Video games have always been a part of my life. I’m an elder Millennial, but my dad was one of those early computer and gaming nerds, so thanks to him I’ve been playing games ever since I was a toddler (there is even a photo of me at one year old playing on a PC). We had an Atari 2600, a Commodore 64, and many PC games. Of course when I was very young, I mostly played toddler games like Alphabet Zoo, FaceMaker, Strawberry Shortcake Musical Match-Ups, and Alf in the Color Caves.
Alf in the Color Caves. I will never forget this music for the rest of my life.
Of course, I also played all of the great Atari classics such as Frogger, PitFall, Space Invaders, and Centipede. I could go on for days about all the games I played, we had a large collection. One of my favorites was Vanguard, a side-scrolling shooter, because it was so colorful. I loved all the rainbow stages!
When the Nintendo came out, we didn’t get one right away. My family has never been one to jump on things when they are new. One summer, we went to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins, and they had a Nintendo. We had a great vacation, and when we got home I missed having everyone around and felt so lonely that I cried. My parents mistakenly thought I cried because I wanted a Nintendo, so they went out and bought one (I’m sure my dad wanted one too). Needless to say, I perked up pretty quickly after that. The first games we got were Zelda II, Super Mario Bros. 2, and MegaMan 2. My parents would only allow me to play games on the weekends, so I would anxiously look forward to Saturday morning and then get up early to play. We would also go to our local video rental places (remember those?) to rent games, and if we liked them we would buy them later. Games were expensive back then, so we had to make sure we really wanted them first. I probably spent most of my weekends just playing games. For a while, Nintendo was synonymous with video games. The Nintendo became so popular that there were even comics and cartoons based off Super Mario Bros. and other games.
After the Nintendo came the Super Nintendo, which is one of my favorite systems of all time. There were so many good games for the SNES. My family actually never bought the early Sega systems (although my cousins had them, so we did play them some). Even when the PlayStation was released and started dominating the market, we didn’t bother getting one until I saw Bust A Move: Dance & Rhythm Action and I decided I had to have that game. At that point I’d started going to conventions and had gamer friends who knew about modding systems to play Japanese games. Thank goodness we don’t have to worry about that with current systems. In addition to Nintendo and PlayStation consoles, I have a Sega DreamCast and a Japanese Xbox 360 (just for THE IDOLM@STER).
These days, I’m still a bit slow in keeping up with new releases, but occasionally I’ll get really excited about a game and play it while it’s new. I’m still a huge Nintendo fan (Zelda and Fire Emblem in particular). Like many gamers, I have a huge backlog of games I own and haven’t played yet, so I won’t ever run out of things to play. Sometimes I don’t have much time to play games, but I always come back to it — being a gamer is a huge part of who I am. My dad still plays video games (in fact, now that he’s retired he spends even more time playing), and I know I will be playing games for a very long time too.