Kids on my street wished for a Super Nintendo for Christmas. I wished that they wouldn’t get it so they could play with me outside.
My childhood was made up of video game stigmas, in which it was considered “a waste of time” to play games. Our household was different. While many kids were spending their weekends beating the latest Mario game I was expected to go outside. “GO OUTSIDE?” There’s bears outside! Never mind that, the fact was that my friend just got a Sega CD and I was tying a rope to a skateboard to slingshot myself down the driveway felt unfair (although I now realize my childhood stories can be so much more awesome sometimes).
We had an NES in the house until age 8 or 9. Only rule for the NES is that you get 30 minutes to play it. 30 MINUTES? Man, it took 10 minutes just to blow into the cartridge and get that thing going! The system didn’t last long, as it got removed because I was breaking my 30-minute daily time limit by sneaking into the living room at 3 am to play games. I loved that thing. I could play it for days if I could only get more than 30 minutes with it. After a while I found out that I could get some extra time out of it if no one knew I was playing it. But I got caught, and that was history.
After the NES went away I was given a Game Gear for Christmas, which really only got to come out for car trips and that was about it. I didn’t understand this at the time, but looking back it made sense… I was easily distracted by it and travel was something that is not nearly as enjoyable with a child. Between the cracks of playing outside or getting my homework done there were some educational computer games, but as far as mainstream gaming goes… I was oblivious to anything going on. I sometimes could get my fix off (of all places) my TI-83 calculator or borrowing a computer game or playing a friend’s console. I watched the N64 release come and go, with the other kids getting an N64 under the Christmas tree. 3D? Please, I was still unsure if Mario was even beatable, let alone an extra dimension being added.
Fastforward ten years. I just graduated high school. I was at college, and my life was really my own then. I had to start from scratch, and where best to start? The NES. I bought one on Ebay with a light gun and game for $75. It was a special day. And I played for an hour. Not 30 minutes, but an hour. And I just broke 10 years of stigma.
After that I pursued other games on Ebay, and slowly but surely started to build up my video game knowledge. I finally beat Super Mario Bros, got 10 ducks killed in Duck Hunt, and eventually managed to beat Zelda… all a decade or two late but totally worth it. People at my dorm would walk by and say, “dude, you’re playing an NES? Yours still works?” I would say, “Yep, I just bought it!” The puzzled looks were hilarious.
Because I’m thinking about it at the moment, an interesting sidenote is that I started making Flash games before I purchased my own console. In 2002 and 2003 I launched my first Flash games at my high school and it wasn’t until college that I got the NES.
But back to my story, after 2004 I really starting to discover retro games it became apparent I needed to start getting into more recent systems. I went and bought an SNES and a N64 (which was still 10 years late) in late 2004, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I played Donkey Kong Country from start to finish in a few nights, thinking it was one of the best things I had ever done. But I still felt behind… and just a year later I would buy my first next-gen console: The Xbox360. It was expensive but worth it.
And man did I suck at games! I was about 10-15 years behind everyone and it was hard to get used to everything. The Xbox360 was easily the hardest console to play games on for me. Halo was foreign, there were probably 30 buttons to know, and the analog stick was something still to master (the N64 analog stick was… yeah). I was easily beat and it was embarrassing. But I was getting better, I think only from the sheer amount of energy I was putting into playing games. One Summer was dubbed “Megaman Summer” in which I tried to finish as many Megaman games as possible… I got through the first three and had to call it quits.
Now I am fairly well-versed in video games but I am still fairly bad at most of them. I play on Normal Mode in hope that it won’t be too hard. And I have still never played Street Fighter.
I look back at showing up late to the party and consider what would have happened if I played games throughout my childhood. I am not entirely sure I would be making games for a living right now if that was the case. Games seem so much more special when you can look but not touch, like a museum piece that you can get close to but never really put your hands on. Things are so intriguing when you can only imagine what they are versus actually experiencing them in real life. For me, video games were this magical entity that could only be experienced a handful of times a year… and still today I get that special feeling when I hear the console light turn red and the game boot on the screen.
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