What was your first games machine?  It’s a question that comes up from time to time and which sparks almost as much passion as the rivalry between the current crop of gaming devices.

For people of a certain age (like your reporter), video gaming in the home started back in the 1980s, when the ‘home computer’ revolution began and thousands of parents up and down the UK snapped up the new-fangled machines because they were i) ‘the future’ ii) ‘great for helping with homework’ and iii) ‘err…!’

The grim reality was that pre-Internets and Wikipedia, there was no way these dinky little gadgets could really help with homework.  What you could do however, was play games…

…eventually.  Make no mistake, readers, in those days, playing games was a serious business.  Loading a game from casette tape could take anything up to 25 minutes – and lord help you if your volume wasn’t set properly (I permanently set mine to the appropriate level with the aid of a whole bottle of purple nail varnish).

Then there were the hardy (or poor) souls, who actually typed in whole programmes, which were printed in magazines.  Several hundred lines of code, all of which had to be typed in – without error – in order to perform astonishing feats like printing a blocky, sub-ceefax smiley face or play a very crude game of a pac-man(esque) maze game.  Of course, as soon as you switched the computer off, the game would vanish and dissolve like early morning mist.

It was a different time.  It inspired life-long passions, friendships and hostilities.  People from the Sinclair camp, looked with scorn upon the deluded fools with Amstrads.  The aloof and smug Commodore 64 owners merely pitied the owners of outrageously obscure machines such as the Oric 1 or Sam Coupe.  There are many Amiga people who still refuse to speak to anyone who remains convinced of the Atari ST’s superiority.

We all, however, looked down upon the rabble who made do with ‘consoles’.  Which were not even real computers.  Could they type in code to draw a smiley face, or impress girls with the 10 PRINT ‘I AM COOL’; trick in the school computer lab?  I think not…

Yet it was the home computer that contributed directly to the UK’s pioneering games industry and the number of enterprising youngsters who went on to start their own game developers.

Which brings me, finally, to the point.  BBC 4’s Digital Revolution series continues tonight with Micro Men, the true tale of love, rivalry and overheating rampacks between Sir Clive Sinclair, creator of the ZX81 (and many other machines) and Chris Curry, founder of Acorn Computers (creators of the BBC Micro).

While it focuses more on the rivalry and introduction of the hardware rather than the games, this is essential viewing for youngsters and whippersnappers who complain about loading times – as well as hoary eyed antiques who think fondly of the good old days.

What was your first games machine, readers?

- Brian (@flackboy)