blakespot

I started playing NMS at age 44. I'm 54 now.

I am the author. I've been running the blog these 10 years.

I sat down to write about the game, summarizing it and how it has grown over the years at this huge milestone. And then, as I started writing, it occurred to me that ... I -- a person who has been playing this game daily for ten long years -- am probably more of a story that some may find notable than anything I could write on my "just for fun" NMS blog as a general recap of the game's history, with so many mainstream gaming sites surely doing the same in articles and YT videos.

So, instead, I just told about my time playing it. Obviously a lot of people couldn't care less about what I've been up to all this time (that's not lost on me!), but I'm still happy with how I decided to mark the occasion and what I decided to write about.

Indeed not, sadly.

Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.

Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.

Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.