Hmm, Annie’s Anecdotes… well there’s a challenge! How about I just introduce myself a bit first?
I got my first computer when I was 12 – a ZX80 which was a hand-me-down from my brother who had progressed to a VIC20 – which I also got after he moved on to a Commodore 64! Ironically (seeing as he ended up a computer programmer) I was mainly interested in coding on them rather than playing, however that soon changed.
Fast forward many years, to my Dad getting a home pc that he was using for charity work, which he added games to such as Beachhead. That was when I really got interested in gaming I guess.
Once I got married and had my own home, my husband and I set up a business helping small companies use the still new idea of computers in business (this was the early 90s). As part of that we had a super dooper (for the day!) Apple Mac and [drumroll] got Tetris! Oh my word, we used to be up until the early hours of the morning refusing to go to bed until we’d beaten the other one’s high score!
Serious gaming though came with the collection of PC games that came out for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. We were really captivated by them.
Fast forward again through raising a family and to the point that our firstborn was of an age that he was introduced to computers. Again, we had one because of our business but we bought some Disney games that he could play – which gave us the excuse to play them when he’d gone to bed! Toy Story, Cars, and then all the websites like Lego (anyone remember Junkbot?!).
As the boys got older, the pc games got better, and then came of course World of Warcraft and Minecraft. A family of gamers was born!
I first got a Steam account in 2015 in order to buy LEGO Worlds for one of my sons to play on. I bought more games for him to play, used it to buy games to send to my older sons (who already had their own account). My first purchases truly for myself were Stranded Deep and The Long Dark in 2017. They were Christmas presents to myself, to give me something to do over the Christmas break.
They got me hooked on survival games, however life entered a new season around then and I went back in to full time work, as a chef. That put my gaming on hold until the pandemic when lockdown meant I had plenty of time on my hands.
Enter Subsistence, the game that changed everything!
I fell completely in love with the game. It wasn’t easy (it wasn’t until later I realised that some gamers call it the hardest survival game out there) but it was perfect for me. It also made me realise why my sons were always watching people play games on YouTube: I used to tease them about it, wondering why they watched someone else play a game instead of playing it themselves but all of a sudden I wanted to learn what could be done with the game so I found myself on YouTube.
GameEdged, OhnoCoho, Mitts, Mykillangelo, and Kage were some of the people I started watching play Subsistence. Even once back working post lockdown I always found the time to watch and, wherever possible, to play.
Sometime early in 2022 I started watching Ogopogo play Subsistence. He was livestreaming, and that gave me the chance to jump in to chat and talk with others. I found a great community that had grown around his Subsistence gameplay. I had found my people!
Chatting to Ogo via Discord, the idea began to grow about recording my own gameplay. I wasn’t thinking of creating a channel to “be a YouTuber” but just to be part of that community, and so, Armoured Annie was born.
Since then, I have had the privilege of growing my own community and building some amazing friendships including the “forever” kind such as with KJ PC Gaming and Arpeggio. I have some amazing subscribers and viewers who regularly comment, indulging me by answering the questions I pose to them during my videos (sometimes about the game, often just about life!), and helping me to build great connections with people all over the world.
I know that some people might think it’s strange that a 53-year-old lady likes to play video games, but I’ve never been someone to be easily put in a box, or labelled, so I don’t see why I should start now! I enjoy what I am doing (and during a period of ill health and change of circumstances it has become very important to me) and I love the community it brings.
So there it is, the first introduction to Annie! I shall try to make the next posts more “anecdotal” 🤣