The Early Years

I suppose I have always liked video games. One of my fondest early memories is being taken to arcades with my family, like when my dad took me to PoJo’s for some pinball or we visited the BSU game room. Going to a place like ShowBiz Pizza (aka Chuck E. Cheese's) or Keystone Pizza gave me opportunities to play some of my favorites, like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. My only problem was that each play was a quarter, and practicing was expensive. Whenever I would go to a new store, I was always looking out of the corner of my eye for a game or some kind of mini arcade that happened to be around. Sometimes I would go run errands with my mom and just stand around the arcade machines watching the demos play over and over. When I was about 5 or 6 we got the Pac-Man Board Game from Milton Bradley, and my mom made my brother and me Pac-Man and Ghost birthday cakes (since we basically share a birthday). I also tried to watch the Pac-Man animated cartoon as often as I could catch it. It was pretty obvious that Pac-Man was my favorite game. 

One night while my mom had some kind of gathering/meeting going on at my house, she had procured my grandma's old Pong Console. I was in heaven - video games at home! It was hooked up to our 13" B/W TV and I played it as much as I could. I remember wanting to play it more after that night, but I never saw it again. 

At some point for his programming class, my dad got a
TI Home Computer (TI-99/4A). It was basically a keyboard with a CPU and some RAM, but no hard drive. It was hooked up to a standard color TV for a monitor. It had a cartridge slot for games/applications, but if nothing was in the slot it would boot up to a BASIC programming command prompt. My parents got some educational games for it, and later Pac-Man and Space Invaders clones called Munch Man and TI Invaders, plus a few others, but my favorite game was called Defense SAM (Surface to Air Missles). This one had no cartridge, so we had to use the other way of storing information – cassette tapes. That’s right, the same kind that we used to listen to music on. It required a tape recorder that had certain kinds of input jacks, and it made a god-awful sound that was like a modem on steroids.

I was given a BASIC programming manual for kids and started to learn how some of it worked. The only problem was that since it lacked a hard drive, after typing up a program it would run once and clear the memory. I spent countless hours on that thing because that was all I had for video games. My cousin had a Commodore64 that I played while visiting them in Utah, and a few other people I knew had an Atari 2600 (Pitfall was my favorite). My cousins moved to Boise and they had one, but I rarely got to play it because in order to do so 3 different things had to happen: we had to be at their house for an extended period of time, they had to not be currently grounded from it, and they had to want to play it. 

I did have occasions to play computer games at school here and there. My 3rd grade teacher had a educational fraction game involving a pogo stick that I liked, and my Gifted class teacher had Escape ANTcatraz and Castle Adventure. There were others, but those were probably the highlights. 

One night, when I was watching TV by myself, I saw something that would change my life – it was an ad for the original Nintendo Entertainment System with ROB and the Zapper. I was amazed, enthralled, and wanted one badly, but had the feeling that we would never get one because of tight finances. It wasn’t too much later that we moved from Boise to Ontario. Our neighbors had a Commodore64 and I would play with that every once in a while when at their house. My favorite game on that was the Impossible Mission, followed by Ghostbusters. I also visited any arcade I knew about, or even just any place that happened to have 1 or 2 cabinet arcade games like Circle-K and Ontario’s mall (may it RIP). I went to those kinds most frequently, but had occasional visits to places like the bowling alley, Pietro's Pizza around the corner, a small arcade by the music store, and there used to be a full arcade in the mall before it became a gym equipment store.

 Around 9 months after we relocated to Ontario, my friend Brooks’ family moved around the corner from Texas. After getting to know them, I found out that they had an NES, and most of the original launch titles. They were still less common at the time, but this family had the whole package – including ROB. I was introduced to some of the launch games like Gyromite, Excitebike, and Kung Fu. Later I played Super Mario Brothers and loved it. Whenever I was over there I used any excuse to play it. They had the system in a small nook in their basement, and it always felt like being in a cave, which enhanced the feeling when I first played The Legend of Zelda there. I had seen the commercial for it and thought it looked fun, but I didn’t know just how much I would love it.

At Brooks' next birthday party, his cousin brought Zelda, and I could not put it down. It was unlike anything I had played before, and appealed to just about everything that I liked with video games, mazes/puzzles, exploration, and fantasy all rolled into one game. I never forgot that game, but it would be years before I would get to play it again. 

Over the next couple years, the NES became more common and more of my friends had one. My brothers and I found out that some of the grocery stores around there would rent the entire system, and we would try and convince our parents to rent one as a reward by waking up early to clean the house. While I was grateful to have the TI computer and the games we owned, I really, really wanted an NES. Finally, Christmas of ’89, it happened. But in the time leading up to it, I did anything I could to be around an NES. Lunchtime conversations with friends were almost always about games and the new secrets they had found or levels completed. Copies of Nintendo Power brought to school were passed around and pored over.

My friend Michael from across the street got an NES along with Zelda 2 and I think I practically lived over there for the next few months. Unfortunately, it kinda ruined some of the discovery aspects of Zelda 2 for me as I more or less knew everything about the game when I got it later that year. But with what little I had played of the game and knew from being around him playing it, I knew more than most of my friends. In fact, once, my friend Jake invited me over to his house specifically to get the Magic Hammer for him as he was unable to do so after repeated attempts. When I got it he ran around his house yelling, “HAMMER! HAMMER!” like a madman.

My aforementioned cousins with the Atari also had, by this time, the SEGA Master System, SEGA’s 8-bit system. In fact, they had 3 of them. My aunt and uncle had bought 3 in the hopes that between 5 kids they wouldn’t fight over them. I played Double Dragon and a few other games with them under the same conditions mentioned previously.

Once we finally procured a Nintendo console on Christmas of 1989, I rarely played anything but Nintendo consoles. However, there was one series of games I played with my dad on our computer - three of the King's Quest series.