The year was 1987 and I finally got my own ZX Spectrum… I didn’t have money for games (not even copied games, let alone legal copies, which you never saw in Portugal), so I quickly learned how to program and did my first game (a text adventure), two weeks after I got it.
Anyway, that didn’t stop me from raiding friend’s houses and getting some games:
R-Type was a shoot-em-up, a horizontal scrolling game in which you destroyed wave after wave of enemies and got powerups for your weapons… Great fun, and on the ZX-Spectrum, the game was so massive you had to load the game in pieces (which implied restarting play after you passed a level). It was released in 1987 for the arcades, developed by a company called Irem.
One of the powerups was particularly memorable: a beam that would fire in 45 degrees angles in relation to your ship and bounce off the scenario… When you got this one, you definitely had an edge…
This was probably the first game I’ve ever finished on my ZX Spectrum, and it took me loads of hours…
Although this is a 1987 game, I only got my Amiga in 1990, and this was one of the first games I played…
Pirates is a game by Sid Meier (of Civilization fame) and developed by Microprose… It was also one of the first games to have the name of the main designer in the title.
In this game, you play as a pirate in the Spanish Main and you had to look for treasures, steal ships, rob cities, get status and reputation with some crowns, etc… It was a sandbox game, way before these became popular… You could build entire stories in your mind with the game serving as a framework…
The game was kind of hard for the time (I was a bit young still), since you had so much you could do at any moment… from going into taverns in friendly cities and finding that the Spanish Silver Convoy was going to pass some place at some time, and then go there to attack them and plunder, to getting status with the French Crown to get some lands and titles, the game didn’t have an “ending” by itself… you were free to chose whatever you wanted…
Never did get the hang of the ground city assaults, though… 
This game really had an effect on what I wanted to do as a game developer in the future years (although I never acted in that direction, to be honest)… I’d already played sandbox games like Elite before, but Pirates gave you a feeling of belonging to a living place, and did that with gentle nudges into “story-like” elements that really appealed to me, much more than the just open and vast world of Elite.
That’s it for today, I know it has been a short entry, but tomorrow I’ll have another post up, about the Image Bank editing tool I’ve finished on SurgeEd (maybe complete with video!)…