Early Gaming

My memories from before first grade are scattered and incomplete, rather like a 500-piece puzzle that's just been started. I don't remember for certain what my first gaming experience was, but I can say with some degree of certainty that the Nintendo Entertainment System was my first console. Super Mario Bros. 3 was my favorite game when I was little. I remember playing it with my grandmother--I was always Mario with her, and she was Luigi. In that game, the Fire Flower power-up, which granted Mario and Luigi the ability to shoot fireballs from their hands, turned the character orange. Given that Mario wore red clothes and Luigi green, my grandmother sometimes got confused about whose turn it was to play when she had a Fire Flower. She was pretty good, but I was better. I also played with my older brother, who was always better than I was; when I played with him, I was Luigi and he was Mario.

The Super Nintendo debuted about six months after I was born, and I always wanted one, but my parents never got one for me; I never really understood why. Instead, they bought me a Sega Genesis, beginning what has come to be known in my family as the "Sonic era." After receiving the console and several Sonic the Hedgehog video games for Christmas in 1996 or 1997, I quickly became obsessed with Sonic, his two-tailed vulpine sidekick Miles "Tails" Prower, and their rival Knuckles the Echidna. I played the games as much as I possibly could (except when I was watching the Sonic cartoons, of course), and I almost always included something about Sonic in my Writing Log in first grade. Such was my obsession that my teacher requested that I go a whole week without mentioning Sonic in my writing at all. Being the smart aleck that I have always been, I naturally decided to write about how I wanted to learn more about hedgehogs, foxes, and echidnas.

Everything changed when I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas in 1999. I think I'd played a Nintendo 64 once or twice before I owned one, and I'd thought that it was cool, but I'd never seriously desired one. I was slow to let go of Sonic the Hedgehog, and when I did, I didn't immediately have another game franchise to obsess over. This was not due to a lack of good games on the Nintendo 64; quite the opposite, in fact. More than a dozen of my favorite games to this day are Nintendo 64 games, from five different franchises and five different developers. There was such a variety in excellent gaming for the N64 that I couldn't choose just one game, character, etc. to obsess over. In my eyes, the N64 years were a golden age of gaming unmatched by anything before or since. Super Mario 64 set the standard for 3D adventure games, as GoldenEye 007 did for first-person shooters and Star Fox 64 did for flight simulators (although I prefer the later Star Wars: Rogue Squadron in that category). Rareware alone released half a dozen fantastic games of different genres for the N64. Furthermore, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was called "the best video game in the history of humanity" as recently as March of 2010, nearly a dozen years after its release. The addition of two more controller ports allowed for four people to play simultaneously. My brother and I played many of these games with our respective best friends (who themselves were brothers), and our parents sometimes played racing games, Mario Tennis, or Mario Party with me and my brother. I actually started playing tennis in real life because I liked Mario Tennis so much, though I was never very good at it.