According to my posts page, this post is officially my two hundredth blog post. It’s rather remarkable that I’ve gotten through two hundred of these given my inability to see nearly anything through as well as my mediocre writing skills. Initially, I intended to just mention this in an otherwise unrelated blog post, but decided this post might be a good chance to let anyone reading this know my history with gaming. How I was first introduced to games, the consoles I’ve owned, etc… I have a tendency to shy away from putting too much personal information about myself out there (I don’t even like putting out my birthday, but that’s also partially because I’m practically ancient), and I don’t think I’ve ever really discussed my history in gaming on here before. Hopefully, this won’t be too boring.
Being born in the very early 1980’s truly set me up to fully experience the rise of the gaming market after the Atari crash. Funny enough though, the first console I ever played was an Atari 5200. We didn’t have a ton of games, but we did have the staples of the system: Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Centipede, etc… It was my mom that introduced me to gaming via the Atari. She LOVED Space Invaders, and was ridiculously good at it. Thank God two player made wasn’t competitive (my mom continued playing games with us, especially Super Mario Brothers 3 and puzzle games such as Tetris, Dr. Mario, and Kirby’s Avalanche).
Now, nothing against the Atari, but it would be my trips to my cousin’s house that would truly spur my love of video games. My cousin owned an NES, as well as The Legend of Zelda, Marble Madness, and Captain Skyhawk. He also had the NES Advantage controller, which I hated (I’ve never been an arcade guy, I think I was too young and in too rural of an area for arcades). Every time I would visit his house, we’d spend most of the time exploring in Zelda or trying to advance in Captain Skyhawk. I would live vicariously through him until some point in the late 1980’s.
I actually still distinctly remember the day my parents surprised me and my brother with an NES, even if I don’t remember the year. I suspect it had to be either 1988 or 1989, but it could easily have been 1990 or 1991. Time seems to pass much more slowly when you’re young. We had been working in our garden the first half of the day and my mom said we’d have a surprise later, and suggested it would be a Happy Meal (just for the record, this would have also been a perfectly good surprise). Before going to McDonald’s, we had to stop at our local department store. Being me, I wasn’t paying much attention and failed to realize we were even in the electronics section until my dad pulled down the NES set and asked if that was the right one. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to verbalize my excitement once I realized what was actually happening. To this day though, I can’t recall if got a Happy Meal or not. I was probably ready to just head home and play, food be damned. I didn’t know it at the time, but that day set me up for a lifelong hobby.
I gradually built a decent NES library thanks to saving up my allowance, doing chores, and visiting the pawn shop (the used games store of my day). I somehow managed to beat Metroid and Metal Gear, two things I’m not certain I could do today without spending hours on each. I discovered the Mega Man series when my other cousin let me borrow Mega Man 2 for about a month. My parents surprised me with Robowarrior out of the blue, a game that I still champion and play to this day. I found both fun and frustration with the Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden series. I’ve beaten the Castlevania games, the Ninja Gaiden games are still a source of shame though. I also experienced the amazement of taking Mario to the sky in Super Mario Brothers 3. Due to limited funds and not having the internet to look up games, I often found games that were probably very niche, though I didn’t know that at the time. Games like Milon’s Secret Castle and The Adventures of Dino Riki were some of my favorites.
