This thread is to be repied to in a WELL THOUGHT OUT fashion. You only get one story. This thread is dedicated to the defining experience of joy that in your mind, cements your dedication as a gamer. If there is such a thing as wabi-sabi for gamers, this thread is for those moments. You can have more than one, but please think carefully and list the most important one to you. :thumbsup:
As a child, I never had a TV. I grew up with books, until one day I came home and my father had purchased a 19 inch television (sony). About three years later, I was given a gift of a nintendo. My mother had carefully selected zelda as the title taken home with the system. That first night, I was up until an ungodly hour, and for the last time that night I died. I was barely awake, and that wonderful music from the retry screen came up and ushered me to sleep. I knew right then and there that I was going to do this forever. Sometimes I hook up the nes just to hear the melody from the retry screen.
well i will post one recently, this is a bit corny and not really epice"that be playing mario 64 for the first time", but i must say it would be recently, you see about 2 years ago after i finaly gotten a saturn and a 4mb action replay, i decided to import some games from yakumo, one of them was marvel vs street fighter, now i got these at a steal considering they were direct from japan and hard off where yakumo goes, so i get the games im cheerful(plus excited since this is the first time i ever imported directly from japan) however about 2 months later my brother moves out of no where, so i get his room. In the process i prepare to move my stuff over to his room, however oddly when i had all my stuff in this room, i could swear i had all my saturn games in the storage area. Well one of my friends comes over i want to show him how this version has no loadings arcade perfect etc, and low and behold i cant find it. This is putting me at a slight worry. So i search the old room, but shits by the old book case where its at, so from what i can see i cant find it. I look every where still cant find it, flash forward to yesterday, friday night board and have a hunch to look for it, sure enough, it was hidden on that very book shelf under a paper that made it seem like nothing was there, and i kid you not, it made my whole day, i know it sounds pretty pathetic, but popping it in the sautrn with no loading times and arcade perfect just felt so great. It brought back memories when capcom use to make 2d fighting games, the little details such as the escalator moving in the background of the mall stage still impresses me to this day, and the fact was it was a shinign example of how powerful the saturn was for 2d game, just with the assistance of 4mb ram added, i mean it was the first time in a long time a game had brought such joy to me, i was so excited when i was fighting with noriama, one of the craziest but coolest characters ever to be in a vs games. i will never forget yesterday, cause it brought back memories of what games were like before the death of dreamcast. (sorry I just had to add some breaks -ASSEMbler)
What made me a dedicated gamer? Wow. This is going to take some serious thinking. Well it all starts from my childhood. My dad bought me a NES system for my birthday, it was the big deluxe package that came with the robot, the light-gun, and Mario/Duckhunt. However, me and my sister played it so much my stepdad cut the powercord and since I was little I believed that was the end of it. That wasn't until I saw that my uncle bought a Sega Genesis. I got to borrow it from him and he had 3 games: Ghosts and Goblins, Altered Beast, and Truxton. I played Truxton the most. That game I really liked a lot. Then one day, I got home and the Genesis stopped working. It suddenly broke. I would be without a videogame for 2 more years until I moved to Florida. When we moved to Florida, the second year I was there my parents got me a Sega Genesis (model2) for Christmas and it came with Sonic 2. That is the game that made me into what I am. I remember waking up at 6am in the morning to play the game with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs sitting in front of me. I would sit there hunched over until they kicked me off the TV. I really fell in love with that system more than the game. It took me a month to beat Sonic 2 I think. When I saw the ending. So I guess that Sonic 2 and the Sega Genesis is what really made me dedicated to gaming.
When I was a kid growing up, my family didn't have much money. I was born to two teenage parents, both working full time and trying to go to college. When I was still young, my parents were married but didn't live together for a few years, my father lived a half hour away and i stayed with my mom. I got to see my dad about once a month, and we always had a great time together. Then Super Mario Brothers 3 came out, there were ads on the TV, all of my friends were playing it. I knew we didn't have the money to buy it it, so i never asked. One day I came home from school and found a brand new NES system sitting on my bed, with a copy of SMB3. I was told that my dad had dropped it off for me. I didn't see him for another few months. With him working minimum wage, trying to support himself, going to school, and helping raise me, I have no idea where he got the money for the console. Opening up that game and playing it is one of the best feelings of my life. The game and system were destroyed in a flood a few years back, and i'm embarised to say that i've never beaten SMB3. Today I own 31 consoles, and roughly 600 games. I would consider that moment the driving force behind not just me being a gamer, but it drove me to become a game programmer. Now i just hope that i help children today have the same feeling. I don't remember if i've ever thanked my dad for buying that NES for me... I'm going to call him first thing in the morning.
Well I've been gaming since the 1970's, but Sonic The Hedgehog would have to be the pivotal point for me. Before Sonic I'd spent a lot of time with the C64, which I liked but it never really got me excited, I guess loading the tapes up for hours on end only to get an error didn't help! ...Anyway Sonic came out on the MD, I bought the package and was hooked, I also bought Greendog on the same day and I remember playing this, with my wife, taking turns late, late into the night ...Well as you know, there was no way of saving progress on the likes of Sonic, so I'd end up playing for days on end trying to complete games!!! ...I guess that's what makes games different now, in the way that you can save and turn 'em off, thus you can play for a few minutes a day, where as you would of had to play the game in one sitting!!! Yep, Sonic definately got me hooked as I ended up buying each and every Sonic version released since, I still like playing the game, its simple, it looks good and captures a moment in time perfectly.
Well the defining moment of my gaming life thus far is not the moment when I started gaming but more when I got direction in my gaming life. I'm sure like most people here I grew up playing games, which I did from my first BBC to various PCs handed down from my father. So I was very much into gaming and played most of the time, but it took a special moment to consoladate this love. My very first Japanese import was Final Fantasy Tactics, which I brought out of loving FFVII. It took me ages to start playing it because I needed a colour converter and import enabler. However when I started playing it, I loved everything about it, but the Japanese language barrier was a proverbial brick wall in my path. So I went out with my dad and brought about 5 Japanese language books with all my money. I was just so desperate to play this game, obviously the fact it was Japanese made it mysterious, but the start of FFT was just a shock to the system and I had to play a game, so classy and amazing. So I started a translation from absolutely zero knowledge of Japanese and played through the whole game with a dictionary, kanji book and basic Japanese learner book. While I did not get most of the story, I got the jist. But I loved this game, I played it so much I pretended I was ill and skived off school, I sacrificed all of my time to the game. My dreams were in grid form and I truly loved the game, the music and the visuals. I finished it and started it again right after. (partly because I had no money) It was then that I knew two things, first that these were the type of games that I loved, Japanese RPGs and secondly that the games had to be the original, in Japanese. It was then I got rid of ALL my old games and started from one again. From then every game I have ever owned has been in Japanese. Because if I could play FFT, I could play anything in Japanese. Of course my gaming has spiraled from there, but it all comes down to that one game. It got me where I am today, it taught me basic Japanese (mainly hira/katakana basic kanji) and it started my obsession on Japanese games. So this is my moment where I started gaming with serious intent and focus, I advise all to do as I did and just jump in with a japanese game and some books. It took me a lot of effort, but it was a really important time that defined who I was as a gamer.
So one day, this is 1988, my dad comes home with a big box full of weird stuff. Mind you, I already knew about videogaming, having played Atari 2600 with my older brother and sister (he even got me those weird blue controllers and the Sesame Street games) - but this was something different. My brother and I got to setting up that weird, and already very old, brown machine. It had like twelve manuals, a tape recorder thing, a diskette drive, a black printer, some cartridge thingies, some Atari sticks, and a mighty fuckload of copied discs. It was some sort of absolute treasure. He had bought it from one of his friends' older son, who needed something different to go to college or something. It took us hours to put it together, but we finally did. LOAD "*", 8, 1 - we typed, as we read the manual. And as a family, we spent that whole afternoon, until it was like eleven at night, playing "Summer Games" on my brother's old Panasonic TV. It took us months to go through the contests of most of the discs. They were jampacked with electronic goodness. And this was all mine. It gave me a sense of exploring the unknown (hey, I was like eight) I learned basic programming there, when I was like nine or ten (and that got me out of junior-high computing class for free, as I knew Qbasic too by then). I played all of the classics (many I knew from going to those gigantic 80's arcades with my Mom) - dig dug, buck rodgers, Save New York, Robotron, Pac Man, Montezuma's Revenge, Three Stooges, Popeye... also many amateurish games, and some printing software. The thing came with like a hundred or more games, demos, and stuff with cracks that made me want to eventually learn english. I was an old-school gamer before there was an old-school. Everybody had the NES (And Eventually, I had one myself) , but I was always the outcast in everything, so it was about right that I had this Cadillac of true classic gaming, the Commodore 64. I considered it superior, but I did get an NES for Super Mario in 1991 or so. The C64 - Getting it, getting to know it, using it, and playing it for millions of hours, that's my Joyous moment - the one primary memory of gaming that made me know I was to be a gamer until I went on to that big arcade in the sky. My C64 eventually stopped working in 1996, after a couple of sad months of bugs and failures. Some "friend" stole almost all of my C64 discs a bit before anyway. But the thing had its effect. Today, I have many consoles, but none has that "magic" tingle of mistery, that expectation of loading a different new game every day, that feeling of exploration and conquest of the electronic unknown. Maybe growing up also ruined that for me with the new consoles. Still, after the C64, I got the NES, SNES, and so on, and kept on playing through many other great memories (specially on the SNES, the best machine ever). But that first one old, slow, brown machine with Atari joysticks, that's the one that made me the gamer I am today.
I had gamed for years at this point, since the NES, but what really made me a gamer for life was Super Mario 64. A friend of mine got the N64 at launch then immediately went on vacation, and let me borrow it for 2 weeks. I didn't do ANYTHING else during that period, I lived, breathed, and thought SM64 24/7. I would just go into certain worlds just to walk around, hang out, and take in the ambience (especially Jolly Roger Bay). In fact, I still do the Jolly Roger Bay thing, but now I do it in 1600x1200 in emulation
I had always played videogames as far as I can remember. When I was less than four I would go with my father to the local corner store, and while he bought bread I would stand on a milk tray so as to be able to see and play Pacman. Later I upgraded to a Famicom, which probably cemented my interest in Japanese games. But it was mainly just something casual to pass the time. I didn't take it too seriously. Until one day, while at school, a friend showed me the latest issue of EGM which had been shipped to Africa. It was a November/December issue, thick due to the glut of seasonal releases. It opened my eyes to many games, pieces of hardware, and other bits of obscure trivia I'd never heard of before. It felt as though I held the gaming world in my hands. I've since re-bought that issue. Sadly my childhood memories turned to bitter ashes, as the issue isn't particularly informative or very interesting today. But at the time, being fairly young, reading that seemingly vast amount of info ignited in me an urge to try and consume as much gaming knowledge as possible. Well, that, and those 16-bit screenshots looked damn awesome.
