In the summer of 1994, my parents went to a yard sale and came home with something that looked a lot like our VCR. I couldn’t have been less interested, until my Dad turned it on and put that perfectly rectangular controller in my hands, and I found out that this was no ordinary machine. The NES completely took over my life, and my parents had to do everything they could to drag me away from it.
Video games immediately became one of the biggest factors of my life, and still are today. These are some of the games that have had the biggest impact on me.
Super Mario Bros. (1985) – Nintendo Entertainment System
This is both the first game I ever played as well as the first game I ever owned, and it absolutely blew me away. I just couldn’t believe that I was actually able to control what was happening on my TV, and that alone kept me coming back to it again and again.
I was only 4 years old when I first played it, so I wasn’t even able to get past the second stage. I didn’t even know that there was more than that in the game, and I didn’t care. I was just amazed by how much fun it was to simply move Mario around in this world. One day when I saw my Dad playing in an area I had never seen before, I begged him to show me how he did it. It seemed impossible that there was even more to this already perfect thing, and I had to see it all.