independence, which featured a series of doors and flight decks that acted as an atmospheric menu screen. Relaxing music played, cute little droids and pilots stood chatting and calls for staff echoed across the hall on the tannoy.

Click on the shuttle bay doors and they open, allowing you to head to the training ground or flight school. Choose another door and it meant you started your tour of duty properly. Of course, as nostalgic as it was to passively surround yourself in the sounds of Star Wars, blowing up its ships was far more exciting.

The true beauty of the game was its fully realised 3D engine, and it pushed the capabilities of the PC to the limit. This was not a game which the SNES, Atari ST or Amiga 500 could have dreamt of; this was epic space adventure at its finest.

Lawrence Holland was a flight simulator veteran of games such as Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and had been asked by LucasArts to apply his skills to create a Star Wars flight sim. The result was as perfect as you could have hoped for.

Completely physics driven, X-Wing’s flight engine modelled every object within the space battle in real time. Each laser you fired had its course in space and each part of a ship was a mathematically modelled 3D object to be potentially collided with. Even destroying a ship could result in spinning debris that could take out a passing craft if you weren’t looking where you were going. Nothing that darted about in space was simply cosmetic.

While you weaved in and out of a teeming danger zone, Capital ships slugged it out above or below you and needed to be either defended or destroyed, depending on what your objectives were. Other fighters would be engaging in dogfights in the distance – duels to the death that splayed green and orange laser fire around them like a Catherine wheel. Rockets would cross your vision and be headed towards your primary target. Meanwhile, other AI-controlled ships had their own individual objectives, such as bombing runs or air supremacy and would be scattered by the entrance of an enemy capital ship from lightspeed.

Each mission was connected by a running plot within each tour of duty, featuring twists and turns, rescue missions, not-so-routine patrols and surprise Imperial raids; all with the plot of the movie was used as a backdrop and explained by your commander in the mission briefing to provide context.

Of course, I began my career as co-pilot, which meant sitting at my friend’s side eating Twiglets and watching him play. Occasionally I would press the shield recharge key, find a new target and/or resist the urge to hit Ctrl-E and eject him into the void out of jealousy. On one occasion I didn’t have to.

Leaning back in my friend’s leather office chair, I saw that Gavin was engaging a Star Destroyer head on, dodging the incoming barrage of turbo-laser fire and physically leaning left and right on his stool. At 14 I was almost as tall as I am now (5’10”) and much taller than he was, so to me he looked like a Hobbit wrestling a snake while looking up at his monitor. Suddenly, with a crack, the X-Wing’s control panel splintered as a laser penetrated the ship’s protections.

“Shields!” he yelled at me and I was probably, no definitely, a little too slow to react. I unfolded my legs and set down my Coke. I leant forward to do as instructed, conscious that time was of the essence but feeling frustrated and eager for my friend’s death and the turn that I’d been promised an hour ago. I took my time and eventually pressed the shield recharge button to divert energy to the shields, but it was too late. Another crunching sound and the ship’s controls were frozen. My friend screamed as he pulled on the flight stick in vain, with his X-Wing impacting on the Star Destroyer’s bridge.

He got up, looking dejected. For a long time, he just seemed to stare at the screen.

“Ooooooh… oh dear,” I said, hand to mouth with mock shock. Gavin looked like he wanted to call his mum and have me ejected from his house.

John Williams would be proud

As great as the game was, it would be nothing without the right sounds and music.

Early PC games looked at the Amiga with envy, but that changed rapidly with the invention of the Adlib and Sound Blaster cards which brought sweet, sweet digitised sound and FM synth to our great, grey and mostly silent boxes.

Star Wars (and other movie tie-in) games needed the sound and music to hit the right notes in the brain, perhaps even more so than regular games. After all, the Star Wars music and sound effects are part of what makes the movie franchise so iconic.

Luckily, X-Wing, like many games developed by LucasArts, boasted a unique music system to help bring the action from a galaxy far, far away directly to you: the iMUSE music system, which also featured in soundtracks like the Monkey Island series. Rather than the game ordering your sound card to play a set series of notes like a recording, the game instructed the computer to play notes in a timing and rhythm that adapted to the action, creating atmospheric anticipation during slow periods, which slowly became peppered with drum beats and sped up as an enemy approached. Under fire, the music then exploded into full orchestra and the familiar themes we all know, dynamically interweaving them together.

The atmosphere was highly immersive and, of course, the story followed suit.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

Of course, there was no use blowing TIE Fighters apart for no good reason. What every young person wanted to do when they first saw Star Wars was to leap into the cockpit of the nearest X-Wing or grab a lightsaber and lop the hand off their father. Well, assuming they were old enough to appreciate it – when I first saw the Return of the Jedi in the cinema, I was a toddler. All I remember was seeing the Rancor’s mouth and immediately having a breakdown. My dad had to carry me out of the theatre in floods of anguished tears and take me home.

But anyway, once you start the game properly, you quickly realise that the X-Wing experience is not just shooty space battles with a cool soundtrack; you became a part of the rebellion against the Empire in as real a way as I think has ever been digitised in game form.

Over the course of three tours of duty (five, including the excellent expansion packs that followed), you helped exact revenge against the Empire and began to feel like an integral part of the story. Perform some heroic deed in a mission and medals and other awards started to adorn your uniform and you felt a real sense of pride at the silver or gold rewards for your achievements.

Cleverly, the game interweaved the events of the movies and created backstory and battles to go alongside it. For example, in one mission, you might have been helping a rescue mission for a transport of Wookie slaves, while in another, you were providing support to transports carrying the Death Star plans, which were on their way to a rendezvous with a certain diplomatic ship heading to Alderaan.

You don’t know how hard I found it

If there’s a criticism you could level at X-Wing, it was that it was rock hard – I mean, properly difficult. The game’s AI was good, but let’s be honest, you were the star of the show, and if you weren’t at the top of your game, the rest of your scummy rebel friends wouldn’t turn the tide to victory by themselves. This meant you needed to be aware of all the mission objectives at all times.

There were some missions where this was almost impossible. Admiral Ackbar might croak “Red Two, your mission is to protect two grain transports bound for Dantooine,” and that might sound reasonable – except that you’d often find you were separated from them by a good 30 seconds of space flight, during which you and the transports were under constant attack. When it only took one or two missiles to turn the grain shipments into intergalactic popcorn, you essentially needed to be in two places at once.

For these reasons, it’s with a sense of personal pride that I completed the game before the CD versions were released, because in the re-release the game shipped with an option to turn off the ‘classic’ missions and instead play the new, easier versions.

Tales of close calls and daring bravery were sometimes swapped long into the evening. One night, with the stars speckling the night sky and a campfire enticing our shadows into dancing on the trees around us, my friend and I sat in the forest at the back of his house roasting marshmallows on sticks like extras in a cheesy episode of Gentle Ben.

We sat shaking, from either the cold or PTSD, I wasn’t sure. Either way, our eyes bore into the fire as we relived each crushing X-Wing defeat after another. I remember two guys, both older than either of us, approaching. These woods were communal and the younger people in the area would come to hang out.

In the distance a thumping beat was pounding. I was very quiet, but it was clear they wanted us to come with them to the party that was going on a few doors down. They became fairly insistent, albeit in a good-natured way. By coincidence, the shorter one noticed the X-Wing keyboard layout card I’d brought with me. Suddenly, the nature of the conversation changed.

“Oh hey! I’ve got that game! Do you play it?”

“I just watch him,” I smiled, keen to avoid a grilling. But it wasn’t long before the pair of them were swapping tales of daring. After a few minutes, the boy’s friend pulled him towards the music.

Back at the house, having narrowly avoided social interaction with humans, we loaded X-Wing up again to try out some of the moves we’d just been hearing about. We made sure to turn the volume up just that bit higher than usual, to compete with the thumping that we were now aware of coming from down the road.

Masters of the universe

It wasn’t just the music and sound which worked so well. There was a definite strategy to the game that you needed to master. Every ship had its own power system which was, with a key press, divided between engines, lasers and shields. This simple system was easy to learn, but it completely opened up how you played the game.

Hit a key and you could divert power to shields and increase your protection, but this would be at the expense of your laser power and available speed. Alternatively, you could set your lasers to supercharge, but at the expense of speed and your defensive capability. On the other hand, if you diverted power to the engines, you were super nippy and could potentially escape a tricky situation, but your shields and lasers would drain quickly.

A lot of your other systems could operate independently too and become disabled at precisely the wrong moment. Your sensors could be broken and refuse to show you where the enemy was, or your targeting computer could short circuit and leave you unable to launch missiles. Worst of all, your ejector seat function could malfunction if that was hit. This meant that if you were destroyed you weren’t just dumped back at the mission debriefing screen with a ‘retry’ button. Instead, you were presented with a CGI funeral and the word ‘dead’ next to your pilot’s name.

Just like in a flight sim, if you were blown up and failed a mission that way, there was a chance your character could be killed outright and it basically meant game over. A dead character was permanent, and so you quickly learned to find and back up your pilot file every day just in case!

University challenges

X-Wing was also the game that inspired one of my favourite moments of all time. At university in either 2001 or 2002, a couple of my friends and I were visiting another friend at her house. Being a computer nerd, and almost exclusively knowing other computer nerds, it was no surprise to me that we arrived at the house to find my friend’s male housemates, most of whom I had never met, all engaged in a network multiplayer PC game.

Walking into one guy’s bedroom and sitting next to him at his computer, I seemed to distract this poor boy into detonating his craft pretty swiftly, but I instantly knew what I was looking at. This was X-Wing Alliance, the fourth game in the series and something I’d longed to get my hands on after I’d left my copy installed on my dad’s PC at home. It played exactly like the original, only with graphics worthy of 1998, when it was released.

After watching for a bit, the host of the game appeared and asked if I wanted to have a go. He was being polite, but I could tell that he immediately assumed I’d never played the game before, which was strange because moments earlier I had told him that I had. Nevertheless, I was warned not to worry about complicated matters, like the shield recharge rate settings, using missiles or the targeting computer.

Presumably, despite being an Astrophysics student, he thought my female mind would explode if I tried to memorise too many keyboard commands. I’d met this guy before and didn’t like him. He was arrogant and outspoken and exactly the sort of person who usually intimidated me.

His friend stood up and I sat in the chair and took the controls. The host went back to his room to take command of his own ship. The other players were all in different parts of the house, each with a PC in their bedrooms. In the next round, we all flew TIE Fighters, except for the host who was allowed the superior TIE Interceptor.

Weaving in and out of the laser fire, I approached him head on, fainting left, before spinning right and then doubling back left to find myself on his tail. I blew him out of the sky, and hear a thump from the floor above. Picking him off from range with some lucky shots elicited a similar noise. Creeping up to the top of the scoreboard, I could hear the host getting more and more frustrated as his superior craft hadn’t translated into superior results.

With the final kill, my victory was rewarded with a faint “F**K OFF!” from somewhere in the house. He came stomping down the stairs and walked straight to the fridge for a beer. There was dead silence as my friend and I looked at each other. Inside, I was laughing my head off.

Pros

• Fully 3D intergalactic dogfighting

• Perfect flight controls

• Absorbing tours of duty and integrated story

• Spot-on Star Wars atmosphere

Cons

• Very difficult, with some unfair missions

• Not as good as its sequel, TIE Fighter

@Bhaal_Spawn’s take

X-Wing is an almost-perfect Star Wars game. Despite a steep learning curve, it successfully gave me the memories of a Rebel fighter pilot. Take to the stars and dogfight with the Empire to save the Galaxy, in exciting story-based ship-to-ship combat.

It was the game that set @Bhaal_Spawn on her path to enlightenment – or as most of us know it, hopeless computer game addiction.

Dungeon Master is probably the first game I remember really caring about. In this first-person, real-time, role-playing dungeon exploration game, you were in control of a party of adventurers seeking fortune and glory in the spooky depths of the trap and monster-filled dungeons of Lord Chaos. It was tile based, meaning you moved your whole party of four characters one square at a time: forwards, backwards, left or right, like four chess rooks trapped in a single pawn’s body. Despite these simple mechanics, it’s still one of the most engaging games I’ve ever played.

A first taste of gaming

The precise year I first tried Dungeon Master is hard to say – but this was Kent in the late 80s and I was around seven or eight. Tears for Fears were on the radio and I spent most of my spare time with my head in a Transformers comic, punching or being punched by my brother, or sketching characters from comics in my room overlooking our garden. Everybody Wants to Rule the World may have been the words sung on the radio, but I was content to mind my own business at home and be a bit of a hermit.

I had friends at primary school; I was fortunate that people seemed to like me and I could make people laugh, but deep down I didn’t feel at all confident, particularly in larger groups. I distinctly recall sitting at my classroom desk at the start of a term and thinking “from now on, I’m going to be confident”. It never worked out, of course.

Game facts

Platform

Atari ST

Year

1987

Genre

RPG

Developer and publisher

FTL

My best friend, a giant of a boy, was called Paul. We used to make up stories where he was a robot and I was his master, and he’d carry me about on his shoulders, weaving in and out of the kids playing football. We would be the ones who would rather chat about cartoons in the corner at the school disco or would be playing on his Nintendo Game and Watch on a bench outside at lunch break with some of our other classmates. He lived just around the corner from school.

One day, he must have invited me round to play on his new computer for the first time. It was an Atari ST, although I didn’t know anything about PCs, Amigas or the likes of the NES at the time. I do remember that the only time I’d ever played computer games before would have been at my cousin’s house in Derbyshire (where they had all the best Game and Watch machines, Pong and some terrifying machine that projected a kind of uber Space Invaders onto the wall), on Duck Hunt with my dad in the pub, or on the Dover to Calais ferry, which blinked such invitingly bright lights.

I remember looking at that little buzzy bee Atari ST mouse pointer – which, by the way, is incredibly cute – and being quickly hooked on seeing what this new machine could do. Every day after school, or at least what felt like every day, my mum would let me walk round to my friend’s house with her and I’d be dropped off for a couple of hours of gaming. Mainly I’d just watch my friend play whatever demo he’d recently found on the cover of a magazine, but I also enjoyed Double Dragon, Elf, Rampage, Gauntlet 2 and things like that.

Becoming the Dungeon Master

The Atari ST opened up a whole treasure chest of newness like that for me – but the game that really reeled me in and locked the lid was like nothing I’d seen before. There were no guns, aliens or men to beat up; no platforms to jump; no bosses to thump; you viewed the game world through your own eyes!

Dungeon Master opened in classic fashion: a jolly-great big door and a massive doorbell, as if for you to say “Hello, we’ve come to kill everything and steal all your treasure.” “Oh dear. You’d better come in.” “Thanks…”

Inside is the character creation, where you designed your party of adventurers. I say design; although you could edit and make your own, after stepping through the entrance of the game, you were placed in a small dungeon in which you walked alone through a sort of rogue’s gallery. You picked four characters from a motley crew of weirdoes all displayed on the wall, as if they were frozen in time within pictures forever.

Even this little touch of the strange was a tiny little piece of magic – just something extra to make the world believable.

Plunging into the dungeon

Once you gathered your party, you adventured forth. The difficulty level was reasonably smooth – the labyrinth started small and simple and the first puzzles you encountered were your common pressure-plate-to-open-the-door-style tricks; you weighed them down with something useless and proceeded.

The first monsters you came up against properly were these weird, radioactive-green breathing mushrooms, which wheezed at you. The hilarious thing about them was that they not only looked utterly disgusting, but they were completely delicious! Kill one, and they left behind slippery slices of toadstool for your characters to greedily chomp on. Yum! You could even hurl the pieces to kill more of them – literally, it was delicious irony.

So, yes, that’s right, you needed to feed your characters, so food was an important part of your inventory. Each of your four characters was a massive glutton, so you needed to stock up on food and also store water in water skins, which was a separate resource requirement.

Other items you might find along the way included weapons, armour, coins, maps and mini-clues or story scrolls. Although there wasn’t really any plot to speak of, you did find occasional notes – puzzle clues, really – but these added to the atmosphere too.

The further you went in Dungeon Master, the harder it got. From humble beginnings, great works were wrought – and the deeper you progressed, the more fiendish and totally bizarre the shenanigans got. Multiple pit traps and teleporters would flabbergast and confound you and had you sweeping the mouse away in disgust. Illusionary walls and hidden doors would surprise and befuddle you into submission. Object-related puzzles and riddles would leave you chewing the end of your map-making pencil and casting your arms into the air in silent surrender to the mind-bending nature of your surroundings.

But the environment was the least of your worries.

Unleash the beasts

After being attacked by juicy garden flora, you could expect to bash a wide variety of absolute numpties over the head. Sometimes even literally; you could hit a door switch to have it repeatedly bosh a mummy on the noggin until it died. Giant scorpions terrified, yellow spiders creeped you out, then there were the blue hillbilly things carrying clubs, and those strange worms that poisoned you – it was all there.

Towards the end of the game, you encountered strange Beholder rip-offs and then, the piece de resistance: the dragon. I still remember the first time I saw one.

It was a Saturday, we were about nine and my friend and I were at his house alone. It was very cramped – one of those thin, old Victorian terraces. We rarely ate when playing on the computer (who needs food when you have fun), and we usually dispensed with the sofa too, where his dad would often sit chain smoking behind us. Instead we’d kneel on the carpet (I can still sense its coarse, scratchy feeling on my legs), sitting not a couple of feet away from the small CRT television.

We were alone, there was no music in the house and maybe just the sound of a passing car outside the window as the only light source, although it was quite a bright day. With Paul’s house being so close to our primary school, we’d sometimes even go back there during lunch break and I’d chat to his mum, but this was the weekend and the adults were out shopping.

The dragon took us by surprise. It doesn’t move fast, or at least I don’t remember it moving, but it was in a large open area, where it loomed out of the dark and was just… huge. More out of excitement than fear, we both yelled (or maybe it was just me). My friend went to hit escape or something, anything just to pause the game, but instead our characters just started screaming and dying in fire. With a thrill of panic, I grabbed my friend’s hand and tore out of the house, away from the carnage and into his garden, where we wound up lying on the grass, laughing our heads off; “Did you see it? Oh my god!”

Master caster

While monsters were like nothing I’d seen before, the magic system to Dungeon Master was also incredibly far ahead of its time – it worked similarly to the Ultima Underworld magic system, in that you didn’t just click an icon to fire off a spell. Instead, you had to know the ‘recipe’ for a spell, in terms of the words used to utter it. You’d find the runes needed to cast spells not in the manual, but in the dungeon itself.

For example, one of the most important spells – the light spell which you needed to use periodically – was cast by clicking two runes in a particular order; this was found on a scroll early on. Once you found a spell scroll, you had to go grab a pen and paper (and I mean literally – get up and go and find one, don’t be lazy!) so you don’t forget how to cast it. Naturally, this made any right-thinking person feel exactly like a wizard with a huge beard.

Skills to raise the thrills

Playing Dungeon Master was always fun – but on occasion I had the whip cracked at me like an Ancient Egyptian slave driver. You see, each of your characters had a base amount of magic and health, as well as a starting level for fighter, wizard, etc. Obviously, the characters with the most mana focused on magic at the back, while the ones with higher fighting ability would be on the front row. But all characters could cast spells and all characters could fight. Pow! Anyway, their abilities progressed at a rate determined by how much they used them.

Basically, it was just like in Skyrim; if a character cast a lot of spells, swung a lot of swords, or made a lot of potions, they were going to gain ability in those skills. If she knitted all day, she’d end up a grandmaster in making dragon motif sweaters!

Which led me to my ‘job’: while my friend made lunch, I often had to sit at the ST, attacking thin air for half an hour, or even an hour, in an attempt to gain experience. I mean, how exciting is that? I’d be sitting there on the carpet, clicking sword, clicking swing, sword, swing: “Whoosh”, “Whoosh”… for what seemed like forever.

So, that sounds dull. But I didn’t see it that way at the time. No, see, we were ‘training’. Yes, totally.

That’s how dedicated we were to this game. It had us spending hours doing nothing but casting light spells or swinging swords in a dead end somewhere, silently nibbling our sandwiches and nodding in mutual appreciation if a level was gained.

A lasting legacy

You know a game is important if it influences what you do in day-to-day life, and with Dungeon Master, it undoubtedly inspired the first fan-art I ever did of a game. I played Top Trumps with my brother on car journeys – for the uninitiated, it’s a card game where each card represents a character with differing strengths and weaknesses out of 100 points. You would take it in turns to play a card and pick a skill to play – a sort of very simplistic Pokémon card game.

So over the course of several days I created my own deck of Top Trumps. So, there was the Screamer mushrooms – Fear Factor 5, Strength 15, deliciousness 57. Yum. Obviously Chaos was the top card, with top magic, strength etc… but he had to have his weakness; he was not very delicious.

But that was the game: a simple dungeon crawler to younger gamers now, perhaps, but for me, my friend and countless others, it represented mystery, exploration, and a journey into a whole new world.

It would be a couple of years before my dad considered getting a computer. I begged him to buy an Atari ST, pointing out you could even make games on it – you didn’t just have to play them! Obviously, I had no idea that games were not at the front of his mind at all. He bought a display-model 2086 from Dixons, with Intel 086 processor (a lightning-slow 8Mhz), with 640KB of RAM and a whoppingly small 32MB hard drive.

But, in a concession to little me, he did promise to buy me a computer game – the game I ended up with was Castle Master. It wasn’t Dungeon Master by any stretch of the imagination, but it was mine. And I would come downstairs in my PJs at 6am to play it at the PC table in the corner of our dining room.

My love for PC gaming was born there, but the fires were first lit by the Atari ST and Dungeon Master, which I’m forever grateful for!