Greg asked me to contribute my own “Gaming Made Me” article and in doing so, provide insight into my own gaming past.  I have to be honest, that when I read his email, outlining what he was talking about I was gripped with fear.  When I then read his draft of his own article, that fear grew and grew.  Finally, my years of running had caught up with me. Time to come clean and fess up.  So here goes.

The truth is that I don’t have much of a gaming past.

With the exception of a few days one summer when I spent time at my dad’s playing Space Quest and redoing up until you had to drive the space motorcycle through the rock field over and over and over again because I didn’t know that you could save your game to a floppy, I didn’t play video games as a kid.  I didn’t have an Atari, or a computer or any handheld gaming device of any kind.  I didn’t live near an arcade and while my best friend had a computer, he thought that games were stupid so he never played any. Well, that’s not true, he loved Wall Street trading simulations, but when faced with the option of playing that, or nothing at all, nothing was an easy choice.

I mean, it’s not like I was Amish or anything. My mom didn’t fear the devil box, and I dropped my fair share of quarters into the machines in the Barn at Seaview Playland in Cape Cod, but other than those few days every summer, my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood were video game free.

Now that I get paid, however meager the amount might be, to review video games, I always look at my past with shame.  When people talk about all night sessions playing Mega-Man or the original Zelda, I can’t contribute anything. I never had an NES or a SNES.  I never played Mario Brothers or Sonic.  By the time I got my first computer and booted up Tomb Raider and MechWarrior 2, I was 25 years old.  By then, anything I was came about without the benefit of gaming.

Now, you could argue that my current devotion to gaming is simply making up for lost time but the truth is that I just really love playing games.  I don’t burn with secret jealousy over those that got to spend their childhood days playing Contra.  I will say though that the fact that I didn’t play games as a kid has a strong factor towards why I don’t get the whole retro gaming thing.  I don’t have the emotional link to older games, so when I see them released as Nintendo virtual console titles, or as games on the PSN, I have no desire to play them.  I’m sure they’re good, but if given the choice between some 8-bit platformer and the ability to drive a dump truck through an officers’ barracks in Red Faction: Guerrilla, I’ll take the dump truck.

I like to think that my lack of a childhood spent gaming gives me a fresh take on games, but I also realize that’s patently ridiculous.  For one, I’m 37 years old, which means I’ve been gaming pretty hardcore now for twelve years.  Any fresh take left the building a long time ago.  Second of all, if I do have a different take on these new fangled video games, it’s probably at the expense of the perspective gained from having played over two decades of games.  In the end, it’s probably a wash, and my lack of experience playing older games just means that I have to fake it when I find myself in these types of conversations.

At this point, I’m not sure if my kids are going to end up with any more of a gaming childhood than I had.  Well, that’s not true. The simple fact that they have a father who’s so much into gaming means that they’ve already had more of an exposure to games than I ever did, however neither one of them seem all that interested in what I’m doing.  It’s not for lack of trying, although I don’t play much that is appropriate for them.  However when we do play Boom Blox, my daughter doesn’t like all of the exclamations of victory and Linda and I eventually end up doing the same stages over and over again so that we can get gold.  At this point, any memories my kids have of gaming will all be that their insane, loud parents bogart the Wii so that they can get gold medals on every stage.  That’s hardly the environment that fosters a will to game.

So maybe my kid will escape my gaming-free past.  Maybe not.  Honestly, it doesn’t matter all that much to me.  Sometimes we stick to the things we had as kids, like me and Transformers, sometimes we don’t, like me and fishing and sometimes we find something new to love, like me and gaming.  As long as I teach him how to fake his way through a conversation, he should be just fine.