☆ "Everyone Had A Spectrum Except Me!" ☆

My Dream Machine

 

Growing up everyone had a Spectrum or if they were really lucky they owned an Amstrad!

I spent my entire time going round to my friends houses after school to play these machines and really liked the idea of owning my own "Speccy" with a disk drive......surely (at the time) the most advanced piece of kit out there! 

The game I simply had to have on the Speccy was 'Football Manager 2' , the game that started the football manager game craze that still lives on today.

So when christmas 1989 finally came along, I asked for my Speccy with a disk drive and a copy of Football Manager 2.

I couldn't wait for Christmas to come along to open that box and set up my brand new speccy.

Safe in the knowledge that mum and dad would get me one I ventured downstairs that Christmas morning with butterflies in my stomach knowing that my whole day would be spent assembling a team of world beaters in Footy Manager 2 on my new speccy. 

I had saved the biggest present till last, I then meticulously opened the large box like present to try and heighten the excitement inside of me even more........

Then I saw the words that made me want to cry "Atari 800 XE/XL" .......

My heart sank.....

I wanted that Speccy so bad and I ended up with a machine I had never even heard of.....no one at school had one and most importantly of all.....FOOTBALL MANAGER 2 wasn't even released on it!!!

I was crest fallen, but I put on a brave face as I set up my new machine. 

Once i'd set it up in all it's glory, I began to warm to it........it had come with a light gun, and a cartridge game called "Bug Hunt" along with another game called Flight Simulator II.....

That Christmas day I also discovered the joy (replace joy with pain) of coding my own games in BASIC. 

The manual came with loads of games that I could create by typing for 3 hours solid with one finger (a style of typing I still adopt to this day) 

It's fair to say that over the next months / years I fell in love with my ATARI as I searched game shops for the less glamorous Atari XE/XL games. 

But to this day, they never did release Football Manager 2 on the Atari, so I had to settle for "World Soccer" by Zeppelin Games instead............

What machine did you always want as a kid ?

 

Did you ever end up owning that dream machine?

 

Which machine introduced you to the wonderful world of computer games?