My Gaming History (Part 1)

A typical joystick, actually one I had.

Do you remember when you first held a joystick* in your hands? Do you remember the first time you saw some pixels on a screen moving up and down, left and right, making sounds you never heard before? These were the times when you had to blow in your cartridges to make the game work again, when you had to buy a new joystick every few months because they were destined to die quickly, the times when video game home consoles and someone that has a very remarkable resemblance to me were born.

Aerodynamic in form, my entry point in gaming.

The year is 1991/1992, meet Jay, a 3-year-old kid with inexhaustible thirst for knowledge and a big interest in gaming and tech stuff. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was aware of what I wanted and what I was able to do. I was programming the VHS to record certain shows on TV, fine tuning the videos, and watching the tapes all day. My mother didn't know half as much as me. Okay, let's stop the bragging part here. What my parents knew was, I was talented with all kinds of technical systems, so their thought was to get me a gaming console, which was the Atari 2600. I remember very clearly what games I was playing and how much fun I had with them. This time period was to be as a foundation of my gaming history. This is were it all began.

My parents divorced after only a few years, my father left the flat and so I had to travel back and forth from mom's to dad's. Not a big of a deal, his home was just "around the corner". So my father met a few new friends and neighbors, which one of them was a big guy whose name I totally forgot. However, I remember his physique too well because he was that typical computer nerd kinda guy from the early 90s. Big belly, glasses, and of course a new computer with the latest DOS version. He had some 3 1/2" floppy disks laying around his apartment and I really wondered what these were.

Don't leave them lying around magnets!

I asked him kindly (that kind of a guy was I), if he maybe can show me how these work and what to do with them. So, sliding one inside the computer, and typing some stuff into the operating system, some magic happened right before my eyes. It was a game, a game which most of the world is familiar with. The game is called Tetris! Wow, this was blowing my mind. I spent hours and hours playing this and some other mathematical programs for years.

In the meantime, my mother had a nice surprise for me to either my birthday or some Christmas in about the same years. It was the first handheld I have ever had. It was the Game Boy. And guess which game was the first I have ever played on it... Ding ding ding ding, yep, it's Tetris again! (I will assure you at this point, this game haunts me until this very day.) Now, having a Game Boy, some revolutionary shit was going on. Oh good lord, I could go out of the house with the Game Boy in my pocket, and still play my favorite games (still Tetris... -.-) This was the perfect toy, it wasn't too big, not too heavy, and would fit in my backpack when I was going to my dad's home. I didn't have to bother the big nerdy guy and his computer anymore. I was all set and ready to go with my own stuff. And man, was I proud. Letting them Tetriminos (I looked it up, it's the right word for those weird looking shapes) fall into perfect lines, getting the Tetrises, and feel baller! In the next years, my parents would give me a good amount of Game Boy cartridges, games like Castlevania The Adventure, Spider-Man X-Men: Arcade's Revenge, Paperboy, The Simpsons Itchy and Scratchy Miniature Golf Madness, Skate or Die - Bad'n Rad, and of course Pokemon Blue.

The rest of what was once my Game Boy games collection.

Well, only a few instances further in my timeline as how I remember it, another neighbor of my father, a girl in her mid 20s introduced me to something that changed my perception of gaming big time for me. I loved her, not her in particular but more the fact that she was lending me her Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis in the NA region) along with one of the most iconic games of all time, Sonic the Hedgehog.

I am honest when I say that I have no clue what other games I played on this machine because Sonic was the only thing that was really there, wasn't it? And this is where this paragraph ends. The only thing I remember was, the game was in color, and the fact that I had to go downstairs two stories, knock on my neighbor's door, I remember her standing in front of me with the console in a plastic bag, telling me that I should have fun with it. Bye neighbor, hello next chapter of gaming. (The Sega era wasn't yet over though for me.)


And guess what, this is when I lost my mind along with the whole world. Winter 1997 Christmas Eve, lil Jay, happy as always seeing presents with little cards that read his name on them underneath the plastic Christmas tree. There was a bigger box, and I always went from small to big, because, you know, bigger means more value, I hoped. So working through the stuff, I finally got to the last one, the biggest present I have ever gotten, literally and figuratively. I slowly and with caution tore open the gift wrap and saw that Sony symbol and the PlayStation logo... You can't imagine how happy I was.

My ultimate love.

Screaming like a little child... wait, I still was a little kid. Anyway, this was one of the greatest days in my life. There was only one game and a demo disk. I played the whole night through the next morning that one game and the demo. My mother told me, it was okay for this one night. She didn't even know, how often I snuck out of bed, tiptoed to the living room, and played some games in the middle of the night. Haha, gotcha Mom!

Let's take a break right here, and get back to it next time from this point on. There is still almost 20 more years from then until now, right? And what 20 years they were!


[*] Joysticks were the gamepads and controllers back in the day, for all you kids that don't know what that is. :D