My brother had an Atari STE when I was little. He used let me play on it. It holds the title of being the first gaming experience I ever had. This would have been at the back end of the 80’s (88/89). I have many happy memories of playing the likes of Gauntlet 2, Pacman, Rockstar Ate My Hamster, Afterburner and Overlander. There probably is one or two others I've missed but these were the first, or at least amongst the first, computer games I ever played.
I remember that whilst it worked fine, it had a habit of overheating and crashing after a couple of hours and we used to have to leave it for half an hour or so to let it cool down. I even remember the sound it made whilst it used to load. It was like a mechanical whine that lasted for a few seconds followed by a few 'tuc, tuc, tuc' type of sound! It's strange how things stick in your memory… Overlander did eventually break though, and in the end all that happened when the floppy disc went in was that the music for the game played but the screen remained blank. As a then young child, this brought me close to tears as I loved it! I remember we kept the floppy disc just to play the music! Haha!
Unfortunately, I have no idea what happened to it. I know it survived on in his bedroom until around the mid 90's and then it just…disappeared. I presume my brother sold it on or, what sounds like sacrilege now considering they're rising in value, binned it… By then he had a Nintendo GameBoy and briefly owned the Sega Game Gear – which I was blown away by it's colour screen! I had a Sega Megadrive from around 90/91 and that basically become the main console in the house at the time.
