Some of my earliest memories start with video games. When I was five, the family received an Intellivision II from Santa Claus. We spent hours playing
Burgertime and
Astrosmash. I wore callouses on my fingers on the black disc and burned holes through the keypad. My brother, twelve years older than me, and I played marathon sessions and bonded over strategy and high scores.
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Yes kids, video game consoles used to look like this. No WiFi, either. |
Soon enough, my brother graduated from high school and moved to college. I grew up and so did the gaming systems. There was a brief affair with Atari 7800. The family purchased our first home computer when I was in middle school, a Laser 128 (Apple IIe knockoff). Gaming continued with
Conan and
Montezuma's Revenge played from floppy disks
.
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Conan was a helluva lot more difficult than it looks. |
Video games were my friends--not my
only friends--but good buddies during some trying times. My father developed a brain tumor when I was in kindergarten. He and Mom were gone most of the year and part of the next. Once my sister (ten years older than me) left for college, I was left at home with an ailing father and overworked mother. Games were an outlet, a way to manage and control
something in a life where so much seemed out of control. When things were really bad at home, when my father resembled a man thirty years his senior with dementia, I met the Nintendo Entertainment System. Three of my buddies spent the night with a rented NES and
The Legend of Zelda on my birthday in 7th grade. I mowed lawns that summer with my brother to earn enough money for my own NES. I played it into the ground.
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Hooray! A golden triangle! |
I grew older... Sega Genesis... SNES... N64... my friends and I played too many seasons of
Super Tecmo Bowl to count. We lost countless hours in basements with
Mario Kart and
Goldeneye 007. A few Madden Football tournaments earned me one of two Cs in college. (Why go to Survey of Art History on Friday afternoon when I was making history on a virtual football field?) Capcom's
Resident Evil 2 and Konami's
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night got me through a rough student teaching semester. Video games have always been an escape, a way to let off steam. When I found myself dumped and alone in a new town during the fall of 1998,
Metal Gear Solid and
Bushido Blade were there.
Yes, games have been with me a long time. When my thirteen-year-old stepson found me playing an emulated copy of
Symphony of the Night the other day, he told Kim, "you've got a good man there, Mom."
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Awwww shucks... I'm just a fan boy. |
I hope so. I hope so.
1 comment:
Hi Aaron,
Video games (design, authorship, utility, pedagogy) figure heavily in digital media studies these days. There are lots of folks in the program that I am in at UCF teaching courses and writing about video games and cultural studies.
My daughter is just starting to learn about them. I have a 16-bit Nintendo, a PS2 and a Genesis, and it never gets old! I still like to take a crack at Mike Tyson's Punchout every so often, and I play Mega Man 2 and Gunsmoke a lot still. My daughter is starting with Super Mario Brothers...is there anywhere else?
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