I loves me some videogames. I’ve been enjoying them since I was six, when my old man brought home a glorious Packard Bell 386 with a 40 megabyte hard drive and 1 megabyte of RAM.
“Sheesh,” said my father, “how will we ever fill up forty whole megabytes?”
Then we got video games.
It started simple. We had a bunch of games on a variety of disks that were mostly simple pick-up games, like Janitor Joe and Q*Bert. Christ, were they awful.
One of the first games we all really got attached to, however, was a game called Hero’s Quest. It was great. You played the Hero, and you walked all around and typed stuff to make the hero do things. Sometimes, you would fight stuff in the forest. It couldn’t have been better! We were hooked, and myself, my two older brothers, and pretty much the rest of the neighborhood would plunk down in front of the computer and play the game.
The game had an interesting effect. With two older brothers, you either learn to be statisfied watching a computer game be played or you solve your problems via a duel to the death. Remarkably, my brothers and I managed to - for the most part - amicably trade turns playing this game. Because of this, my brothers and I are mostly capable of being able to derive almost as much if not more joy from watching video games be played rather than playing them personally.
They had to change the name to “Quest for Glory” because of some shitty board game that nobody remembers. Even so, we had tasted the fruit of what would become a new genre, the computer adventure game, and we went back and tried many others: Quest for Glory two through five, The Curse of Monkey Island, Kings Quest - just to name a few. The games typically involved complex puzzle solving and reading comprehension, and my mother has said over and over that despite how hooked we got on video games, she’d never choose differently if given the chance to do it all over again.
As I got older, the scope and breadth of the computer games we played expanded as our computer got more and more powerful. Soon it was me and my oldest brother (not my stupid English major of a brother who can barely work a blog) who were putting together the computers and getting games for ourselves. DooM, Heretic, Quake, and many others followed.
We never did have a console, though. That’s where emulators came in. Once I could get my hands on emulators and download roms, I played everything I wished I could as a kid. Zelda, Metroid, Contra, you name it.
I am of the humble opinion that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of the greatest video games ever created. I had so much fun playing it that I make sure to donate a copy for the Gameboy Advance every year to Child’s Play, a nationwide charity run by the kind fellows at Penny Arcade for sick kids in children’s hospitals. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy that I am able to anonymously share one of my favorite childhood video games with a random kid. If I could, I would totally share Quest for Glory with them.
You better believe that I’m going to be guilting you bastards full-time once Child’s Play gets into full swing this year.
Video games continue to show me new and different ways to learn and to tell a story, and I eagerly await the day that I’ll be able to share the games I enjoyed so much as a child with my own kids. I still get a hankering every once and a while for those old games, and I keep my eyes out for modern remakes of the classic games of my past.
