When I was little I always like taking things apart. My family would give me broken electronics, and I would go down in the basement and desolder every component off of every board. One day, my mom was cleaning out her parent's basement and found her old Atari 2600, and gave it to me, assuming that it was broken. After some cleaning, It was up and running great. I loved games like Air Sea Battle, Gunslinger, Fishing, Dragster, Enduro, Combat, Super Breakout and Pong Sports.
My mom, aunt, and grandma would go to a flea market on weekends, and I would tag-along. In those days Atari games were abundant, and cheap. I loved the hunt! It was about this time, Sega dropped the price one their Genesis bundle and my dad picked one up for the family. We only had one game, but we played Sonic the Hedgehog like crazy, and my cousins even showed me the level select and debug codes. Later I would get Mickey Mouse's Castle of Illusion and Sonic 2. Sometimes we would rent games from our local Superstar Video. I wasn't allowed to rent fighting games, but I really liked the driving games like Outrun and Lotus.
I never really played the Nintnedo, but I did let my friend borrow my Sega for a weekend in exchange for his NES. I could only get Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles working, and lost interest pretty quickly. I would play Mario Kart sometimes, and I would watch my friend's older brother play Final Fantasy III. It looked amazing.
My family bought our first computer around 1994, and I loved playing the games that came with it. Tyrian 2000, Strategy Games of the World, The Incredible Machine, and Hover. And when I learned about AOL games channel, I played Lemmings and whatever else I could find. I'd go on to play Flight Simulator 95, Myst, Sim Ant/Farm/City, Diablo, X-wing, The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and some Command and Conquer games. I learned about modding as many of those games as I could.
My school computers came loaded with Microsoft Entertainment Packs, and I would bring in my AOL disks, erase them, load them up with individual games, then I would charge people to borrow copies of them to install at home. Ski Free was the big title!
My daycare center had a computer with lots of old dos games on it. I would play Tank Wars, Duke
Nukem, and Jill of the Jungle, but they also had an N64. I played Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Rouge Squadren. I'd borrow the other kids' Gameboys and my game was Wario Blast. At a friends house, we'd play Goldeneye, and Perfect Dark. My sega was starting to seem pretty obsolete at this point, even with Sonic and Knuckles, so I donated all of it to my daycare center.
My church was getting rid of their video games, so I was able to get another Atario 2600, and a ton of games. I could have gotten the 5200, but I didn't like the games for it as much as the 2600. They weren't going to get rid of their Jaguar, as it was recently purchased. One day, there was a fight at our local pool, and someone threw a Gameboy into a pool. I recovered it, and to this day it still works. But then we visited a friend's house and played the newly released Playstaion.
My brother and I were able to convince our dad to let us buy one. They had just opened a Toys 'R' Us near us, and their game section was amazing! Our first game was Vigilante 8, and Its probably still my favorite game on the console. The system came with a demo disk, and over time, we bought almost every game on it. We each bought a copy of Pokemon, I got all 151 on my copy of Blue.
About this time I would play Dreamcast at a friend's house, and I loved Sonic Adventure, but he ended up selling it. I learned to pirate PC games, and thats primarily what I played through high school. I had an old laptop from my dad's office, and I was able to install Window's 95 on it. It wasn't able to do much, but I learned about lots of old games with it. It eventually died and I moved on.
Affter high school, I got an apartment with my then girlfriend, and her NES. For the first time in my life, I had unincumbered acces to a Nintendo. I got really into Metroid, and my friend and I beat The Legend of Zelda. I learned every trick in Super Mario Bros. 3, and it was amazing. My brother let me borrow his Gamecube, and I beat Need for Speed Underground 2 twice. After my relationship ended, I purchased my own NES and a few games. Back in those days, you could still get NES games at pawn shops cheaply, and you'd see them at flea markets and yard sales all the time.
I got married and traveled the country. My liscense became suspended while I was in Portland Oregon, so I took a month to just hang out and look for work. I had plenty of free time, but I didn't think to bring any games, so out of desperation, I modded my wife's old clickwheel Ipod to run a Gameboy emulator. I beat Mario's Picross and Mario's Picross 2, which is only in Japanese.
When I returned home, I became known as the guy with the Nintendo, and pleople started giving me some of their old stuff. My collection grew,a nd I was able to trade for things I wanted. I found a top-loader and had it AV modded. I bought a Powerpak for my NES and an Everdrive for my "new" genesis. I bought a SNES at a yard sale, and dove into its library, and my cousin gave me a Magnavox Odyssey2. My new wife had a Gamecube, and my collection was taking shape.
I flew to Oregon in 2012 for the Portland Retro Game Expo, and I decided that I'd come back next year. It was too expensive to fly, so we drove 40 straight hours to get there from Charleston, WV. Around this time, I started going to Retro Video Game Night at a local bar. We would set up TV's and consoles for play, and we would organize tournaments and other fun events. I went to Too Many Games in Oakes, PA, and I helped run the freeplay section of PowerUp!, a local game convention.
My kitchen job wasn't looking lucrative, and retro game nights had run their course, so my wife and I decided to pack up and move to Portland. At the PRGE in 2014 we tried an arcade machine called Killer Queen. We became addicted and fell into a bad croud at Ground Kontrol. We were going on all the freeplay nights, Sundays and Mondays for league and mixer nights, and we even won one of the tournaments! We bought a house and I built my gameroom. I sold some of my extras and duplicates at the PRGE this year and had a blast. Here's to many more good times in gaming to come!
