Video games have be central to my entire life.

Chalk it up to being a nerdy kid who needed a lot of mental stimulation, but I cannot remember a time when video games were not a big part of my life. Like I have said before, I remember “playing” Space Invaders when I was too small to see the bottom of the screen. (Not sure what I was getting out of the experience, but when you are that small, your needs are simple. )

From that point on, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that video games were the best thing ever. Nothing could compete. Sure, I also loved reading and watching TV (more mental stimulation), but if by some weird happenstance I had been asked to choose, I would have picked video games in a heartbeat.

Even before the Atari 2600 (I wonder how they picked the number?) came along, I had been exposed (without owning) to people’s “Pong machines”, and of course, there was always the arcade. I haunted everywhere in town that had video games from Grade 1 onward, even taking trips to the other end of town (uphill on the way there, even) to play games they didn’t have on my end of town. I was just that dedicated.

Or obsessed. Tough call.

The problem with the arcade, though, was that you only have so many quarters and unless your allowance is huge, you always run out of quarters before you run out of appetite.

So then came consoles. I ended up with an enormous library of Atari games, which I now know was partly because of the Atari glut that led to the Great Atari Crash of 1983. Other kids would trade a dozen games they didn’t want any more for one game they did, and I was only too happy to make that trade.

I have always had mercantile instincts. You should see some of the lunch room trades I made.

The consoles were a poor substitute for the arcade back then. Console graphics were hopelessly primitive compared to the graphics on arcade games, and so the arcades continued to thrive. I spent a lot of time both in arcades and in the basement, playing Atari 2600 games on an old black and white TV.

Some of my favorite arcade games from back then were Tempest, especially when my local arcade The Asteroids Arcade got a sit-down tabletop version with the dial controller. I loved the original Karate Master with the two-joystick controls. My first fighting game. I loved Gyruss, one of the few shooters I really loved. And I loved a game called Shao-Lin’s Road, a very cartoony version of a Bruce Lee movie. Kind of like a more sophisticated version of Kung Fu Master.

On the home front, I loved Pitfall. That was as immersive as it got back then. I remember being blown away when I learned that you could go up and down the ladders. I loved this game called Dolphin, where you were a jaguar. Just kidding, you were a dolphin making your way through the ocean with the help of sound cues. You would hear a tone, and the higher the tone, the higher up the gate through which you would have to pass next. And I loved Dig Dug, a game so weird I could not possibly explain it.

The NES is the first game console I remember asking for and getting. It was the Xmas gift that year for both me and my brother David, and we played the heck out of it.

Sadly, by this point, the sort of spontaneous game trading that had brought me so many Atari titles had dried up because this was the dawning of the video game rental system. So I didn’t have the variety that I had with the Atari, and renting a game created its own kind of tension (oh crap, I have to pay for another day in order to finally beat this game!), but I still played a hell of a lot of the games that were out there.

Some NES faves included the Ninja Gaiden series (first game with serious cinematic cutscenes, made the whole thing so much more immersive), Dragon Warrior, the Final Fantasy series, and so many more.

And of course, I played the hell out of Super Mario Land, which game with the console. I played it so much that I eventually burned myself out on it and for years after, I could not hear its signature music without getting a headache.

Then game the SNES and it, of course, blew my mind. Not right away, though. At first, it did not impress me all that much. Sure, it had better graphics, but so what? It was not nearly as big a leap as from Atari 2600 to the NES.

But I came around when I figured out how much more was now possible than on the SNES.

Next would have come my Dreamcast. I loved that machine, because it was hackable. You could totally download games from the Internet, burn them to a CD, and play them just like you had bought them from the store.

For someone like me with an insatiable demand for video games, this was a ticket to heaven. It was the same deal with the PS1 that I eventually acquired. I have always been an enthusiastic video game pirate and this was its perfection.

The third generation of that was my Xbox, which I still own, carrying case and all. Every now and then I ponder taking it out and hooking it up, but nah. Sometimes nostalgia is best left undisturbed.

Of course, during all this, I was also playing games on my PC. That did not have the stability and accessibility of console gaming because I could never keep up with the latest games that required the latest PC to play them, but it was still an excellent source of games that were a lot more sophisticated than could be done with the relatively crude controls of a console.

Then began this new era which I am still “enjoying”. I don’t have the latest consoles any more and my PC grows more ancient and unstable every day. But that doesn’t bother me, because thanks to the miracles of Flash and Android, I have access to tens of thousands of games any time I want them.

A younger me would have thought that to be the very definition of heaven.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.