Born in '02, thankfully I dodged the early days of emulating. For me it was all about flash games on the family PC. One day, I'd guess around 2011. I go checking out random flash sites and scroll down a bit. Mixed in with some flash games are some retro games. I saw Zelda 1 and 2 and I guess I just had the intuition to know "This isn't like the others, this really is the first one! Wow!" To be fair, I thought Final Fantasy Sonic was actually made by Sega so maybe I was right by accident.
It played via a built-in browser emulator, so I just played with the keyboard like any flash game. After exploring Hyrule in the first 2 Zelda games, I wanted more. So my searches for "sonic games" became "old games" and I started checking out firsts for franchises I knew. I actually didn't even learn what an emulator was for a long time. I guess I just assumed people converted the old games into browser games with tech magic. So when I eventually found you could download a program to run games just like a console. That was a real "we live in the future" moment.
A lot of people I watched on Youtube way back showcased old games too, so I learned about Castlevania through Egoraptor for example. After a few years I had a pretty wide knowledge of classic games, even if I could only beat like 2 of them myself. Nowadays I've become far more interested in the world of bootlegs and unnofficial stuff. Which had lead me here. Seeing all sorts of random games from Japan getting translated is so cool. Like here's all the stuff we missed out on back in the day. Huge respect to people going through all the effort just to make a bunch of crappy old games playable worldwide.
