Growing up, I craved a game console and even though we in the village I grew up in were the earliest to own a desktop computer, we were unfortunately late when it came to video games. But to be able to enjoy a number of hours with these exciting games, I had to go to the neighbors and hope they wanted to play. One of my friends had a Sega Saturn and we played countless hours with Graylegs & Wheellegs and a dolphin game that I loved when it was underwater and full of shells everywhere. One of my closest neighbors had an NES that was inopportunely plugged into the TV in his parents’ bedroom and I can still remember to this day how we climbed around on their waterbed (because it was more fun than sitting and just waiting) while the other tried to focus while ride a cable car in the circus game or clear a track in Super Mario 3.
The third household that had a console in the area became the gathering point when several of us wanted to play the red-clad plumber as they had a large couch in front of the TV. It might sound silly that there were only three poor households that had video games, but I grew up in a small village outside Norrköping where the nearest store was over a mile away and there were about 200 inhabitants if you counted those who belonged to the parish, but there is basically just one street and in the middle of the forest. We had the forest about 100 meters from the house and the meeting point for all the children was down in the village school’s storage room where the lock had been broken for a long time and we played among the dusty furniture or twisted a basketball that we played with outside the school. We cycled down and swam at the small swimming area that was there and spent the evenings either in the IOGT room where you hit ping pong tables or in the association room where you could learn to shoot air rifles and as children you won a bag of sweets if you were good.
Even though I wasn’t nagging my parents about wanting a game console, I longed for the opportunity to own one myself, even though it was fun to play with my friends, it couldn’t satisfy that feeling of wanting to own a console myself and play without having to take me home to someone else who still played 80% of the time. One day when I came home from school, all that changed, dad had bought a Playstation 1, happiness was total! After so many years, finally there was a large gray console I had not seen before in the living room, but I knew immediately what it was. I grew up in the country so news about technology used to take a little longer to reach households. There was only one CD that came with it, a black demo disc and me and my dad sat for hours playing Kula World, Tekken and some of the others that were included. The next day I was at ÖoB with my schoolmates and I saw they were selling Formula 1 for Playstation, it was on sale so I bought it straight away, I remember it cost SEK 100 at the time which I thought was very expensive as a poor teenager. In the evening me and my father sat for another couple of hours, that night we only sat with the newly purchased game and I still remember that I chose Michael Schumacher as the driver. We sat there and followed the turns as we steered the car along the winding track. I often confuse the magical nostalgia for that night with the first night, but when you dig deep into the brain office, I remember that we bought the game after we got the console home.
This is an ad:
Formula 1 for Playstation was released in 1997 and was based on that season, all drivers are included except for Jacques Villeneuve due to copyright and the Mastercard Lola team did not qualify for the season and therefore were not allowed to appear in the game either. Otherwise, there are several of the big giants that most people recognize at least some of. We have the grand champion Michael Schumacher, Damon Hill, Gerhard Burger, Mika Häkkinen, David Coulthard and several other famous names where you can also see Ruben Barichello who was with us for a very long time and the fathers of today’s driver Kevin Magnussens and the world champion Max Verstappens can be seen in the list.
After the Formula 1 game we bought Spyro, Rayman and Casper which dominated the game console in the living room for a long time, of course we had more games but there were few that we played as much. Spyro and Rayman are classics that I remember today with great fondness and that many people recognize. But Casper so far I haven’t met many people who have played, my mom played Casper with me and I remember both of us getting annoyed by his continuous “I can’t do that” constantly as soon as you walked into a wall or a door which was locked which he could not open yet. Panic quickly set in when we had ghosts we needed to escape from while doing various tasks to get past them. Remember that we had to find puzzle pieces and try to solve various problems in order to get to the end of the game. Spyro has been close to my heart ever since I first played the purple little dragon, I’ve played all the released versions at some level and to this day I look forward to running around the magical little world, of course with the goal of collecting all diamonds and get 100% on the whole game. But the original really holds a big place in my heart and we kids used to play that game on New Year’s Eve to the point where it became a household tradition. Several years in a row we sat 2-5 kids (depending on whether we had guests or not) and ran around chasing eggs, ticking enemies or sheep and sailing through rings while nibbling on pieces of gingerbread houses that we traditionally smashed on New Year’s Eve and drinking pommac. Rayman was a new type of game for me when it came out, it looked like 3D but it was 2D when you were walking along the track, short tracks where you have to be quick in most situations to save the poor people imprisoned. For some reason it felt like a slightly different take on the previous Aladdin games played on Sega.
This is an ad:
During my later teenage years, I had a tough time at school with bullying and ostracism and when I came home from school, gaming was my refuge, security and distraction from everything else that teenage girls stress about. Our Playstation 1 lived a long time, but in high school just before the new year, we had to say a bitter goodbye to our faithful console. Very upset teenager caused a quick visit to the mall and we got home the upgrade Playstation 2 and our New Years tradition with Spyro could continue after all.
Thanks to my first console being a Playstation, that series of consoles has always felt the most familiar and the one I would prefer if I had to choose, even if the look has changed drastically compared to the fifth which is the latest model today, the controller is still and the feeling of pressing the buttons not so far from the first one I played on when I was a kid.
What was your first console?
