What largely goes unsaid on my articles is that gaming was a bit of a lifeline for me.
Painfully shy, extraordinarily awkward, and chocked-full of physical and mental health issues, my childhood looked sure to be a very lonely experience, a personal hell spent from the outside-looking-in, watching as my classmates developed life-long friendships whilst I was doomed to be a mere spectator.
But then, there was a common ground, and the insurmountable gaps were suddenly bridged.
It all started one day in 1998, when I noticed a girl from my class furiously working at her desk, her mind fixed on the task at-hand and her gaze full of determination. I watched in awe as she handled a bunch of Pokemon cards (from Panini's Pokemon Album) and expertly cut them with the scissors provided to us as Elementary School students. She would grab one, cut everything but the actual creature, and then discard the waste. She would do this mechanically, almost like a robot that had just found its rhythm. I was mesmerized by this task I couldn't even begin to comprehend, and for a few minutes the only sound that existed in that room was the mechanical "SNIP, SNIP, SNIP" of her tools as they did the job. Finally, I got the courage to ask her what she was doing, fearing that she would be pissed off for being interrupted in the middle of this mad art project. To my surprise, she looked up, smiled very sweetly, and told me that she was making little stickers out of the repeated cards she had gotten, since they were all apparently very common and couldn't be traded. Then, she proceeded to grab a Ponyta she had just cut and turned it into a little stand (which was honestly very impressive, given the material and the technique used to make it), and she just gave it to me with the same smile still plastered in her face. I'm sure that she just thought she was being nice by doing so and didn't even think about it, but that was huge for me. She was actually my first friend in that entire grade, and would eventually become one of my most trusted partners in crime.
My parents used to believe that Pokemon was an isolating experience... So it's actually quite funny to me that it landed me my first two real friends.
The revelation that media (and specially gaming-related media) could actually be used as a conversational piece and open roads for me felt like an earthquake shaking me to my very core. I was always thought that games were a single-player experience at best, something that you could only enjoy at home. Things like battling with my siblings didn't count, either. But this small act of generosity actually challenged that notion for me, and I couldn't wait to put that to test again.
I got my chance almost immediately after that, during one of our computer classes.
Computer lab wasn't even mandatory in 1998 -- you basically signed up for it as an extracurricular activity and let your parents enjoy one extra hour of rest before you came back home and took over the TV with your games and cartoons. I'm sure they felt blessed that many of us took the bait.
One day I found myself sitting next-to this dude who I barely even knew and I just watched as he proceeded to mess with the computer's floppy drive, getting a diskette in while keeping an eye for the teacher at the same time. I thought that he just wanted to impress the faculty by being extra devoted to his homework (since we had to save our work on diskettes), but turns out that the little devil was side-loading his own games onto the school's computers. Once he was done copying the files over the painfully slow system, he opened Battle Chess and challenged me to a game right there in the classroom! THE NERVE! But I was too intoxicated to care about any possible repercussions, and promptly joined him as we started sacrificing pieces on purpose just to see the beautifully gruesome death animations that befell our army. At the end of that class this same dude asked me for my floppy disk, then copied the files over and made me my own copy, while patting me on the back as I pocketed the freshly-baked contraband. Although I didn't know it at the time, that was the beginning of a relationship that is still going strong nearly thirty years later.
My friend and I didn't even try to play it cool as we watched these little guys massacring each other. We even voiced the battle by making sword-clashing sounds and death noises! That class was such a joke.
From that point on, I took any excuse to cast my line and see who was a fellow gamer in disguise... much like what happens in Bart vs the Space Mutants, you never knew who was just a regular Joe and who was more than met-the-eye. And it was fun experimenting, too.
Yelling stuff like "He Shoots!" during a football match in Gym class quickly earned nods of approval and even some "yeahs!" from some of my classmates, quickly making me identify my crew. Other times the conversations were far more subtle, but not less exciting: I would be hearing my classmates talking about the latest River vs Boca and casually make a reference to the coolest football games of the time (particularly FIFA 98: Road To The World Cup), just to see who would raise to the bait. In a way, that really helped me separate the wheat from the chaff.
Of course, these experiments could go awfully wrong, too (and they often did).
What I failed to understand at the time was that this wasn't the age of the internet, so people were painfully limited when it came to game knowledge: they either knew what they had played themselves, what they had played at friends' houses and what was insanely popular. So, of course, bringing up stuff like Desert Strike or Cannon Fodder was often met with silence, which was actually quite painful. I eventually reined-in the whole thing and focused to keep building upon all the "secret gamers" I had already discovered, figuring that I had no need for an army of friends.
And by doing so, I guaranteed endless fun in ways that I couldn't have possibly imagined just a few months earlier.
My parents almost couldn't believe it when I was first invited to spend the night at a friend's house that same year... they seemed to have already decided that I was gonna be a hermit with no tongue nor heart, and were absolutely delighted to let me go all-in in this friendship, even allowing me to take my priced RC car to my friend's house (a toy I was basically banned from using because that beast drank 8 AA batteries, plus a D one for the controller). If only my parents knew that our plan was to have "Robotica-style" matches, ramming each other's cars inside a makeshift arena, hoping to get the opponent out-of-bounds... I'm sure they'd have been pretty mad. But we actually never followed through with that, because my friend had just gotten his hands on the hottest thing ever: a ROM of Pokemon Yellow, something that blew my mind upon seeing it for the first time.
It was simply not our time to play this.
You can probably tell for the way this article started that my friends and I all got a really bad case of the Poke-Fever, consuming everything that had that franchise's name and logos on it (this little nerd even got himself some damn POSTCARDS, because why not?). So getting to play the actual game on a computer seemed incredible to us at the time. Were we gonna start our own journey as Ash and the gang traveled through Kanto on the TV? Were we gonna run into the same characters? Were we even going to overtake our hero and actually get ahead, becoming the real-live "Garys" to the actual, animated Ash? We were SO ready to put that to the test...
But, alas, it was not to be... my friend's computer (won on a raffle, because his family was THAT poor) couldn't handle this newfangled technology. An indecipherable error just popped up as soon as we clicked on the executable and that was about the death sentence for the whole idea. Without any sort of recourse for that fiasco, we resorted to do what did best: playing the Genesis and getting into some shenanigans on Monopoly (and, let me tell you, we didn't even come close to knowing the rules at the time, which ended up with us bankrupting each other after maybe five turns... it was great).
As my friendship with this dude grew, so did the scope our digital adventures and I eventually became a fixture on his house, showing up pretty much every weekend for more of that pixelated goodness. We played stuff like Commander Keen 4 so much and so often that I'm honestly convinced that we got some ear damage by sheer exposure to the shrilling orchestra of PC Speaker sounds that accompanied everything we did on that one.
For years afterwards my friend would run his own piracy operation, copying games for me to enjoy on every bit of writable media he could get his hands on, gracing my computer with stuff like the aforementioned Battle Chess and even some weird junk called Pikachu Volleyball. However, the real star of the show was the then-newly-released (and pirated) Pokemon Crystal, a beast of a game that we just couldn't wait to play.
Oh, no! It's... It's... "???"!
My friend had actually upgraded his computer on the two years since we were stopped from playing Yellow, so we were unbelievably ready to tackle the Johto Region at a time when Pokemon's popularity was beginning to fade, which gave us an almost sense of urgency to complete the game... and, oh boy! Chaos ensued almost immediately.
You can chalk this up to us being remarkably young if you want, but that's not the theory I'm going with... because we, bred on the world of copy-protection found on the PC, thought that the rival's name had to be "???", and that's what we named him as the police officer near Elm's lab asked us to. It was actually the first time I was seeing the rival being named within the story (you named him before you even started playing in Yellow), so it was pretty hilarious seeing us battle "???" for hours and hours afterwards. And you know what? I don't even regret it anymore, because that makes that particularly shared playthrough all the more unique, even in its idiocy.
What's remarkable is that we actually stuck with the game all the way to the iconic battle with Red at the top of Mount Silver, which was another mind-blowing experience for us in a game that wasn't exactly short of them. But that's just kind of the cherry on top, really. We were good friends by that point and Pokemon didn't really move the needle for us in that regard.
(Slurred giggling).
It didn't need to, either. And you wouldn't believe how many times I ended up enjoying a good night or afternoon just by bringing up gaming in the years since, from hearing my first-ever crush get beyond flustered by discussing her beloved Final Fantasy VII in front of me, to me getting a small gathering off the ground by suggesting we stopped watching the endless monotony of "Big Brother" at 3 AM and raided the home owner's PlayStation collection instead, passing about a bottle stolen right from his dad's stack and emptying it while laughing maniacally as our heavily-intoxicated selves couldn't get poor Tony Hawk to stop wrecking himself, nor could we do anything but to waste all our ammo on the battlefields of Medal of Honor: Underground, upping the ante as our young minds drifted and the bottle grew lighter and lighter as the night wore on. It's actually hard to imagine an alternative timeline when that pivotal gathering doesn't die right after we started channel surfing quite halfheartedly without mentioning gaming. It's also a guarantee that my friend wouldn't have ended up being grounded for months after replacing the missing liquor with tap water, thinking his dad wouldn't notice (LOL). We played a bunch of battle games that night, but who would have thought that my friend would end up with real "battle scars"? Just one of those things, I guess.
There's a quote I really like that says something like "no matter how much magic you find in a story, it's always the magician who is the least impressed", and that resonates with me quite heavily... because my kids often come to tell me about games their classmates are talking about, new releases they are excited for, and even stuff they found out about by poking around Google Play, and I can just about see the tools that will get them to bond being shaped with every excited word they share with me. They are on the first few steps of their own adventure, and I know that they will one day look back on the days when they decided to use gaming as more than a hobby and there will be smiles in there and enduring, unforgettable memories, too.
Because games is where it all started.
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. I also have a trans friend who I know since kindergarten and we like Sonic a lot. I remember that we wanted to play Sonic Boom on 3DS and then the game came out and we forgot about the excitement immediately. We still see each other some times and the last year we went to see Sonic 3 and it was great. I love what gaming can do sometimes in one live. Great article!
