Yeah, my mum and dad got me my Speccy (on condition I let my younger brother play). My uncle had Pong on some weird console thing and I think that may have been my first glimpse of home video gaming. My Spectrum knackered our telly too actually (burned a permanent white line into it); I think that was quite common back in the day but it was worth the sacrifice (for me anyway). Now I'm all grown up (sort of), I've since bought me mam and dad a new telly. They still don't game tho, the squares.

They had a pong machine in the pub my dad used to take me too
I did have things when I was a kid
I was working in 1980

In reply to a post by SPOOKish:

Yeah, my mum and dad got me my Speccy (on condition I let my younger brother play). My uncle had Pong on some weird console thing and I think that may have been my first glimpse of home video gaming. My Spectrum knackered our telly too actually (burned a permanent white line into it);

My dad always moaned about me using my console after hearing that could happen

Hehe. My dad was always (and still is) ignorant of tech matters so I feigned ignorance myself when it happened tho I think I had a good idea at the time that the speccy was the cause of the problem. Our telly was an old radio rentals and lasted ages and ages even after the white line incident. I must give me dad credit really for not getting all smeggy about it (which is exactly what I would've done if I had kids and something did that to my telly).

Sometimes it pays to have stupid parents I suppose.

Yeah think you are prob right, 70% through now and at 13 hours so looks like I will be not far off the 18 hour mark unless I have to keep retrying something. Thought I was going to take excessively long to finish the game, not that it would really matter as long as I am enjoying it, which I am of course! First half of the game was great but the second has been even better so far.

Haha our teles always came from radio rentals
I remember the first time we had a colour tele, someone got shot on a film and my mum saw the blood, it went back to radio rentals the next day

Radio Rentals,Visionhire,Granada,Der to name just a few....All with Slots on the back for the 50p pieces for us poor people.

You could celetape string to the 50p and pull it back out again

You guys are all speaking a different language haha. My first console was a Sega Mega Drive..... on a colour TV!

Radio Rentals. Hire Purchase. Even Granada. All terms that belong in another age. The Sega Megadrive was a great console but even that is going to look very antiquated for today's youngsters I guess.

We used to have a 50p leccy meter actually. Before that it was 20p and before that, it was 10p I think. Before that I dunno what it was. Days of full (well, nostalgically full) employment whereby the meter man would come once a quarter and spend half the day counting out all the coins after emptying the meter. If you were lucky, you'd get a couple back I seem to recall...

/grandad spook reaches down to pick up his false teeth after drooling so much they fell out