My life has generally been a cycle of obsession and disillusionment. Around the time when I got my Nintendo 64, instead of becoming obsessed with a new video game or character, I became obsessed with Star Wars, and thus far it has been my longest-lasting obsession, and it has occurred simultaneously with some of my other obsessions. It was around that time that Episode I came out, and since I was eight years old and I cared a lot more about action scenes than about plot, dialogue, or writing, I loved it. I often would pick up long sticks at recess and pretend they were lightsabers. I don't think I ever hit anybody with one; I just fought against imaginary enemies. I started watching all of the movies regularly around this time (well, those that existed at the time, at least—later, I added the others to my rotation), and I continued to do so until I started college. I watched them so many times that I’ve memorized all the best parts without even trying; I can recite the dialogue from any of the following scenes without any effort at all: the beginning of Episode I, Qui-Gon’s death scene, the chase near the beginning of Episode II, the three lightsaber battles against Dooku near the end of Episode II, the whole beginning battle of Episode III (in English and Spanish), the fights between Anakin and Obi-Wan and Yoda and the Emperor in Episode III, and almost if not all of Darth Vader’s and Han Solo’s scenes in Episodes IV, V, and VI.
I didn’t have many Star Wars video games, but those I did have, I played often. I remember that my cousin used to have a PlayStation, and my favorite game to play while I was at his house was Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles. If I’d had the chance, I probably would have played that game nonstop for weeks. In the game, when a character picked up certain items, the player heard Yoda laughing like “Mm-hmhmhm!” To this day, my cousin can still make me laugh by saying, “Hey Kyle, guess what? Mm-hmhmhm!” Speaking of Yoda and laughing, the first time I saw Yoda lightsaber battling against Count Dooku in Episode II, my brother and I both laughed hysterically through the entire fight. And since I was only 11 years old at the time, I didn’t even notice the bad dialogue and acting, and I couldn’t understand why my dad hated the movie so much and called it “the worst movie of all time,” something he still says from time to time.
I started learning about Dungeons & Dragons in high school because my brother had started playing in college, and as soon as I began to understand how it worked, I wanted to play the Star Wars roleplaying game made by the same company. The latter is something I still do; I may write a post about that sometime, but I digress. Since starting college, I’ve only watched each movie twice—once for a film music class (John Williams remains my favorite soundtrack composer of all time, and I still enjoy listening to his music), and once with a group of my closest friends; some of them had never seen the Star Wars movies despite being quite geeky (how that happened, I have no idea), and some of them had seen the films before and greatly enjoyed Star Wars.
The recent Blu-ray re-releases of the Star Wars movies were what finally broke my obsession. Not because they added more rocks to R2's hiding place when the Sand People are attacking, not because they changed Obi-Wan's scream that scares off the Sand People yet again, not because Greedo continues to shoot first, not because they added a Dug in Jabba's Palace, and not because they made the Ewoks blink. It was because they completely ruined the single most climactic moment of the entire saga, when Darth Vader is watching the Emperor attack his son Luke with Force lightning, by adding in a "No...NOOOOO!!!" It shatters the dramatic tension, and it sounds terrible. When I found out about that particular change in the Blu-ray, I swore I would never give George Lucas another cent. I was tempted to go back on that by the release of the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) Star Wars: The Old Republic, but I've stubbornly refused to buy it out of spite.
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.
