Warcraft Before WoW: The RTS Series I Lost Weekends To It’s kind of funny how a simple shareware CD changed the trajectory of my gaming life. Summer of ’95, I was hanging around Electronics Boutique—back when mall stores had those huge PC game boxes lining the walls—and the clerk, this guy with a Metallica t-shirt who always saved the good stuff for me, slides a CD across the counter. “Try this,” he says. “First one’s…
Spyro the Dragon: PlayStation’s Purple Hero I Still Love Christmas morning, 1998. I was twenty years old and home from…
The first time I played The Secret of Monkey Island, I was sixteen and spending the night at my friend…
Christmas 1997 was a turning point in my gaming life, though I didn’t realize it at the time. My then-girlfriend…
The first time I ever saw Pac-Man, I couldn’t even reach the controls without standing on my tiptoes. It was…
The first time I saw Star Fox in action was at a Toys “R” Us demo kiosk in early 1993.…
The first time music made me cry, it wasn’t a sad movie score or a heart-wrenching pop ballad—it was the…
It was the summer of 1995, and I was working at Electronics Boutique in the Woodland Mall—one of those summer…
There’s something deeply satisfying about the clean, definitive moment when a puzzle clicks into place. That mental “aha!” sensation when…
The first time I encountered Earthworm Jim, I was 15 and desperately trying to convince my mom that renting a…
