The History of Gaming! Now, I don't mean in a general sense. I mean MY history in particular. And in the beginning, there was NES. The Nintendo Entertainment System. We got the NES when I was probably 3 or 4 years old. Clearly I was a Nintendo fan right from a young age. I don't really remember much about life back then, but my earliest memories are of my cousin Brandi staying with us for a bit and playing one of the Mario games pretty much non-stop.
It wasn't until a few years later that I really learned how to play video games. We had the old Mario Bros. 1 through 3, the second (which isn't really a Mario game...) was mine, and I loved it. I remember getting it for Christmas one year. It was a big deal. We also had Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, some dumb football game that I could never figure out, and my favourite, Bubble Bobble.
One of my fondest memories of Bubble Bobble was playing it for hours with my Dad. I was terrible at it, so eventually it would just be him on his own, but I had so much fun. Blowing bubbles and popping enemies, running away from the evil skeletal whale thing that terrified me. Eventually, the fun would end when my older brother let a friend borrow the game, and that friend's house was burglarized, resulting in the loss of my favourite game.
But all was not lost, we still had our other games, and we would occasionally rent new ones. I'm not sure for exactly how long we had the NES, but it seemed like forever when I was a kid. But one fateful day, when my younger brother and I were playing Super Mario Bros. 3, the unthinkable happened! Do you remember the minigame that you could play when both of you selected the same level on the world screen? It was actually an even older iteration of the Mario Bros., I believe. Well, Paul and I were playing the minigame, and I kept winning ('cause I'm amazing! and also modest), so he got angry and threw the controller at the floor, as we often did when we got angry playing games. There was thick shag carpeting! Nothing bad would happen! ...right? Wrong. The controller ricocheted off the floor and hit the NES with enough force that it never worked again. I was devastated. We tried to make it work again, but eventually we realized that it was kaput, and my gaming life was over.
Except it wasn't. But that's another story for...
The History of Gaming!
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