My sister was born three years before me.
That probably doesn't sound like much but, because of some cosmic hijinks, she was effectively the product of an entirely different decade, her 1987 birthday making her look older than she really was to my kiddie eyes.
That odd-sounding (and awe-inspiring) number also turned her into the coolest thing ever by virtue of being the older sibling, something that still amuses me to this day. In practice, all that really meant was that she learned how to talk and walk before I ever did, but it also had the (very real) side-effect of turning her into the de facto leader among us kids: she was the one who knew all the "grown-up" jokes, the one who would feed us Oreos when mom and dad weren't looking; the one who would help us with our homework when no-one else would and, infinitely more important, the one who could beat all the hardest levels gaming had to offer, being so good at it, so natural with the first controller on her hand that we actually had no choice but to watch as she would clear world after world on Super Mario Bros, not getting a chance to play ourselves until the latter worlds, the only ones where her "technique" faltered enough to kill her... at which point the game had gotten so difficult that the joystick would circle back to her almost immediately.
For all intents and purposes, SMB was strictly a single player game in our household. My sister was just THAT good.
We didn't mind, though! Watching her breeze through those games was a reward in-and-on itself, as was bearing witness to the endless, bloody rounds of Urban Champion dad and her would engage in, every tap of the buttons thundering around a living room that had grown silent as a tomb with wonder and expectation as those two titans battled on pixelated streets and wore pots as hats, courtesy of some 8-bit hag that clearly wasn't having it.
Those three years that separated us so thoroughly really didn't mean anything negative in the grand scheme of things, and we just loved the idea of having someone like her at the helm of our lives: a peacemaker of sorts who would solve disputes with the authority bestowed upon someone of her age, picking all the movies to watch and all the cartoons that were "age-appropriate" for us to feast upon through widened eyes (which means that we often ended up watching R-rated movies until dad walked in on us crowding against the living room TV and put an end to that nonsense). Her age was an imposing gap that we had no chance of clearing, but it was also her biggest advantage in a practical sense.
With her leading the charge like that, we had no pressure to grow up as fast and could choose to devote our time to favorite pursuits, like making hilariously broken Play-Doh! models of our favorite Pokémon (which she also taught us how to do, because she was THAT cool) and to just being kids who enjoyed life in a much calmer rhythm -- all the expectations were placed on her as the oldest one and that afforded us some intoxicating levels of freedom.
My dad and sister would go on forever if we let them. Thankfully, mom was usually not having it and forced them to quit around dinnertime.
But then, in a turn of events that was so precise in its cruelty as to look like it came right from the quill of a long-dammed playwright, those three years came back with a vengeance as the year 2000 loomed ahead and made us look to the horizon with a sort of cold, nervous admiration.
We had looked forward to the end of the millennium ever-since we were old enough to understand numbers, fueled by the relentless media assault that had promised robots, flying cars and all that good stuff just because of a calendar change... But we had never even considered that a new year was also going to affect us personally. And, as December 31st, 1999 turned into January 1st, 2000, amidst loud celebrations and fireworks so bright as to turn the sky into a ghostly sort of rainbow, we realized that those numbers mattered in a way we hadn't expected -- our "Y2K" was homemade and just as scary.
On 2000, my sister turned 13-years-old. And that single fact was enough to change everything for us.
We had SO MUCH FUN just trying to understand the madness playing out right before our very eyes.
We didn't know it at the time (really had no way to even suspect it), but those loud explosions that had lit up the night sky all those months prior had also signalled the birth of a butterfly, a beautiful creature that was now spreading her wings for the first time and readying herself for flying solo, clearing the deep chasm that had been silently carved into the earth as we were too busy gazing upon an exploding sky that had promised (and delivered) a ton of change overnight.
In the Fall of 2000, my sister truly showed her age for the first time by joining the newly-formed Folklore club at school, resulting on her being unavailable after the last bell for the first time in our lives. Oh, she was doing the perfectly normal thing for a kid of her age: getting out there, making friendships and connections with her peers, having a grand time while inhaling bags of Doritos and joking about teachers that weren't there and friends they could all afford to slight as "battle lines" were being drawn in the ever-changing landscapes of youth, the kinds that erect and demolish alliances on a whim, like waves crashing upon sand castles.
We would never protest that now, but it was certainly jarring for us at the time, specially since it came right after years of built-upon pressure and increasingly heated arguments had resulted in a divorce, making it so our dad was nowhere in sight, either.
There was nothing quite like challenging each other to this game, the only one in our entire collection that couldn't be defeated by force.
The house that had once been so full of life suddenly felt grayer, colder, emptier in ways that we could never properly articulate, but that governed our every thought day in and day out, even as we tried our best to mask it by doubling down on the business of being actual children who could afford to get lost in printed and digital words for hours on-end.
But there's only so much pretending one can do before the obvious rears its ugly head.
Our childhood rituals started dying one after the other: the R-rated movies that we had so joyously sneaked a peek on were suddenly gone now that my sister could watch those on her own on the local cinema, laughing along with her own, sweaty crew of peers as fake blood and even faker romance lit up the theater. The SEGA Genesis marathons (which replaced the Famicom tournaments we used to have after accidentally killing the console) screeched to a halt as well now that she didn't feel like engaging with "kiddie stuff". And the many hours we had spent "dubbing" cartoons and shows late into the night by muting the TV and making up our own stories on-the-fly were also a thing of the past now that she was given her own room to exist in -- and you know what? For all their faults and shortcomings, my parents got one thing absolutely right: a teenage girl just couldn't share a room with her male siblings. Her moving into her own room (which had to be built specially for her by erecting a wall on the far corner of the house) felt like the final nail on the coffin for childhood.
I still giggle just remembering the amount of gratuitous road rage we subjected every other driver to while coming up with the most outlandish explanations for it.
Still... for as a much as she had grown, I could tell that my sister was still looking out for us in just the same way she had before, and she actually surprised me more than a couple of times by sitting right beside me on the computer and challenging me to a myriad of DEMOs dad had installed for us in one of his court-regulated visits (about the only things our junker of a computer could run).
Hearing her revert back to her younger self for a couple of hours by inventing backstories for all the characters in the Virtua Fighter, Test Drive 4 and Tomb Raider DEMOs was the kind of thing I didn't even realize I needed after I had lost both of my "anchors" and been set adrift down the treacherous seas of change.
She could make it so Lara Croft was some sort of maniac going on shooting rampages against tigers because they had stolen her purse or something. She'd also craft entire backstories for why our driver in TD4 was ramming other drivers off the road in some forgotten countryside. And, of course, she had way too much fun inventing reasons why the playable characters in the Virtua Fighter demo just beat the crap outta each other on endless, vicious fights that felt like they were taking place on the Moon.
At some point we even made up an entire new plot for the game involving an evil doctor and lots of senseless violence delivered through the impractical magic of akimbo pistols.
But our biggest pleasure came from the most unexpected of places: the Heretic demo.
Buried deep within a forgotten side-menu on one of the discs dad had brought over (and flanked by much better offerings, like One Must Fall 2097 and Strife), Heretic looked painfully bland, but it had one massive advantage over the other two that made it us choose it: It had absolutely no English text for us to figure out. And that? That was all we really needed.
My sister just LOVED taking this pixelated, unrealistic world and bending it to her own will -- unlike those early 3D games that pretty much set the tone and pace of her narrative by... looking like something and having clearly-defined goals, she could put her powers to full display here: she soon invented a rich universe that entirely replaced the one the game offered and made us all the richer for it.
I think we had decided that these guys were tax collectors. Killing them violently was THAT much satisfying after that.
Long corridors that barely looked like something were suddenly transformed into the halls of a posh mansion that our hero character just happened to invade for treasure. In-fighting between the enemies was used as fuel to create an entire drama about families tearing each other apart for the privilege of getting the last bottle of Coke (as represented by the floating vials of mana found all throughout the title). Even something as simple running into a gauntlet of enemies was soon transformed into the wackiest, most original story ever, a tale so nuanced and full of twists and turns that I honestly can't even recall it anymore.
It all gave us a reason to keep playing and to try our hardest to beat each new level just to burrow deeper and deeper on this shared madness we were now at the center of, but careful not to overdo it, knowing full-well that the demo could end at any second and shut down our ride. It was almost a tug-of-war between our want to have fun and our need to protect it, both of us aware that we weren't going to go at it a second time once we had reached the end of the road. Such were the unspoken agreements we had put forth.
I don't really remember how long this lasted, but it is only now, writing this piece, that I can truly appreciate the magic that had taken place here: despite her casual dismissal of the whole thing, I think my sister knew exactly what she was doing and just kept pretending otherwise even as her every instinct and social expectation screamed at her not to: powering up the Genesis like old times? That was a huge no-no for a teenage girl already into the latest trends and making her way into early social media and the endless worlds of malls and concerts, where her every choice and stance would be judged by a firing squad of her equals. But sitting by the computer (something she was already doing a lot of anyway) and playing a game while she was at it, in-between rounds of gossiping and chatting? Yeah, she was more than willing to do that. That was "acceptable" in her world.
In many ways, those frantic gaming sessions were the "swan song" for our friendship as it existed in the purest sense that seems to belong to early childhood, a fire that was reduced to some stubborn embers that just refused to go out completely but that still burned true. And every question we got right as we fought on the ancient battlefields of Carmen San Diego and Historia Del Mundo, every level we cleared on Wolfenstein 3D (now full, because we had internet) and, of course, Heretic was just a sweet reminder of the fact that we still had something going, even as the world pressed on all sides and tried to break us apart completely.
What's funny to me is that this would all be solved (at least partially) many years down the line as we got trapped in our house by a storm that suddenly roared overhead and forced us to face our unspoken demons while also mocking the very thing that had set up this whole chain of events in the first place: a burning sky had marked the beginning of our separation and a flooded one glued us back together.
Last edited:
