I didn't start off with a Spectrum or anything like that, I'd started learning programming with Fortran, sending punched cards off to be processed, result about a week later, then manually coding punched tape to feed through a reader having obtained a pre-booked computer session on the phone, and getting results punched back on the tape. The phone was put down into a transfer box!
I bought a Dragon 32 computer for about £250 using the advanced for the time 6809E processor, and typing text or graphics BASIC games in manually with only cassettes to save them on! There was a specific Dragon User games magazine but after typing an A4 page (or 2 or 3 pages!) of game code, they often wouldn't run - with a correction needed published the following month! Some cartridge games and tape games were very good. A Winter Olympics one took all morning to load from cassette if it didn't fail loading part-way through, ready to play on a rainy afternoon!
The Dragon was a proper computer with rather more abilities than a Spectrum or Commodore 64 but like many games computers of the time could only display lower case text by a special code routine to artificially create this via graphics routines, but it did have an 8-bit color display. It was essentially the same as as Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer to most specifications and intent, and most of the Tandy games and game cartridges ran on it. A simple skiing game was a lot of fun at the time!
My introduction to Video games was on pay freestanding consoles, playing Frogger and Galaxians mostly, or occasionally Asteroids/ Space Invaders. Mixed in with snooker, table football and pinball machines, which between these and the Video games took all my spare change/cash! I did buy a Pong machine to plug in to the TV before buying any gaming computers but I soon got fed up with it!
I then bought an Atari 800XL to further advance my programming, and to play the top Atari titles such as Space Invaders, Pacman, Asteroids, Donkey Kong and Missile Command which all had brilliant timing needs to play, and other favourites such as Scramble, and had a large collection of cassette tape games.
Modern commercial (and some freeware!) games are to a mind-bogglingly high standard nowadays, but at the time the games then in the early to mid 70's were great to us as we didn't have anything else to compare them to and they were all we had!
Considering the games in the 70's were quite pricey, especially the top titles, many of today's Indie games are really exceptional value for money, and some of the special deals get some really great games for real knock-down prices!
