I have been what I would consider a "gamer" for 28 years now. At the tender age of eight my parents bought my brother and I our first home computer, an Oric-1, which as I recall never made it big in the States. It was from this first computer interaction that both my own love of videogames and future career path would stem, as would my brother's. We ended up taking two very different paths; he became interested in programming while I became obsessed with playing games. Guess which one appealed more to my parents?

But the point is that this simple personal computer introduced me to gaming in a more meaningful way than standalone handheld electronic games like Game & Watch or Astro Wars ever could. I started to share some of my brother's enthusiasm for programming, and would spend hours typing in line after line of basic code printed in gaming magazines just to see a few pixels move around the screen and make a bit of noise.

The Oric-1. Nice carpet.

But my brief stint with programming faded rapidly. The Commodore 64 arrived one Christmas morning and the poor old Oric-1 was garage sale fodder the same day. The C64 was a monumental gaming platform which penetrated Europe, Scandinavia, Canada and America. The sheer breadth of software gave rise to a much wider variety of game genres, styles and mechanics, from the subtle genius of Andrew Braybrook's Paradroid to the guns-blazing arcade-to-home rips of Elite's Commando.

Gaming had a platform like no other with the C64, and while there's simply no denying the power of the NES and Atari 2600, it was this machine that influenced me most as a gamer.

Fast forward to last week, when I found myself engaged in a conversation with my brother over a few beers regarding our old days of gaming. I told him that I was writing my new column, but was struggling thinking of a topic to write about. He joked, "You should tell everyone that Zorgon's Revenge on the Oric-1 was one of the best games ever made." to which my response was, "Hang on, wasn't it shit?"

Zorgon's Revege: Shit, or what?

Had I become a gaming snob? Had living and breathing through 28 years of gaming evolution "jaded" me? Has being an active part of the videogaming industry for 11 years jaded me even further? Or are those old classic gaming memories that we all have simply better left in the past? Suddenly the Commodore 64 popped into my head again. While I truly believe that the vast majority of our collective gaming histories are best left alone, for me, the Commodore 64 was just too good to cast aside.