Last weekend... I had a rather wild one :). Had to do some work, was lucky to go with Christina to see "Shrek" (a must-see!!!), and there was a final celebration of my birthday (actually, it was on 11 November) with my friends. It was a kind of a quiet company, but at the end I think, my friend's (we had a party at his place) neighbours were busy interpreting girls' squeals sounding from the flat... No-no, we did nothing bad at all, though we did turn off the light for a couple of minutes. The photos will be printed tomorrow... :)
But, as a matter of fact, why am I telling this? Just to say I'm in a perfect mood, spiced up with the Best of New Order CD. Yesterday going to bed I was thinking about mu next column subject, and the answer came by itself. The theme isn't new, but it seems to me nice and not provoking cruel discussions. :)
This was... I'm ashamed, but I can't remember exactly. At a girlfrend's place or in school?.. No, neverthless, it seemed to be in school. On a monochrome screen in square labyrinths, a small hard-working Digger was running. It was a hard time for him in view of many different obstacles on his way, but he went on opening his jaws, crashing all the impediments and demonsatrating an imperturbable Arian will to victory.
Then there was Tetris - a regular ona and colored Colums (hm, 16 shades of grey, speaking exactly). The second one was especially popular in our class, though the damage it caused to vision was shattering. About at the same time one of my girlfriends' dad assembled for her a Spectrum, and we played with her duels in basketbol or single player Rambo =). The action was going on a Soviet TV's screen, and an Electronica mono cassette player served as a disk drive - it was an unsolvable mystery for me how THAT worked =) (honestly, I wouldn't answer this question today either =)).
A friend who studied at MIEM, bought himself a BK - the giant of Soviet home computing at the moment - and invited me to come to his place to play. Actually, he meant not only computer games, but all I enjoyed at his place was shooting enemy fighters in some black and white version of Star Wars theme. Was funny, but boring. Some time after nothing, but school tettris, caused damage to my vision. And finally I got to my boyfriend's birthday. He was a "progressive" young man, and his parents gave him a PC as a present. Don't remember what kind if PC it was, but I definitely payed a lot more attention to it than to my friend that day =). because there was it. DOOM. Breaking up a small crowd of my boyfriend's buddies, I stared amazingly at the monsters' muzzles before they formed small inaccurate doormats on the labyrinths' stones.  This was magic.
Fortunately or not, I hadn't muy own PC till 1997. So for rather a long time I didn't play and there were no people keen on games, near me.
At the beginning of '97 under pretence of a life importance (writing of my term paper) a PC was bought. The first game was a shooter, of course -  Duke Nukem 3D. As I remember, they offered me the disk in the shop where I bought the PC. There were also several DOOMs on the CD, NFS, and of course, Q1... Granpa Wolf was there, too, but I preferred a toy called BlackStone, made on the same engine, with monsters looking like bears covered with toxic waste. With funny distorted snouts they threw green lethal balls.
I think this is the moment to stop my list of the "first". Everything that came after was under the #2, 3, etc. Those who are 10 years younger than me haven't probably caught those careless times when we, staring happily at the impressionisticly pixelated monsters, didn't use swearwords like fps etc =). We use other words =). I won't fill the page with pathos about "we saw from what dust the great games grow", but I want to say that I'm personally satisfied with the sight of evolution having passed before my eyes. And I'd like to notice that if a game IS interesting, no ancient graphics can bother you to blow away dust from it and go through it again. That's why I sometimes take a scratched CD box with Dark Forces and a pack of addons from the shelf - 'cause the Force is with them... ;)