Growing Up: Gamer

As I mentioned in my previous article, Nerf Wars has ended for the semester, leaving me without an opportunity for a Nerf Wars Rundown. Instead, this week I’m going to talk to y’all about something a little different.

All my life, I’ve been exposed to a large variety of games and consoles. Even before I was born, both of my parents were gaming fans. My mother was a sucker for a good Super Mario game and my dad couldn’t get enough of F-Zero. My parents bought a SNES almost as soon as they were released in the US, so by the time I was born, it already had a good year of use put into it. Because of this, my two younger siblings and I were introduced to the wonderful world of console gaming extremely early on.

As far as I can tell, this is pretty unusual. Out of the friends that I’ve talked to about gaming, none of their families had as strong a bond with gaming as we did. Many of my earliest memories that revolved around family bonding also had something to do with Super Mario World, Bubsy, or Q-Bert: watching my mother defeat Bowser time after time, only to discover that her princess was in another castle, or cheering on my dad as he ran Bubsy through a maze of enemies. Not long afterwards, I started playing the games myself. From that point on, I’d say I was hooked. A love of video games had successfully been passed down to the new generation in my family.

I’ve always had a knack for working with my hands, through everything from art to model-building, and gaming was no different. Not only did these games teach me about adventure and strategy, but they also helped me with finite motor skills and hand-eye coordination. And I wasn’t the only one in my family that was strongly affected by videogames. After the Super NES, my family had since acquired an N64, the limited-edition Pokemon version that came in a bundle with Hey You, Pikachu! That game had always been one of my personal favorites for the system, right up alongside Pokemon Puzzle League and Stadium. The concept of speaking to a video game and having one of the characters react and respond was mind-boggling at the time. In late 1999, my brother and I were gifted our first handheld consoles, two Gameboy Colors, mine with a copy of Pokemon Yellow and his with a copy of Blue. Needless to say, the months afterwards were filled with battles and badges, but one thing stood out in the beginning. At the time, my brother, going on five years old, had little interest in learning how to read. He had just never had any sort of passion for it. These games succeeded in changing that. With a bit of help from our dad, my brother managed to teach himself how to read using only Pokemon Blue Version.

Since then, our household has run through a series of consoles – N64, Gamecube, Playstation, Wii, Xbox, plus the Gameboy Advance, SP, and Nintendo DS. That being said, more often than not, whenever my dad needs a break from work or my mom is sick of grading papers, we can always expect that the 64 will come out, booting up for a couple rounds of Doctor Mario.