I remember the first time I played Metroid with startling clarity. It wasn’t even my game. My cousin Mark had gotten it for his birthday, and I was sleeping over at his house on a Friday night in the summer of ’87. After his parents went to bed, we stayed up way too late, the glow of his 19-inch Zenith TV the only light in the basement rec room. “You gotta check this out,” he…
My first sports video game was Basketball on the Atari 2600, and calling it “basketball” required more imagination than actual…
Christmas morning, 1986. I was eight years old, still in my pajamas with the feet built in (Spider-Man, if you’re…
The summer of 1991 changed everything. I was 13, awkwardly navigating the hellscape of middle school, when my friend Kevin…
I wasn’t always a Sega kid. That’s a confession that might get my “hardcore gamer” card revoked, but it’s the…
The first time I saw blood in a video game, I was standing in a dimly lit arcade at the…
The battle lines were drawn in my neighborhood sometime around autumn 1991. The day after my friend Chris got a…
Sometimes I still hear that Nintendo start-up sound in my dreams. You know the one—that magical little jingle that meant…
I still remember the first time I joined the Dark Brotherhood. It was about a week after Skyrim’s release, and…
