I have always been drawn to technology.
In fact, one of my earliest-known pictures features a two-year-old Waffles smiling widely at the camera as his hands are awkwardly wrapped around a Walkman and the headphones are barely hanging on to his tiny skull. At such a tender age, I had already become fascinated by the world of electronics, getting my hands on anything that could be powered on and brought to life by flipping a switch, pressing a button or swinging a dial. The more I could see those leds, spinners and speakers doing their thing, the more engrossed I became with the whole thing, and I wanted to learn every single thing about it. In no time flat, I was working video cameras, computers, answering machines, portable devises... basically anything that could be plugged in or took batteries.
For those very reasons It really didn't come as a surprise to my parents that I was all-over their newly-adquired Famicom, a shiny red-and-white devise gotten from who-knows-where and that had come bundled with a purple cartridge full of games. It's actually quite amusing to me that my introduction to gaming was also my introduction to piracy... talk about killing two birds with one stone!
I was completely hooked, and I had made it my mission to try any and all of the games included on both sides of that beastly cart, stopping only long enough to see it all.
Cheeky little thing... he knows just how cool he is.
I made my very first gaming memories on the virtual battlefields of Front Line and Battle City, I experienced high-paced action unlike anything I had ever seen through Macross; I got my first arcade fix by blasting away aliens and spaceships on Galaga and Galaxian... and, of course, I learned just how amazing gaming could be through game #89 on Side "B": Super Mario Bros.
Playing Super Mario Bros for the first time was an experience unlike any other I had ever seen, mostly because I was used to single-player games at the time, with the only form of "multiplaying action" coming from sharing a case and comparing notes with my dad and sister on "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?" on PC. This was an entirely different beast, and I was all for it as we moved from world to world, stomping on those things that we insisted on calling "Lechuzas" ("Owls") and sending turtles flying through a few button taps, all whilst that charming music kept on playing and our characters did all sorts of trippy stuff. It was just about perfect, and the fact that my dad had made my sister Player One after I had picked "Luigi" (because the name sounded cooler to my kid-self) only soured the experience somewhat. In retrospective, though, I'm glad that I was always Player Two, because that meant that I'd get to watch my sister play for a bit before retreating for the night -- an Elementary School student at the time, she was already familiar with the grueling world of homework and really didn't wanna do it, so her playing time was limited by default.
At the time I thought it was quite neat that a Mario game had (inadvertently) led me to the Genesis, but now it's just quite common.
NOW... isn't it weird that I have spent the first half of this article about the SEGA Genesis talking about Walkmans, Carmen Sandiego and the Famicom? Sure is, but all stories need a beginning.
For as much as I loved the Famicom, I knew that its one flaw was a ticking time bomb ready to go off at a moment's notice: the fact that the controllers were permanently wired into the system itself had made our dad warn us quite sternly about tugging on the joysticks, explaining that it would take only a little force to damage the whole thing beyond repair. And we were quite careful about it, too, but we were also kids and very enthusiastic about our gameplay, so the inevitable thing ended up happening a few months later, when we had just reached the eighth world on SMB and were just about ready to rescue the princess.
Dodging all those Bullet Bills and Hammer Bros that late into the game wasn't an easy task for my six-year-old self, and after losing two lives to them, I got a little pissed and did the one thing I had been warned against: I tugged on the wire, just enough to feel something horrifying on the other end. What followed was my character stopping dead on his tracks and me watching in agony as he was killed by one of those stupid, grinning projectiles. Once the game was over and was unable to be restarted, I got beyond pissed. I even called my dad, knowing full-well the earful that awaited me for it (after all, I had been warned repeatedly about doing the very thing that got this done in the first place). To my infinite surprise, my dad just took a look at the broken wire, pressed a few buttons, switched the console on-and-off (a classic dad move), and then just shrugged and declared it "death" with a solemnity meant specifically to mock us.
A few weeks later I found myself on a playdate with my cousin, Helena (who would eventually become my best friend for a few years during our incredibly awkward teenage years), laboriously giving the final touches to a pretty fine-looking house made out Legos, getting our Playmobiles and action figures a place to live (why would Batman ever share a shack with a Smurf, we did not wish to know) when the doorbell rang and my dad came to fetch me hours before he was supposed to.
My dad said nothing for a while, then took me to the local "Todo Por 2 Pesos", a hybrid between a grocery store and a video store that was the poster child of the 90s. Once inside he wasted no time pointing to the upper shelf near the counter, as a huge cardboard box sat by itself dangerously close to the lights that bathed it -- a SEGA Genesis Model 1, in all its next-gen glory. He exchanged a few words with the clerk (who called the system a "Nintendo", making my nerdy-self shudder), then forked out the $200 asked for it as we left the place.
I always liked this one because it looked and felt quite funny, like a bunch of guys in inflatable costumes had gone to fight XD
When we got home, I spent a couple restless minutes watching my dad read the manual, trying to get the Genesis A/V wires hooked to our wooden TV (that was not going to happen), then settle for the antenna option. While he was fidgeting with that accursed box, however, I traced my fingers all over the shiny red-and-black plastic of this new beast, stopping on the volume slider for the headphones, which immediately caught my attention -- was I going to be able to hook up my Walkman's headphones to the console? That sounded wicked cool to six-year-old me (ok, still does), but I didn't get the chance to put that to test, as my dad loaded the packed-in game as soon as he figured out how to get the image to come in clear.
I have observed lots of jumps in technology during my time: I have watched graphics going from Monochrome to EGA and then to VGA. I have seen CDs become the norm at a time when your absolute storage limit was however much a floppy disk would allow. I have even seen consoles going from kinda 3D to photo realistic visuals in just a few short years, but the leap from sunny 8-bit graphics to the crisp and textured majesty of 16-Bit stuff will forever remain the most shocking and awe-inspiring of them all for me.
I can no longer remember which SEGA Genesis game I played first, but I know that I played Spider-Man vs the Kingpin that same night, and that I was blown away by it. There was so much to do even as the game just gave me barely enough info to go on, and that first experience cemented my expectations for the system moving on. The fact that I could stop a robbery if I just lingered long enough in the starting area, that I could climb windows just for a laugh, that I could swing around aimlessly (wasting precious web in the process) and that the game would let me do all of that just starting out when the real objective was to get my spider-arse moving was actually mind-blowing to me. It felt like every screen had a secret for me to find out... and not all of them were pleasant.
Even though it's actually not that great, this was the game that "sold me" on the Genesis as a whole.
One of my first moments of pure rage came not even ten minutes later, when I started fighting the forklift mini-boss at the end of the first stage and somehow managed to trigger Venom, who came out of nowhere and promptly handed me my arse on a platter. It was hilarious and annoying at the same time, and I couldn't have asked for a better console debut than that. And the fact that that was followed by introducing me to beat em ups in the most ridiculous way possible was just the cherry on top... I mean, how many people can claim that they discovered the genre through the sheer awesomeness of Moonwalker, dancing the absolute heck out of every screen, killing the entire Billy Jean cast in one swift, star-powered motion? It's the kind of wackiness I didn't know I so desperately needed at a time when my games weren't anything like that.
You know what was the oddest thing about my Genesis experience, though? I had a TON of sports and driving games, and I can't recall getting a single one of them. They kinda just showed up on my shelves.
I had great stuff like NHL 98, Wayne Gretzky NHLPA All-Stars, RBI Baseball 94, NFL 98, NBA JAM, Mario Andretti Racing and, of course, the big **** itself: International Super Star Soccer Deluxe, which I played constantly with (and against) anything that cast a shadow. I just find it hilarious that I would own so many sports titles when my primary focus and interest was elsewhere, on the vast catalog of action-adventure and platforming games.
Tananananana! I love this one SO much, even if only for the amazing music.
I had a lot of fun building my collection based on my own tastes and word-of-mouth, getting proven stuff like G-Lock Air Battle, Cannon Fodder and Mortal Kombat, as well as "accidental rentals" (games that were not supposed to be rented, but that had to be picked due to the ones I actually wanted being unavailable) like Desert Strike and Rocket Knight Adventures, which were both awesome, too, but I quickly learned that the best experience to be had with the Genesis laid on the multiplayer side of things.
I won't go over my experiences with Road Rash 3 again (read that article if you want to know more about that), but I will say that a lot of my fondest memories of the system (and childhood in general) were made with someone gaming by my side... like, I distinctly remember how my sister and I would shoot at anything that moved on Lethal Enforces II, even making it to the final boss before she lost all interest due to her mounting schedule as a high schooler... but the absolute biggest thing to come out of that one game was the fact we were so obsessed with that it that we actually set up our very own "bar" on my grandpa's tool shed by making a table out of a round, wooden surface and dragging stalls from the half-finished pile that was being worked on, completed with a couple of bottles of fine wine that we weren't even supposed to touch and that made excellent Wild West props. I also had a lot of fun torturing my friend Sebastian, as I'd beat him mercilessly on ISSD time and again just for him to get pissed off to the point of getting his own copy and practice like crazy in retaliation, even developing a devilish technique that guaranteed a goal every time he shot from a veeeery specific pixel on the screen. It was insane how much fun he had taking his revenge, and how we both upped our games just to not let the other one win, at one point finishing a match 9-8 (!).
The fact that my sister and I shared such a deep love for this one as to experience it outside the screen makes me treasure it. That it is a pretty dang great game doesn't hurt, either.
The SEGA Genesis was pretty much universal among my friends and classmates and that made trading games into a complete delight, especially as some of those same kids were moving on to the PlayStation 1 and really weren't in a hurry to get their cartridges back, sometimes even outright giving them away (much to their parents' annoyance). I remember getting absolute stellar deals on games that used to cost a pretty penny as soon as their owners no longer cared about having them, getting stuff like Road Rash II for "free" (got it, was never asked for it again) and enjoying it to the max. Soon enough, I had a parallel collection of "orphaned" games that weren't getting back to their owners, no matter how much I insisted (and I insisted very little, being nine and all).
A lot of really weird stuff made its way into my collection as well, which would never cease to amuse me: like, I had a Sonic 1 cartridge that had been hacked to give the player 99 lives (Awesome! But how?!), and then I had games that some jokester had taken apart and replaced the actual circuit board, making them look like something awesome on the outside (like Road Rash 3), just to be some lame-o game that no-one would pay two cents for. This was sadly very common for a while, and meant that games had to be tested because way too many people were into this whole bait-and-switch, disappearing act.
It really felt like there was no shortage of awesome games to play... like, I remember one time my dad came home with a whole stack of titles taken from a video store that was about to go bankrupt (it closed down before the games were even due), and we spent that whole afternoon playing stuff like Primal Rage and Batman just for a quick laugh on what would turn out to be the closing years of our relationship.
I'd argue that this is the "hidden" MVP of the Genesis' library.
The weird thing is that I don't have a single, enduring memory with the Genesis... it's more like a collection of really fond things that complete a puzzle. In literally any other case the bit about setting up a whole bar with my sister just to replicate what we saw on our favorite game would have been the selling point of the story, but when talking about the many things that happened while playing the Genesis, it becomes almost unremarkable. Like, of course we did that. Our imaginations were at their peak and the console was providing way too much fun for us not to. Not even the fact that my friend saved up like crazy just to avenge all his defeats at my hands could claim to be the star of this story, because that was actually quite common, and would eventually result on him keeping a tally on all the times he would beat me on PES and other PS2 sport titles. Playing the Genesis meant that we were competing, not playing around, and memories of extreme anger and laughter becoming almost interchangeable are not part of the tale, but what defines it.
Perhaps it is for that very reason that I have been unsuccessfully trying to find the words to close this article in a satisfying manner... perhaps that's because those words simply don't exist. This was the console that had me being literally snowed on for the first (and so far only) time of my life, because I had heard that a store was liquidating its Genesis inventory and I just didn't care that the sky looked so angry as to fall on top of my head. I was witnessing the miracle of snow in an area that hadn't seen even a single flake in more than a century at that point, and my focus was entirely on getting more of that 16-bit goodness. It's the kind of thing I would write about if I tried to write fiction, but reality always beats fiction.
All I can really say after more than 25 paragraphs is that I had a lot of fun, and that I wouldn't change those experiences for anything. A lot of friendships began and ended on that system, and that's the reason why I still have mine lying around, despite having the opportunity to sell it multiple times (and for a really inflated price) over the years. I made the mistake of trading in (and selling) a lot of my games, but the console will remain in my possession for as long as I'm able to keep it around. It's like a memory machine that silently keeps a tally of those experiences, and even looking at it is usually enough to unlock more and more of those memories. Pretty good for a hunk of plastic gotten only after breaking its predecessor, huh?
What about you? What are your memories with the Genesis?
Last edited:
. Is truly an amazing console and even if i was a playstation 2 kid, and later a nintendo teenager. I still consider me a big Sega fan.
