When I Realized...

Like Brad said, we've always had games somehow entrenched in our lives. When I was growing up, I never really played games, but I was always watching someone play. I was always fascinated by the story and skill behind playing them. I watched my cousin play dozens of games on his old NES. My brother and I would wake up early in the morning and just wait around until he woke up so we could watch him playing something. But we never touched the system ourselves.

Later on in my life games made it into my house, we had a NES, SNES and N64, we were always big Nintendo owners. My brother eventually got a Dreamcast which was the biggest deal because I had always disliked Sega from their advertisements during the SNES and Genesis console wars. As I went off to college I bought a GameCube day one, that was my first launch day purchase but still not the moment when I realized that games would play such a big part in my life. A year later I broke down and bought an Xbox, the live service had just been launched and I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about.

So what was the next purchase I made....

I never owned a Game Boy. As a kid, my parents never let me have one, at first there was no color, and then it had color but was still difficult as hell to see. Finally came the Game Boy Advance SP or "Special." It's hard to think that the SP was only release in 2003 five years ago but when I bought it on launch day I got Metroid Fusion along with it. There I was just turned 21 years old, able to drink and go out to clubs, and I am in line at Circuit City buying a Game Boy which was mostly owned by little kids playing Pokemon. This was when I fully embraced my love for games. Consoles were always fun on the big screen but plenty of people owned them. But when it came to the point where I needed a portable so that I could take the games with me and have them on me at all times. I knew I was hooked and had taken it to a level beyond just normalcy. About this time is also when I realized what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I liked games and it'd be kick ass to do something involving games as a job. And that's when I realized games would forever be a part of my life.


Thank you GBA SP,
David