My unique childhood with videogames
Everyone has a different story, but one I hear a lot is that when they were kids, they got games on birthdays and Christmas, and other than that, they had to rent games from the video-rental store. My story is very different.
I got an NES during the holiday-season on 1988 when I was 6 years old. It wasn't on Christmas-morning. I remember my father setting up the NES in the bedroom my parents, sister, and I all shared, with Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt. The NES was never presented to me or my sister like it was ours, or a gift for us, nor was my father interested in playing it. He just hooked it up and barely played it. I just stood there watching him emotionlessly. It's kind of sad if you think about all the videos of kids receiving their new consoles on Christmases and being overjoyed.
I never got games on birthdays or Christmases until I was older, because 1) I never asked for them, and 2) my parents didn't like games nor wanted me to play them, which contradicted with their decisions to purchase videogame-systems for me, but that's another story.
My father owned a video-rental store for maybe 20 years before the whole industry collapsed because of competition from places like Netflix. During that time, I got to "rent games for free," although it wasn't as romantic as it might seem.
As a child, I learned that one of my friends could only play games on the weekends, and so I was dumb and told my own parents about this idea, and they imposed it on me. Sometimes I got a new game or batch of games to play on the weekends. Hooray, right? Wrong. I didn't actually get to pick the games I wanted to play, although it was not like I knew which games were any good. Hell; we all didn't know which games were any good back then. The point is that I got to play a lot of the crap that James Rolfe talks about on his AVGN series of videos.
I remember playing games like Back to the Future, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Karate Kid, and Jeopardy. To be fair, I also got to play a lot of the classics like Punch-Out!! and Mega Man. The caveat with the latter is that I never had the chance to finish any of them because I only had them for a weekend. Sometimes I could get a good game for one or two more weekends, but it was completely up to my father which games I got to play. Still, as a kid, I was just thankful and excited to play any games at all. Only later, after growing up, did I realize that I did not have the ideal gaming-experience growing up.
When I hear about other people's childhoods, I often hear them talking about playing through Zelda 1. I played Zelda on a few weekends, but never had the game long enough to give birth to the idea that I could actually beat the game. One of the biggest teases of my life was going to Toys "Я" Us and buying Super Mario Bros. 3. That was such a bittersweet weekend. I knew that that copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 was going back to my father's store on Monday. That weekend, more than any other, shaped my childhood, my beliefs, and what I could expect in regards to my life in gaming. It fostered this sense that nothing belonged to me, and everything belonged to my parents; everything was for the greater good of making money.
Eventually, during adolescence, I rebelled. I wanted games for myself, and I wanted to play whenever the hell I wanted to. I've spent a lifetime reprogramming myself so that I feel worthy of possessing videogames. I still have a problem with finishing videogames, in that it doesn't come naturally to me. I have to basically force myself to beat them because my childhood was spent playing games for one or two hours each and never having the opportunity to finish any one of them. My attention-span, when it comes to single-player games, is very low. It's weird how the longer I play them, the more detached I get. It's like my mind is putting up a defense-mechanism from getting too attached because it still thinks it has to give the game back to my father on Monday.
On the other hand, I started heavily playing multiplayer games during my adolescence with the four-player capability of the Nintendo 64. I could spend hours playing Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye, and Super Smash Bros. Expanding from that, I spent a lot of time playing online multiplayer games during my college-years, and so I can also spend all day in online multiplayer gaming.
I didn't have the worst childhood in human history. I am aware that this is a "first-world problem." I just wanted to put this out there and reflect on my own past and how it has influenced me into becoming who I am today.
I got an NES during the holiday-season on 1988 when I was 6 years old. It wasn't on Christmas-morning. I remember my father setting up the NES in the bedroom my parents, sister, and I all shared, with Super Mario Bros. + Duck Hunt. The NES was never presented to me or my sister like it was ours, or a gift for us, nor was my father interested in playing it. He just hooked it up and barely played it. I just stood there watching him emotionlessly. It's kind of sad if you think about all the videos of kids receiving their new consoles on Christmases and being overjoyed.
I never got games on birthdays or Christmases until I was older, because 1) I never asked for them, and 2) my parents didn't like games nor wanted me to play them, which contradicted with their decisions to purchase videogame-systems for me, but that's another story.
My father owned a video-rental store for maybe 20 years before the whole industry collapsed because of competition from places like Netflix. During that time, I got to "rent games for free," although it wasn't as romantic as it might seem.
As a child, I learned that one of my friends could only play games on the weekends, and so I was dumb and told my own parents about this idea, and they imposed it on me. Sometimes I got a new game or batch of games to play on the weekends. Hooray, right? Wrong. I didn't actually get to pick the games I wanted to play, although it was not like I knew which games were any good. Hell; we all didn't know which games were any good back then. The point is that I got to play a lot of the crap that James Rolfe talks about on his AVGN series of videos.
I remember playing games like Back to the Future, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Karate Kid, and Jeopardy. To be fair, I also got to play a lot of the classics like Punch-Out!! and Mega Man. The caveat with the latter is that I never had the chance to finish any of them because I only had them for a weekend. Sometimes I could get a good game for one or two more weekends, but it was completely up to my father which games I got to play. Still, as a kid, I was just thankful and excited to play any games at all. Only later, after growing up, did I realize that I did not have the ideal gaming-experience growing up.
When I hear about other people's childhoods, I often hear them talking about playing through Zelda 1. I played Zelda on a few weekends, but never had the game long enough to give birth to the idea that I could actually beat the game. One of the biggest teases of my life was going to Toys "Я" Us and buying Super Mario Bros. 3. That was such a bittersweet weekend. I knew that that copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 was going back to my father's store on Monday. That weekend, more than any other, shaped my childhood, my beliefs, and what I could expect in regards to my life in gaming. It fostered this sense that nothing belonged to me, and everything belonged to my parents; everything was for the greater good of making money.
Eventually, during adolescence, I rebelled. I wanted games for myself, and I wanted to play whenever the hell I wanted to. I've spent a lifetime reprogramming myself so that I feel worthy of possessing videogames. I still have a problem with finishing videogames, in that it doesn't come naturally to me. I have to basically force myself to beat them because my childhood was spent playing games for one or two hours each and never having the opportunity to finish any one of them. My attention-span, when it comes to single-player games, is very low. It's weird how the longer I play them, the more detached I get. It's like my mind is putting up a defense-mechanism from getting too attached because it still thinks it has to give the game back to my father on Monday.
On the other hand, I started heavily playing multiplayer games during my adolescence with the four-player capability of the Nintendo 64. I could spend hours playing Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye, and Super Smash Bros. Expanding from that, I spent a lot of time playing online multiplayer games during my college-years, and so I can also spend all day in online multiplayer gaming.
I didn't have the worst childhood in human history. I am aware that this is a "first-world problem." I just wanted to put this out there and reflect on my own past and how it has influenced me into becoming who I am today.
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