Today’s anecdotal ramble-post is inspired by the second round of the WordPress gaming community collaboration – EXP Share, prompted by DanamesX from Tales From the Backlog. We’re still in the midst of the holiday season, so for this month’s theme we are discussing times we shared our love of gaming with others or they have shared it with us. For my addition, I’ve included a couple past examples, along with a more recent mention. Let’s start with a stroll down memory lane, shall we?
First, this month’s theme…
Share a story where you shared the gift of gaming OR someone shared it with you
Number 1.
A pretty early example of someone sharing gaming with me, indirectly or not, was an older cousin bringing over an old Apple II computer to our house and….just, kinda leaving it there. I don’t remember exactly why a spare room at the end of the hallway was the place to leave a 10-year old computer, but regardless, there was a small box filled with some floppy disks that had a few old games on it, including a version of Mario Bros.(which confused me as a young Nintendo fan) and a spelling game which I forget the name of. Along with those was a game I had never heard about called The Oregon Trail, which I knew the likely basis for the game, being a history nerd since childhood. I remember spending many, many hours playing the game, trying to keep your in-game family intact as you traverse the 2,170-mile voyage between Independence, Kansas and the Oregon Territory, hunting for food and managing supplies all while doing your best to avoid drowning while crossing rivers or diseases like dysentery, typhoid or cholera. In addition to Mario and Sonic games, “edu-tainment” games like The Oregon Trail and Where in the U.S.A is Carmen Sandiego? were some of my favorite games to play as a young kid; throw SimCity into the mix and you’d have the three games that comprised 98% percent of my pc gaming experience until my adult years…
Number 2.
One of my childhood memories, video game-related or not, that remains the most vivid in my memory is getting a N64 for my birthday in 1998. I’ve mentioned previously on this blog site about Banjo-Kazooie being THE game that made me determined to get a Nintendo 64 and it was later that year I received one as a birthday present about a week early. One of the first things my younger brother and I did after hooking up the new console to my bedroom tv was head over to our neighbors, who’d had a N64 since shortly after it was released, and borrow a few games. I believe one of the first games we borrowed was Cruisin’ USA, which we had played there after school many times before, but another game that we decided to check out was the video game adaptation of a movie that had just come out a few years earlier – GoldenEye 007. I had never played a first-person shooter game before – it took me a little bit of getting used to, but it quickly became one of the most amazing games I’d played before, turning into one my favorites(we did eventually buy our own copy). Another example of going into a game knowing absolutely nothing about – much easier when it a monthly magazine that provided most of the information you received about games, but ended up being something truly spectacular. I played a little bit of GoldenEye on my old N64 a few weeks ago and I still get the rush of nostalgia just hearing the intro or level music…
Number 3.
My final example of sharing games with others is less of a specific instance, but more of a general one. Twitch, as a platform has been awesome as a means to connect with others across the globe and share one’s enthusiasm for video games. Throughout the several years I’ve spent watching various Twitch streamers, I’ve learned about quite a few different games that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Over this past summer, I started streaming my own playthroughs of games more regularly and it’s been pretty awesome to have others say as much about being introduced to different games, whether watching myself or others on Twitch. I can’t help but laugh when I’m being held responsible for causing someone else wanting to play a game after watching me play it(and poorly, I might add) as I woke up a couple weeks ago to some Twitter mentions as Kim from Later Levels blames me for wanting to give Yakuza 0 a try…
Gaming Omnivore 