You know what makes me angry? The whole notion that everybody has said the NES was a defining console generation and they are correct — and I was NOT part of that generation. When American kids were unwrapping their brand spanking new NES’s in ’85 I was hanging out in Manchester with my ZX Spectrum waiting for Nintendo to release “that magic” machine to the UK for another 18 months. And by the time they…

I have an excellent memory for when and where I played specific games. When thinking about Metal Gear Solid, I remember it like it was yesterday. Mike’s basement. January 1, 1999. I was hanging out with my friend Mike down in his basement, pizza boxes and all. The smell of old pizza boxes mixed with that distinctive basement stench that no amount of air freshener could hide. He had picked up this new game that…

Christmas of 1985 was not supposed to go like this. I had my heart set on a bike that I had been coveting for months. I made my parents hint at it incessantly. I put little circles around the red Schwinn in the Sears catalogue. I wrote reminders in their calendars to go buy it for me. What I got was a Sega Master System because it was on clearance at Kay-Bee Toys and they…

Christmas morning, 1987. I’m seven years old. I’m looking at this orange plastic gun that came bundled with our new Nintendo. My brother had been playing Super Mario Bros. for hours on end, but when we popped in that Duck Hunt cartridge everything changed. I aimed the Zapper at the TV — our console TV, a big Zenith with faux wood panelling that weighed about 200lbs — centered the reticle on-screen, pressed the button, and…

OK. Full disclosure time; I’ve been playing Sonic games since 1991. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’m still obsessed now almost thirty years later. Well. Ok. Maybe I do know why I got into Sonic all that time ago, just can’t work out why I haven’t mellowed with age. Summer of 1991; Dave’s house in Stockport. His big brother had bought himself a shiny new Sega Mega Drive, along with a game about a…

I was nineteen-years-old opening it for the first time. I was meant to be studying for a calculus mid-term, but Kevin and I were barricaded inside his dorm room clutching textbooks and scribbled notes while simultaneously paging through his collection of GamePro magazines. Procrastination will do that to you: suddenly everything is interesting except for the thing you should be doing. Hidden away in the back pages of GamePro was a preview for Final Fantasy…

The Game Boy kept me sane during what might have been the longest car trip in recorded history. I didn’t own any video games that summer of ‘91 aside from Tetris. Dad was driving cross-country from New Jersey to Kansas to visit relatives. You know, the quintessential family vacation that everybody takes because that’s what families did back then. My brother Jake and I were fighting about everything and nothing for six hours straight when…

Christmas 1985 wasn’t supposed to be like other Christmasses we’d had as a family. It wasn’t because my dad suddenly came up with some crazy innovative idea – far from it. It was because my dad talked mum into letting him buy a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for our house. Dad was a big fan of our ZX Spectrum – probably still is – but somehow getting a Nintendo was him pulling off a feat…

My controller throwing moment happened because of summer of ’89 and Mega Man. I hurled my controller across the basement like I was Joe Nathan pitching for the Twins. Seriously… tossed it across the room. I remember the exact moment it happened too because my dad came stomping downstairs in his work attire (shirt and tie) asking me at almost midnight what that crashing sound was. Poor NES controller. By then it was barely held…

I remember the moment gaming became something more to me. Christmas Day, 1991. Age thirteen. Sitting on the floor in front of the TV in my Minneapolis living room. I had opened three gifts that morning, each of which had contained clothes. This fourth one was boxy-shaped, felt like it weighed enough to be a videogame, and rattled like a SNES cartridge when I shook it. Holy shit, I thought, as I tore the paper…