“Are we there yet?” I must have asked that question two dozen times during our family’s epic road trip from Michigan to Florida in the summer of 1990. I was 12 years old, crammed in the back seat of our Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera between my older brother Dave and a cooler full of sandwiches that my mom had carefully prepared the night before. Somewhere around the Kentucky-Tennessee border, my dad pulled into a rest stop,…
I was seven years old when I first met Mario, though neither of us knew we’d be lifelong companions. It…
My love affair with The Legend of Zelda series began in the most unremarkable of places—my cousin’s dingy basement in…
In 1996, with the debut of the Nintendo 64 (N64), video game history was irrevocably altered. The N64 was, and…
The summer of 1988 was defined by three things: uncomfortably hot weather that made my Nintendo feel warm to the…
Summer 1998. I’d just finished my sophomore year of college, moved back home to save money, and landed a soul-crushing…
The day I brought GoldenEye 007 back to my college dorm in the fall of 1997 was the day my…
I remember the first time I played Metroid with startling clarity. It wasn’t even my game. My cousin Mark had…
Christmas morning, 1986. I was eight years old, still in my pajamas with the feet built in (Spider-Man, if you’re…
The battle lines were drawn in my neighborhood sometime around autumn 1991. The day after my friend Chris got a…
