My Relationship With Video Games

My Early Memories

For a long time I didn't have a huge interest in video games. I can't really pin a timeframe to my earliest memories, but I vaguely remember being very young and playing around in some games on my dad's N64. Soon after that we got a family Wii and my brother and I each got a DS Lite. All of this is very hazy and occupied the time in my life when games were another toy to play with, which was probably apropriate for my age anyway.

Emulation

For our 11th birthday my brother and I each got a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. It's an awful device now and it was already pretty bad for the time, but it's how I learned to really take advantage of the tools I'm given and find things to do with it. Around that time we were getting into Pokémon without access to any of the games. I'm not sure how it came about exactly, but I learned about emulation and managed to play all the way through Pokémon Leaf Green and Emerald together with my brother. There was no way to connect our devices, of course, but we were able to have that shared experience that makes Pokémon so special just by playing them at the same time and learning together.

Retro Gaming

Eventually I realized that older games were much cheaper (at the time), and if I wanted more experiences like Pokémon my best option was to get things second-hand. I'd estimate I was somewhere between 12-14 so after some research for my next birthday I asked for money to buy myself a RetroDuo Portable V2. In hindsight, this handheld was kind of a piece of crap. It came with a single dead pixel that I just dealt with and the cartridge slot got so loose over time that I started having to shove things inside the slot to take up space and keep the cartridge still. I didn't have much money left over, but a friend's mom let me buy a handful of SNES games off her for $4 a pop, making possibly the best deal of my life. Between her, my uncle, and a nearby second-hand store I got The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 2, Star Fox, Yoshi's Island, F-Zero, Super Mario World, and Super Metroid. Super Metroid is the first one I finished, and it changed my life. This started my passion for video games and solidified them as my main interest.

PC Games

Once I got my fill with the games I had over the next few years, I was short on money and high on time. I had recently gotten an Asus X540s (which was awful) laptop and ended up spending tons of time on Gamejolt, Itch, and sorting by free on Steam. This laptop became an extremely janky desktop setup on a small desk I had to share with my brother for the next few years. Eventually I saved up some cash to buy Steam gift cards, and in middle school I bought all of Valve's games and I instantly fell in love with their style, writing, and design.

Console Modding

Later on my grandmother bought me a 2ds on sale for under $100. I spent the next few years getting amazing milage out of putting custom firmware on it and downloading basically any portable Nintendo games I wanted. This gave me tons of freedom to go through my backlog and play wherever I wanted throughout highschool. Over time I learned as much as I could in order to get the most out of it, and soon my Wii would follow suit.

Desktop Computer

Finally, just before my junior year of highschool I managed to save up to build nice a computer. I spent the whole summer doing manual labor on a farm, but in the end it was worth it. Suddenly every system was open for emulation and every game was playable, if only on low settings for the time being.

Today

Not a whole lot has changed since that last major shakeup in the middle of highschool. I've been upgrading my PC slowly over time with my own money and I spent a few years playing everything I always wished I could've when I was younger. I finally don't have to share my desk anymore, which gives me a lot more space to put other stuff. I've had time to pick up some other consoles and I'm mostly happy with what I own, finally putting some time into Playstation and the enormous backlog that comes with it. There's a lot I skipped over for the sake of brevity, but I'm sure it'll all come up later. These kind of retrospectives get kind of messy as is inherent to memory, so I'll probably keep history to a minimum from here on out.