Hi, this is going to be the first part of a series I am going to be doing on my “gaming memoirs” which is just a pretentious way of saying that I am just going to be writing about my history with video games beginning from a very young age. This first installment is going to be maybe a little light on the actual video games, but the next installment is going to be on the N64 and that should be more lively.
My mother didn’t believe in video games, thought they were a complete waste of time. I don’t think dad cared much about them either way, but just wasn’t willing to spend money on a console. So, for the first part of my life I didn’t have any sort of game system at home. Because of this, until I got into PC gaming, video games would always be something that was always on some level unobtainable.
Both of my parents worked so until I was old enough to just go home on my own after school, I had to go to a local daycare. I am from a small town in rural alberta of only 2000 people so the only option was a place run by a local woman called Manna. It was there that I first encountered video games.
I would have been just entering kindergarten at the time making it about 1999 (my memories of that time are frankly a little hazy being so young) and she had an old Sega Genesis with a copy of Sonic 2. This was my first video game. The funny thing is I really cannot remember much about that game or the specifics of my reactions to it. When I played it when I was older I though it was a good game, but I had no real nostalgia for it unlike a lot of other games from my childhood. I just remember that Sonic 2 and by extension video games themselves were the funnest and coolest thing ever.
Now when you’re a kid with no real responsibilities or commitments, fun is pretty damn important. There were a few other things like books and TV that I also enjoyed a lot, but for me video games were the ultimate way to have fun, better than anything else. But, again I own any sort of console so on one level video games were always unobtainable, I could only play them at specific times and places and I think this lack created a mystique around video games for me.
So the only time I could play video games was when I was at the daycare and that was always the highlight of my time there. Part of the issue was that at that establishment I was the oldest child who was there regularly. Children my age did come on occasion and playing with them was always a blast, but most of my time everyone else was always so much younger than I was which prevented me from relating to them .So basically because of that a lot of the time I spent there I was either lonely or bored. The one exception was always when I was playing video games. They wouldn’t let me spend all day playing video games, forcing me to….. go outside (The Horror!), but I generally had at least some time to play video games and it was always the highlight of my day.
Eventually, the daycare would replace the Sega Genesis with a Nintendo 64 and I am going to make my experience with that console the subject of the next blog post I make in this series. But , I am going to spend the rest of this time talking about the one video game experience I had outside the daycare system at this time.
One of the highlights of every year for me was the annual summer expedition to go see my Grandma in Saskatoon. After the mammoth 10 hour car ride across the endless expanse of the Canadian prairies we would spend the two weeks at what me and my sister called camp Grandma’s and it was the best. We would go to the zoo, to local day camps, to a brand new library, we would eat grandma’s delicious cooking and watch cable. But, the highlight was always interacting with whatever cousins happened to be there at the time and especially my cousin Tad who was the same age as me. I haven’t talked to him in about 10-15 years, but when I was kid Tad was probably my best friend in the world despite only seeing him a few times a year. We would always have so much fun together just messing around and playing and then one summer he had this brand new video game called Pokemon Yellow.
This was at the height of the Pokemon craze of the late 90’s and every person my age thought Pokemon was just the coolest thing ever, the anime, the video games, the card game all of it. That first movie coming out was the event of the summer. However, my mother hated Pokemon, thinking it was just awful and glorified fighting and violence. This may sound silly, but she kind of had a point, because when you look at it objectively it really is just dogfighting. Whatever the case, Pokemon was forbidden in my house.
However at Grandma’s house it was her rules that applied and she didn’t mind and my cousin Tad who was living with her at the time loved Pokemon. When I was there we watched the 3 or 4 Pokemon VHS tapes he had over and over again and despite not being able to see the show on a regular basis I think I got to the point where I could name all 151 pokemon.
So when he showed me this thing called Pokemon Yellow my mind was just blown! Now I never actually got to play the game personally but I spent that entire two weeks hanging out with him on my Grandma’s back porch and looking over his shoulder while he was playing the game on my Grandma’s back porch and my younger sister looking over my shoulder. I didn’t even need to play the game to be in awe of its greatness, but just watching someone else play the game was enough for me to think this was all incredibly awesome.
I think my experience with this game reinforces a lot of the themes I was talking about earlier. Video games were to me the pinnacle of coolness and fun, but always on some level unobtainable because I never actually owned any. That will be all for this blog post, next week I am going to talk about my experiences with the N64 which all took place during the time I have described. In particular I am going to be talking about Super Mario 64 which to me was and to an extent still is the platonic ideal of what a video game should be.
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