I was talking to my 13 year old brother today about video games and it became clear to me that his experience and understanding of video games is vastly different than what mine was at his age. I was exposed to video games in a very different way, under very different circumstances. Many of the elements of gaming from my past no longer exist, or have changed so much that they are now something different entirely.
When I was growing up there were fewer consoles, and PC gaming was an entirely different beast. My first exposure to video games would have been in arcades at the giant cabinets that played games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, and Frogger. I remember our local arcade was named Time Out, and a family favorite was the bowling game. Instead of a joystick there was this large track ball that was rolled by hand. Sometimes I would be so enthusiastic in my rolling that my hands would get pinched between the ball and the wood of the cabinet.
My earliest memory of a console involves the Nintendo Entertainment System, however it is possible that the first system I ever played on was an Atari system. My grandparents on my father’s side had an Atari that I remember playing a couple of times, but it wasn’t always set up and was almost always in storage. My grandparents on my Mother’s side had an NES that they bought not long after it first came out and it was always set up in their home. We played that constantly, fighting over whose turn it was and what game to play.
Grandma Wanda, my mother’s mother, bought me my first console. My memory is a bit fuzzy but I do remember being with her when she picked it up at the store. It came with Super Mario Bros 3 and Duck Hunt, as well as the light gun. To this day I haven’t beaten the Super Mario Bros 3 game. We also had a soccer game, Ghost and Goblins (2?), Island Adventure, and a Batman game. None of the games with levels were beaten. Granted, Ghosts and Goblins is a wickedly impossible game to beat and requires you to play it all in one sitting, Island Adventure was possible broke, and Batman was a terribly designed game. In fact, many games made for the NES were developed by people who were used to making cabinet arcade games, where the goal was to encourage the players to throw money into the coin slot to keep going.
Buying new games was not something we did often. They were expensive, we had fun with the games that we had, and video games didn’t take up a great deal of our play time. These were treats, treasures, and privileges.
If we wanted to play another game chances are we had a friend who had it. We never got the Super NES, but I did play many of the games made for it while spending time at my friend’s houses. I remember Battle Toads and Ninja Turtles. Oddly, I also remember Sim City for the SNES. My cousin had a Sega Saturn, where I played the 7-UP platformer, a Mickey Mouse platformer, and Street Fighter.
At some point my grandmother bought me a black Game Boy. It was a big brick that took four AA batteries and required good lighting to see the screen. On that I played Donkey Kong, The Simpsons, Tetris, and a couple Super Mario games that were sans Luigi. Later, much later our mobile game options expanded to Game Boy Color, Game Boy Pocket, and the Game Boy Advanced. The only other game I remember playing on a game boy system was Pokemon Red/Blue, and I stopped playing that when I started dreaming of Pokemon.
Between our NES and our Nintendo 64 I began to be exposed to PC gaming at school. Classics like Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego were classroom staples, but there were other games that I don’t even know the name of. Games like an island survival game where you control the actions of four castaways and attempt to keep them alive until rescue arrives. There were many educational games, in fact. In one you played as a space taxi driver that drove people to different planets.
My brother and I saved up to buy the Nintendo 64. I don’t remember if we learned about N64 from friends, advertisements, or seeing it in a store but I do remember that my family rented the console at least once from our local Blockbuster Video. On that console we played Mario 64, Star Fox 64, Golden Eye, Bomberman 64, and many, many more games. Mario Kart 64 was a regular game for family night, and Ocarina of Time influences my fantasy writing to this day.
It was at this time that we discovered two things that changed gaming for us forever. The first was game manuals, starting with the one for Mario 64. We didn’t buy them for every game, but without that guide we wouldn’t have been able to beat the game nearly as fast as we did. The second discovery was of video game magazines. We really only bought them for the cheat code section in the back of each one, but the magazines also opened us up to the possibilities of other games.
Even with those two discoveries we still had to rely on our friends to help us get past certain parts of the games. The water temple in Ocarina of Time was torture because we couldn’t just go and look up the solution online. We didn’t have a computer with Internet in our home at that time, and even then there weren’t dedicated sites to video game guides. We either worked out the solution on our own or had a friend come over to show us how it was done. We also learned how to play by watching each other, and then doing it even better when it was our turn.
There was no online multi-player for consoles. If you wanted to play with friends you had two options. The first was play a split screen multiplayer game like Star Fox 64 or Mario Kart. The second was to play a single player game while everyone else watched and provided commentary. It wouldn’t be until Halo 2 that I would even experience a multiplayer game against someone who was on another console.
However, the man who became my father-in-law was also my scout leader, and computers were one of his hobbies. He set us up with local area networks multiple times to play games like Outlaws and Warcraft against each other. We were still in the same room, but it was something special and something we hadn’t been able to do at home.
Non-educational computer games had been introduced before the N64, but I can’t be sure about where they fit in the timeline. I remember, for example, a fight simulator on my grandparent’s computer and the Tie Fighter game on my best friends. When we finally had our own computer we purchased along with it a Jurassic Park and Goosebumps game. There was eventually Starship Titanic, Sim Ant, Sim City 2000, and The 7th Guest added to our small library. I would later discover an Indiana Jones game on my grandparent’s computer that took me through the events of The Last Crusade, though I never beat it despite the many hours I poured into it.
This was an era before Steam, before the console wars we know today. This was a different time and it involved many more tactile experiences. Visiting the video rental store on a weekly basis meant picking up square cardboard boxes and turning them over in our hands as we tried to figure out what the game was. It wouldn’t be until we played it at home that we would find out if we would like it or not. Today we can look at reviews within minutes of discovering a game. Today’s reviews could include video of a play through, something unheard of until I was well out of my teens. Computer games were more of a mystery than console games because we could rent them. Their boxes were bigger, and often game with cooler books or supplemental material. It would be pure gambles when we bought a computer game, but we were careful buyers and those gambles paid off in games like Lord of the Realms 2, Warcraft 2, Star Craft, and Baulder’s Gate.
The internet also opened us up to Shockwave games, later to become Flash games. Lenny Loosejocks and Elf Bowling were family favorites in those days, and now as far as I can tell people can’t even play those early Internet games. There were certainly an interesting introduction to what was to to come and what was possible. Lego, for example, had a somewhat experimental game for their Bionicles line that I really enjoyed.
The PlayStation 2 was my last childhood console. My personal favorites were Armored Core 3, Grand Theft Auto 3, the Metal Gear games, and Kingdom Hearts. These were games that I needed in my teenage years. And once again, these were games that I either gambled on when I bought them or were recommendations from friends.
I took a break from video games, and when I got back into them in 2007 things had already began to change. The boxes for PC games were growing fewer and fewer. Blizzard held out to the end with their Warcraft and Starcraft bundles. Video rental stores, where I went to find and try most of my games, went out of business as Netflix grew popular. Steam came along and dominated PC gaming with the ability to buy and download from home. If I ever got stuck I could find detailed guides online with pictures and video, as well as dedicated message boards that revealed all the secrets before I even started the game. Consoles grew more complex, becoming massive entertainment systems that did more than play games. Each one can now connect to networks and servers to provide multiplayer gaming no matter how lonely you are.
At the end of this reflection I have to ask, are we now better off? Maybe I’ll tackle that in another blog, but for now I’m just happy to have such wonderful memories of all the video and computer games I have been able to experience, as well as the unique experiences I had with them.
Elements Nine 