While Clair seems to have taken a scattershot approach to her introduction, I decided that I would begin on a more particular topic: my growth as a gamer. From my humble NES kid childhood to my avid gamer present, here's how I got to where I am today, from 5 to 25, from behind a controller.
I got my first console, a Nintendo, for Christmas when I was 5. I remember playing Mario/Duck Hunt that Christmas Day, then having my parents spring a gift on me later that night, under the guise of Santa having accidentally “dropped it behind the TV”. That gift was Super Mario Bros. 3.
I was a Nintendo kid. I had Nintendo bed sheets. I had a Super Mario Bros. backpack. I forget which year, but I know I’ve had a Mario birthday cake. I had a stack of about 10 games, and every Friday I would get McDonald’s and I’d go to the local video store to rent a game. I remember renting Mega Man 2 and having a bugger of a time with it – I couldn’t beat any bosses, but the fact that I had eight different levels to try instead of having to play level the same one over and over again kept me content. I remember renting Mike Tyson’s Punch Out and being forced to rematch King Hippo over and over again because I didn’t know to punch him in the godforsaken mouth.
I had a subscription to Nintendo Power for what must have been four or five years. I remember many a summer day playing outside, waiting (impatiently) to run and check the mail to see if the new issue had come. I loved re-reading old issues, learning about games I would never play, getting excited for new games and new systems, and finding out new secrets about my favourite games.
Eventually, I got a Super Nintendo, and I was a full-fledged gamer – I received games for every special occasion that presented the opportunity to receive games as a gift. The parents gave me a Game Boy for Christmas one year, after I borrowed my cousins and broke it. I finished A Link to the Past and I remember how my little heart pounded when I was fighting Ganon. Probably the same way it pounded when I was trying to finish Super Mario Kart on 150 cc: I used to play my own music and mute the sound, and you can imagine the absurdity of watching an intense young boy manipulating a controller furiously to the Chipmunks’ version of “You Keep Me Hanging On”.
My mom grew less and less amused as time went on, though. She’s always seen video games as children’s toys, and here I was growing into adolescence and all of a sudden I wanted a Nintendo 64. I was jealous when my friends got one for Christmas and I did not. I thought that that was it for me and console games, at least until I had my own income. At this point I had a good computer, and so I was downloading shareware games like Doom and WarCraft II to tide me over. At least a computer had other uses that merited me having one – it didn’t quite seem like a toy to my mother.
So, I puttered around on my computer until about four months later on my birthday when a well-placed lie about a math test grade permitted my parents to think enough of me to get me an N64 for me for my birthday in 1997. I eventually ‘fessed up, of course. And I didn’t know about the N64 until after I’d lied. I actually felt really bad about lying, afterwards. But my ill-gotten system came with the relatively new Mario Kart 64, so it was hard to feel guilty for too long.
I re-experienced the heart-pounding exhilaration of a Zelda game with Ocarina of Time – probably the only time I’ve ever delayed playing a game because I didn’t want it to end. I tore the shit out of the palm of my hand trying to win mini-games in Mario Party. I spent long hours playing NHL 99 tournaments with my friends at sleepovers. I chuckled heartily at the movie parodies in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. I rented games every weekend, just like before, until the lifespan of the N64 ended, and so did my time as a gamer, at least for a while.
And then, I didn’t get a GameCube, I remained ignorant of the PlayStation, and I don’t think Microsoft had even entered the gaming ring. If they did, it wasn’t really on my radar. I spent my early university years chasing girls instead of coins. I still played a few games on a newer computer we got for the house in 2003, a little GTA: Vice City, a little Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a little Morrowind. But most of my computer time was actually spent on MSN talking to friends or trying to impress potential lovers, and downloading obscene amounts of new music, as I finally had my own CD burner.
My old Game Boy finally just stopped working, and I convinced my mom to get me a Game Boy Advance by telling her it could play my old Game Boy games. While it wasn’t a console, per se, it let me get into Pokémon (for better or worse). I also had a small addiction to Mario Golf on the GBA – it was a surprisingly fun game, for what it was.
I played an Xbox for the first time at my friend Tracey’s. I remember playing Splinter Cell and Knights of the
Time passed and eventually I ended up with a girlfriend that owned a GameCube, and, as a first in my life, I moved in with her. This allowed me to have permanent access to some games that I didn’t get a chance to play through when the GameCube was new – particularly Super Mario Sunshine (which I eventually finished) and The Legend of Zelda – The Wind Waker (which I never really did get very far into). I started buying my own games for it, and then she bought a DS, which entranced me.
I’d seen a friend of mine play a DS the year before, with its two screens and its touch pad, and I was intrigued. I played some of the mini-games from Mario 64 DS, and I enjoyed them, but figured I’d never own one, as I was well out of gaming territory by that time. Now, all of a sudden, here was one that I could play every day, if I wanted to. Eventually, my then-girlfriend gave me one for my birthday, along with Tetris DS, and that was it – that started me back down the road towards gaming again. I played Tetris obsessively, mainly online, and there was no stopping me. I would be up until 5 a.m. playing, as I did with Harvest Moon 64 years earlier.
Eventually our DSes became DS Lites, we got ourselves a puppy, and all of a sudden news of the Wii was reaching us. Motion controls? Old games available for download? A new Zelda game as a launch title? We were beyond psyched. I don’t think I’d ever been so anxious for a game system since I wanted a NES for Christmas when I was five years old. Yeah, seriously.
I was a kid again. I could hardly sleep the night before the Wii’s launch. We had one pre-ordered at Entertainment Centre (the only local official Nintendo dealer) and we woke up at the crack of dawn to get it. It hasn’t been replicated since, but I remember the awe I felt messing around with the Wii on that first day, playing around with Miis and Wii Sports. I had high expectations for the Wii – and it’s not really certain whether they were met, two and a half years later, but I remember how much my first time playing Wii Sports Tennis was like my first time ever playing Nintendo at my cousin’s house, when I couldn’t have been older than four years old. It boggled the mind.
When that relationship ended (she took the dog, so I got the Wii), I moved back home, and treated myself to an Xbox 360 out of the money I would have had to put towards rent. By this point, the internet had become a big part of my re-emerging obsession with video games, and reading blogs like Kotaku had me wondering how the other sides of the console war were living. With Guitar Hero II being released for the 360 within the next month, and my obsession with that game growing daily, it became something of a no-brainer.
Since then, I’ve also purchased a PS3, so what started as a childhood passion has come full circle to become, well, an adult passion, I guess. I’m a part of a generation that sees video games as more than just kid’s toys; they’re a viable medium of entertainment just the same as music and film. That being the case, though, I still get reproving looks from my mother when she looks at my growing collection of games. Ultimately, I know that I’m not the only adult who grew up playing games and still takes gaming seriously today.
Playing Mario Party was awful on the hands, for sure.
ReplyDeleteI sat outside Futureshop in line overnight to ensure that I would get a Wii. It was tiresome and not entirely worth it, but definitely a funny story to tell.