My Video Game Library: Introduction

    I was born at the right time to be the start of the video game generation. Machines were entering the arcades, ready to dominate the market. Home consoles were just starting to be developed.  I was going to be a large part of that movement. Kind of. I only went to two arcades ever, and I barely played any video games at either one. At one, at the Southside Mall, I barely went in and left after barely trying to play one game that was malfunctioning. At the other, Showbiz Pizza in Lexington, I wound up playing more Skee-Ball than video games.  When I was a kid, I never had a game console, although relatives and a neighbor did. A cousin had a Coleco. Unfortunately, they had a basketball game that I didn't really get into, but they also had a pocket game that really intrigued me. There were others, but I can't remember them at the moment. My neighbor had an Atari. We weren't too close by then, so I barely got a chance with it. It had the "unofficial" version of Pac-Man, Pitfall, and the game with the tanks. Combat, maybe?  All I had was a handheld electronic game called "Merlin" that looked like an early red model of early cell phones.  There was also the sequel "Master Merlin" that was flatter and blue. I came back to those years after I had outgrown the target age range. Simple games, but entertaining. I also had a digital watch in seventh grade that had a basic shooter where a rocket had to fire at incoming aliens. The game reset after 200 or 300 points, so it wasn't that long-term playable. Once the battery died a few times, I gave the watch up.

    It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I would really start in video games, beyond a few demos in stores that I would mess around with.  A freshman had brought in their new GameBoy that I got a chance with. Tetris. It captured me in a way I couldn't describe. That summer, I tried to get my mother to allow me to help buy a GB at a department store at the Huntington Mall, but she turned me down flat. I wouldn't get an actual console until that Christmas, after I had started college. Maybe my second year; my timelines are a little mixed up. Anyway, I finally got a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I would play that a lot over the holidays. For my birthday, a month later, I got my third game, Super Mario Brothers 3. I played that most of the day a week later, somehow leading to one of my first major panic attacks that night when I realized how alone I was. (I had no one else other than play with, as my mom could never get the hang of most games I liked.)

    While I a got a Super Nintendo (SNES) around a year later, it wouldn't be until another panic attack in the mid-90s that a would try and reinvent myself as a gamer. That's when I switched over to the PlayStation (PS1), mostly. I still had a GameBoy from Pokemon phase, but I was willing to accept the future of gaming. While I usually wouldn't play into the night, I was playing most days for hours. It helped that I was unemployed at the time. My gaming slowed down to the weekends when I opened my store in 2000. Still, I was enjoying myself quite nicely, especially after I upgraded to a PS2.

    Then came the 2003 flood. 

    I lost a lot of games, but I managed to save most of my consoles. Still, I wasn't able to play anything for a while as I got through the disaster. Things took another bad turn when I had to start going in to work on Saturdays as well in 2005. This would limit my gaming to just one day a week for an hour or two, and portable gaming at work on my GameBoy Advance (GBA). I ultimately had to stop gaming. I just lost interest, and I didn't have the money to keep upgrading systems. I also had a hard time finding games I still liked. 

    I didn't really play much in the 2010s, until I got my first computer. While my gaming options were limited on a MacBook, unless I wanted to pay a lot of money and devote a lot of memory. Still, I started to slowly get back into limited gaming. Very limited. Finally getting an iPhone helped on the end as well. While I don't even come close to gaming as much as I did back in the 90s, I feel that I still have an active time doing so.

    For the next few weeks, I will be posting twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, about some of the games/series that I have played over the years. I will occasionally write a third post about some related gaming topics (Mondays). Come back Saturday, as I start going through my library.