It’s never a good practice to try and put a human being into one specific category. We’re multi-faceted creatures, in every single sense. This, obviously, extends to hobbies too. I don’t think there’s a single human being who only has one hobby exclusively, and they do nothing else to define themselves by. For example, I like to read, write my own stories, dabble in voice acting, work on creating my own RPG projects, and used to do community theater.
But, there’s also usually one hobby in particular that does become the biggest centerpiece of a person’s hobbies and favorite pastimes. And while, for me, writing is a very close second, it’s a true fact that video games, and the act of gaming, is the hobby that most defines me, and has for my entire life.
I was watching a YouTube video this past week where someone chronicles their journey with video games, and I thought that could be a fun thing to do here on The Contrarian Corner! Yes, I’ve mentioned anecdotes here and there across this blog, and my “Remembering The…” series of articles included a lot of little memory snippets. But I still figured this article could serve as a way to compile everything in one place, plus add some new context and stories that I know I’ve never told on this blog before.
Anyway, without any more preamble, let’s get into it!
As I’ve discussed before, my earliest memories of video games all center around the Nintendo 64, and very shortly after the Sega Genesis as well. I consider Super Mario 64 to be the first video game that I ever played, but all of those initial years of gaming involve one of two goofy controllers (the baffling three prongs from Nintendo, and the A-B-C from Sega). I loved using both of those systems, even if those years fell directly within the timeframe where I really wasn’t all that great at video games, and could basically never actually beat any game I played, at least not fully.
But that sort of thing didn’t matter when you were a kid, did it? Nowadays, I value my time more than I ever have before, so dying a million times over in a game is a surefire sign to turn the difficulty down or consider dropping the game. I don’t love games any less, but there’s so many to play and so little time that I don’t have the patience that I did as a kid.
I remember booting up games from the N64 and Genesis and just starting new files or playing the first few levels over and over. I remember failing to beat a boss or a tricky platforming section, and either trying over and over, or finding something new to do in the game instead. I remember getting lost in mazes or stuck on puzzles and just exploring endlessly until I either figured things out…or I didn’t. We never really had strategy guides lying around the home, this was a few year’s after the heyday of those gaming tip hotlines, and a few years before we ever got internet at home.
Those two home consoles weren’t my only exposure to forming my lifelong love of video games. Arcades also played a huge role.
I grew up around two malls within close distance, and very frequently visited them all throughout childhood. One of them is gone and demolished these days, and the other is barely limping along, but when I was growing up they were both pretty big hotspots. My dad would often take me and my siblings to the mall just because there was so much to see and do, and plenty of space to stretch our legs and run around (while my mom, undoubtedly, got a chance to just relax in a quiet house for a bit).
On nearly every single one of these visits, my dad would take us to the arcade, usually as the last stop on our visit (both malls had an arcade). Then, on more trips than not, he’d hand me a dollar bill, I’d turn it into four quarters, and that would be enough to play two or three arcade games. It was always such an exhilarating experience, and as I mentioned, only further increased my love of gaming by continuing to associate the mere existence of video games with feelings of fun and excitement.
Were the types of arcade games that I played as a very little kid actually equivalent to video games? No, I suppose not. Skee-ball, basketball, and the game where a light spins in a circle and you try to time your button hit to land on the jackpot aren’t video games at all. But I think their essence is pretty similar. Plus, as I got a bit older, I started playing arcade games that were very much just video games, like those shooter games or racing games.
As a very little kid, I stuck to ticket games in hopes of leaving the mall with a tootsie roll!
Then, there was another pretty underrated part of my childhood related to video games. It was no less formative on my love of gaming, but it’s also the part of this tale that I have the hardest time recalling memories from. For a period of several years, I played a ton of video games on our home computer, whether through floppy disks or eventually CD-ROM.
Many of these games were edutainment titles, meaning they were meant to be educational experiences in the form of a video game. Stuff like Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam, if you’ve heard of those titles. It wasn’t just educational, though. I furthered my complicated-but-mostly-loving relationship with the Sonic the Hedgehog series through some PC ports of his old titles, I played a ton of Shining Force (the game that would one day lead me to Fire Emblem), I built cities and inevitably blew them up in SimCity, I crafted insanely wild coasters in RollerCoaster Tycoon, and I raised a little gremlin monster on a diet of exclusively sugary cereal in Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchling Adventure.
And yes, I also played a ton of 3D Pinball Space Cadet. Who hasn’t?
One thing I also have to add is that many games of the era were weird. A lot of them experimented with 3D graphics, lending a super unique and vaguely uncanny feel that distinctly marks the era that those games came from, no doubt about it. Even the educational ones had some really wacky moments of a kind that you just didn’t find from console and handheld video games at the time. Nintendo kids were jumping on blocks as Mario. PC kids were time travelling through the eras as a robot guy trying to defeat a little science girl who took over a castle.
School also presented a rather interesting option for video games. While it was true I had access to an assortment of gaming titles to play on our home computer, our home computer was also slow as molasses, as was our dial-up internet. I say this in a loving manner, but that doesn’t make it less true.
The computer lab at school, and the free-use computers at my local library, because havens of gaming that I couldn’t get access to elsewhere, thanks in no small part to Flash games. The internet is filled with a ton of stuff that doesn’t contribute much to society (and also some that does, like, of course, The Contrarian Corner), but for a young kid there is nothing cooler than playing some Flash games. Or even other classics such as The Oregon Trail and Kid Pix.
Broadly speaking (and this isn’t me complaining or anything), it was my friends who always had more video game options than in my own household. Because of this, I often took advantage of every opportunity that I could in order to play video games with my friends that I never would have been able to back at my own house. This often took the form of the Gamecube and the Wii, as well as hours and hours of playing fun games and wishing that I had them at home.
Things took another step when I received the first ever video game device that was 100% my own, which was a GameBoy Advance. I loved that little thing, and played it religiously for years, even though I never owned more than a handful of games for it. In a similarly unique circumstance, we never procured a charging cord for the GBA aside from a portable car charger. This meant that my GBA saw most of its use during family road trips.
That’s not to say I didn’t wring every last drop of battery life out of my GBA in between the weekly Saturday and Sunday drives wherein I’d bring my GBA into the car to charge it. I got a lot of use out of my GBA during the wee hours of the morning (or super late at night) when I should have undoubtedly been asleep. I also leveraged this weird trick where, if your GBA died while using it, leaving it to sit for a day would somehow refill about ten minutes of playtime the next time you boot up the GBA, even without a proper recharge. And to a kid, ten minutes is an eternity of fun!
Then, we hit the day where my older brothers purchased an original Xbox. I fell in love with the Xbox instantly, even when the only game we owned was a racing game. Honestly, I think I played that racing game more than either of my brothers, simply because I was so obsessed with video games at that point in my life and the Xbox was a brand-new thing. Because I don’t even really like racing games all that much! And yet, I played the heck out of that game, customizing my car and doing time trials over and over.
As one year rolled into two, and then three, the Xbox became a powerhouse of gaming in my household, and definitely my favorite console for a decent chunk of my childhood. One of my older brothers showed me basically every single Star Wars game available for the console, my other older brother played each of the Tony Hawk Underground games with me on the system, and I spent my pocket money picking up Sonic, Pac-Man, and SpongeBob titles.
The PS2 game a bit later, and I played that one a lot too. But we never really got too many multiplayer games for that system, which meant I never really brought it out when friends came over. Considering so much of my video game time was playing games with either friends or my brothers, that meant that the PS2 got a lot less attention than the Xbox.
It’s worth nothing that this era of my life is when I was most addicted to video games. I don’t think it ever quite reached a truly harmful level, but gaming was about all that I cared about. I played games, I read about games, I dreamt about games…it was definitely an addiction. Ironically, I probably play video games more nowadays just in terms of total hours, but I’m a much-more balanced person in my hobbies and my time than as a kid, when the mere idea of video games had me frothing at the mouth.
Finally, we hit what I would explain as being the moment my relation to games began to change a bit. It’s the point in time where, instead of my older brothers, I myself shifted into being the center of gaming in our household. It’s also the point in time where, as if overnight, I became good at video games. I mean, yes, it was a gradual evolution of years of playing and honing my skills, but I definitely didn’t notice the slow progress in the moment!
One Christmas, I got a GameCube. The very next Christmas, I got a Wii. Since the Wii has backwards-compatibility with the GameCube, it somewhat made the GameCube obsolete, but it definitely didn’t make the GameCube’s games obsolete! From this Christmas on, I hardly touched a single gaming-related device that wasn’t the Wii, metaphorically drowning myself in more Mario and Zelda than I knew what to do with.
Prior to this, I’d always just had to experience these sorts of games at a friend’s house, or at even stranger locations. My nana’s nursing home had a Wii, and I remember playing that thing every single time I had the chance, totally crushing those other older folks’ top scores in bowling! Well, that is, when I wasn’t spending all of my time creating Miis or browsing the other random channels the Wii gave you access to, like the photo album and the crowd voting one.
Actually, let me cut in with a quick aside. I think it was influenced by how much I loved video games as a kid juxtaposed by how little access I had to the vast stores of consoles and games many of my friends had. But for whatever reason (and this is still true to this day), I’ve always had a compulsion to explore every single figurative nook and cranny of the games and consoles I use.
I remember being entertained by the cute little icons for every single game within the PS2’s save data library. I remember listening to my brother’s uploaded MP3s on the Xbox’s music player feature. I remember spending time playing that silly puzzle game on the Wii’s photo gallery app. I remember doodling silly faces on the DS’ chatting app, even though the messages weren’t being sent to anyone but myself. I just really like experiencing every single thing that gaming has to offer, and I’ve found that I stand mostly alone in that regard compared to my peers.
I also played a decent amount of the Nintendo DS in this era of my gaming life, though the DS actually belonged to my sister. To this day, I’m not 100% sure why she ever wanted a DS. She got a lot of mileage out of Nintendogs and this one Guitar Hero game, but otherwise she barely utilized the thing. I was the one who borrowed it quite frequently, especially once my friend got me into the mainline Pokémon games for the first time in my life.
A very memorable and silly moment came in 2012, when the Nintendo Wii U debuted. I actually wrote a multi-page draft to my parents explaining how our family just had to have the Wii U, outlining it’s pros-and-cons and how it would benefit the entire family. In the end, I’m not sure anyone really used it by themselves ever except for me, but my proposal must’ve worked because I received one for Christmas that year.
The Wii U actually became my pride and joy for the next few years, as I lugged that bad boy to every single party and get together that I had with friends and family. Sleepovers with my closest friends, hangouts with our youth group at church, and family reunions with my cousins. I brought the Wii U (and especially Nintendo Land) to every single gathering, and it was always a massive hit. Say what you will about the Wii U’s financial success (or rather, complete lack thereof), but it was a phenomenal console for multiplayer fun.
High school brought with it the 3DS, which unlike my sister’s ownership of the original DS, was entirely a system of my own. I adore the 3DS to bits, both back in high school and still to this day when I play it. It’s innovative StreetPass feature actively rewarded me for bringing it to school and interacting with my friends, ensuring that there was never a day that passed when I didn’t have it in my backpack, even if I never pulled it out all day.
Many of my best memories with the 3DS come from lunches and testing days. My high school had us take these tests in our freshman year, and if you passed you didn’t have to take them again. What that meant was that in sophomore, junior, and senior years, there would be two days a year where we just had a three-hour chunk of nothing to do but kill time. The 3DS was a gift from heaven on those days, and my friends and I would just play multiplayer games for the whole three-hour chunk. As for lunches, it wasn’t uncommon for my buddies and I to cram food down our throats as fast as we could, and then fit in a few Super Smash Bros. matches or Mario Kart races.
The year I graduated high school is the year I picked up a PS4, which I’ve talked about many times on this blog with regards to how that decision dramatically altered my gaming life and introduced me to dozens of fantastic franchises. Later that same year is when I grabbed a Vita for the exclusive purpose of playing Person 4 Golden, a game I’d watched people play on YouTube and always wanted to try for myself. The Vita is my least-played gaming device that I own, but I am forever grateful for it introducing me to the Trails series!
In the last (current) step of my gaming journey, I nabbed a Nintendo Switch in 2018, and a PS5 about a year after that console released (trying to get one on launch was impossible). Both of those systems have been fantastic, and I’ve enjoyed a bunch of amazing games on each one. I look forward to continuing to do so!
Of course, my relationship with video games hasn’t always been a pleasant one. While it’s embarrassing to talk about, I’m also not ashamed to address it, especially in light of how far I’ve moved beyond the shortcomings of my childhood.
For as much as I loved games, they used to make me incredibly angry. I’d cry, I’d scream, I’d thrown a temper tantrum. I’ve tossed a few controllers, I face-palmed myself so hard once that I got a nose bleed, and I accidentally broken my sister’s DS one time when I got upset (thankfully, there was a warranty, so she was able to get a brand-new one a few days later). Video games, in a sense, were practically synonymous with potential rage. Not to say I was a ticking time bomb, but the possibility was always there if the experience grew sour.
These days, I think of myself as a pretty chill person. Obviously, something like Dark Souls can be prickly with a really tricky boss, but I now react like a normal person. Maybe a quick scowl, a murmured ‘geez, this boss is so stupid‘, and then I take a break from the game, calm down, and move on with my life like a normal person. Just in general, my relationship with games is dramatically more healthy than it used to be, which only makes my love for the hobby stronger.
And that about wraps up our journey! But there’s still a long road left for me to travel as my life continues, so I know I’ll be making a million more memories within the incredible world of gaming!
The Contrarian Corner 