Hello.
I'm Mike, and I'm sitting at Bletchley station waiting for the train after the Vintage Computer Festival. It was very nice to meet you guys and great to see someone preserving what is, in essence, the European history of home computing and computer games.
I say this because I consistently see our history being overwritten by the U.S.A.'s version of events. I've heard mention a couple of times in national newspapers on the subject about the "video games crash of 1984", which, of course, never happened here as the vast majority had C64s and Spectrums, not Ataris and Intellivisions. Even after that, it was STs and Amigas here, not NESs and Master Systems. And yet, U.K. and European computer gaming defined so much of what we know as the game industry today. For example, I once gave a presentation to a team at Rockstar San Diego, where 11 out of the 14 people in the room were British. The bedroom coders of the 80s and 90s have spread far and wide across the industry enabling some of all-time great game franchises. That couldn't have happened had they not started messing with their home computers all those years ago.
So I definitely wish for every success in getting real funding for the museum and preserving the history of the computer and video games, rather than just video games.
A bit about myself:
I started by using my next-door neighbours spectrum, then having a Commodore 64 for a few glorious years before moving onto the Amiga where I stayed for a long, long time. On the Amiga I started writing music with Soundtracker and ended being asked to do music for some games for a local company after giving out some music disks at a weekly computer club. Last Ninja 2 on the Amiga was the first game that I worked on. Thanks to another friend from the same club who got a job there, I got to do the music for a Psygnosis game (Bill's Tomato Game) and then got a job as a tester/evaluator at Psygnosis after college. Six months later I was doing music and sound effects full-time. And there I stayed for the next 7 years or so, having a hand somewhere in most stuff that was released during that period (1992 onwards); always composing with Bars & Pipes on my Amiga (a practice that continued until about 2 years ago when my Amiga hard drive died).
Due to being an Amiga die-hard, the Amiga heritage got me into buying an Atari Lynx, which remains the only console that I've ever actually paid money for.
I now run a game company called Playbox with a friend.
And that's me. I'll try to dig out the gear that I mentioned at VCF for donation next weekend.
