In the beginning

Welcome to the home and ramblings of a mature gamer, I have been playing games from the 80’s and never really lost the passion for games playing. Starting off playing on the Commodore 64 with games like Elite, Impossible Mission  Boulderdash to name a few. I progressed onto the successor from Commodore to the exceptional Amiga 500. This started my enjoyment of playing F1 style games spending numerous hours on Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix.

My enthusiasm never altered when the rise of the consoles started and initially I bought a Playstation One, although I never really got to grips and still don’t to this day of mastering FPS style game on a controller. I tend now to only play sports games on the consoles I own and all my gaming is undertaken mainly on the PC format.

My first PC was bought in 1998 which incorporating an onboard graphics processor and a hard drive that in todays standard wouldn’t even have enough space for a Win 7 or above install.

My passion for PC gaming really took off when I first came across the Half Life mod – Counterstrike this game has a lot to answer for in my gaming time. After venturing on line with the 56k modem connecting to the internet and joining a game. I so joined my first community of gamers – an avid core of gamers playing the mod and generally enjoying each others ramblings and views. Many hours were spent playing this (even though you had to reconnect to the internet every 2 hours at this point). I upgraded the internet to the ISDN line as Broadband wasn’t available in my area and the community grew and changed its name to Men of Beer. All the gamers in the community had already had names around beer brands and this is where my name gamer name changed to Kestrel (all the major brand names where already taken).

A few months into this is when I went to my first ever gaming LAN party which was help in a gaming centre in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. This was where I met a lot of the gaming community and formed lasting friendships with them.

The community developed expanded changed games to Battlefield 1942, BF2 and various other games and continued to host its own LAN events.

As PC’s developed the games got more involved, I played various MMO’s including my favourite Star Wars Galaxies until it changed the way the game played after spending months developing a character. 

As my career changed and my involvement in grassroots football changed I could devote more time to my keen interest of gaming, in 2020 I took the decision to try out streaming on Twitch, not thinking it would amount to anything starting playing any game where we could have a few of us play co-op or multiplayer. Amazingly after the first few streams a few started to follow and this is where I found I actually really enjoyed talking to people, having a laugh and talking about games all whilst playing games online.

The channel progressed and is still evolving to this day but I achieved Twitch affiliate status in November 21. I have upgraded my stream set up although I still need to improve it further and develop the content and improve. This is where the journey started and i’m looking forward to see where it takes me.