My history: Video games

Since I'm just getting started with this, I thought I'd share with you all a bit about my history with the various subjects I plan to blog about. My pedigree, if you will.

I've been gaming virtually all my life. When I was born, my parents owned an Atari 400, which was basically an Atari home computer with a 5200 built into it, though it used different sized cartridges (Atari's slick way of making you spend more money on games). We only had a small handful of games, but we had the ones that counted. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command, and more. There was also an old Odyssey 400 Pong-clone machine, though that mostly stayed packed away in the closet.

I cut my teeth on these games, from around age 4 to age 10 (my parents wouldn't let me play any younger than that, and it's still my theory to this day that the reason for this was so they could have more time to play themselves). On my 10th birthday I received the gift I had been clamoring for all year, my NES. Super Mario Bros. showed me a whole new world of gaming that I didn't think was possible before that. I was instantly hooked on Nintendo. But the big bomb dropped a month later, on Christmas morning. There was one game all the kids at school were talking about nonstop. They had been talking about it since before I even got my NES. I didn't know much about it at the time, but I knew I needed it. When Christmas morning came, I woke up and ran to the tree and saw that little rectangular box that I knew must be a game, and I opened it up. I was immediately struck by the fact that it was shiny and gold. I could tell because the box had a little window in it so you could see the cartridge inside! The Legend of Zelda was in my hands! This was truly a defining moment in my life. I never looked back from there.

As the years went on I did what I could to grab more games. We didn't have much money growing up, so I mostly borrowed games from friends, or rented. But I managed to get a game or two at Christmas or birthdays, and managed to get a couple dozen by the time I convinced my parents to get me a Genesis. I really wanted a Super NES, as Nintendo made my favorite games, but it was too expensive. So Genesis it was. Other than Sonic, though, I didn't find much that thrilled me on Genesis, so it wound up sitting on my shelf while I spent a summer mowing lawns and washing cars to save money for a Super NES.

My gaming cooled down a bit at this point. I was getting older, and had many siblings now, and therefore got less at Christmas and my birthday. I had to work for what few SNES games I managed to pick up for myself. I managed to pick up a Game Boy when Link's Awakening was released, and later talked my dad into getting me an N64 for Christmas when that came out, but the games were coming fewer and farther between for me. After I graduated and got a crappy job, I saved up and bought a PlayStation so I could play Final Fantasy VII, and a Game Boy Color for Link's Awakening DX. Things were still pretty slow moving though, until 2001.

A couple of my friends, while away at college, got to play the Dreamcast and loved it. Since Dreamcast was pretty much a dying system at this point, you could get a new one for around $50, so they bought one. All of my friends who played it loved it too, so we all wound up buying one. This started some kind of chain reaction in me. After buying the Dreamcast I felt the need to go back and get the other Sega systems I missed growing up, and I quickly snapped up a Master System, Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn. Then I turned to other systems, like the Turbo Grafx 16 and Neo Geo systems. I basically started buying up anything I could. I also started buying games like they were supplies for an end-of-the-world bunker. NES, Super NES, Genesis, any cheap old games I could find, even if I wasn't particularly interested in playing them.

The collecting bug had bit me. Hard. Before I bought my Dreamcast I took a quick count and saw that I owned around 70 games for around a half-dozen systems. I currently own 1,830 games for almost 40 systems. If I had the room to properly display them all, I would love to provide you all with some pictures. I guess that'll have to wait, though.

By the way, for anyone that is interested, I use Collectorz.com's Game Collector software to keep track of my collection. I may go a bit more in depth on that in a later post. It's good software.