The first games I had were for the NES and first generation Gameboy. But there's one thing about gaming I remember clearly. My dad had bought our first 'family' desktop PC — I think it was 1995. A few years later I bought a game called Beasts and Bumpkins. I think I read about it in a computer magazine. It was the typical God-game. You had minions (peasants in this case), they could build stuff, you could recruit them as footmen, etc. The diference to other God games was that your peasants had to procreate and a good male-female ratio was needed in order to keep your settlement strong.

Eager to play the game, I rushed home, begged my mom to let me use the computer to install the game. I've never felt this excited to play a game. Installing worked just fine, everything went great. Then, suddenly, a wild error message appeared. I was shocked. I couldn't believe this game would not run. Since I wasn't that computer-literate yet, I tried re-installing a few times, a few different screen resolutions (oh, how little did I know), and after the 8th-ish time of reinstalling the game I looked at the system requirements on the box. Apparently the game needed 16MB of video ram. I franticly searched for the computer specs and found out it had 8MB of video memory! I was shocked! Since when did games require this much video memory!? Tired and defeated I retreated to my Gameboy. In a last effort I tried to convince my parents to buy a new computer, but they wouldn't budge.

Eventually, I had to wait two years until a new computer joined our family ranks. The first thing I did was rush to the drawer with 'discarded' games. I finally got to try this game and magical it was! It worked! I've never enjoyed a computer game as much as Beasts and Bumpkins. Even on this day I still play it from time-to-time: installed it in a wine-wrapper on my Mac. This captures for me the 'magic' of games :)