| MOST IMPORTANT GAMES IN MY GAMING HISTORY In Chronological Order... |
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Pitfall!Atari 2600, Activision 1982 I was maybe age one to three and sitting on the floor of our Mahomet apartment livingroom, as my sister started to manipulate a little blocky man on the TV screen by herself, like some kind of cartoon you could control. He would swing a vine over pits of alligators and make weird synthesizer noises. THIS was my introduction to video games, in the eighties, by Gen X. Pole Position IIArcade, Atari 1984 By the time I was about five or six, maybe seven... I used to go to Aladdin's Castle at the mall, especially if mom/sisters were on some kind of long clothes shopping spree or getting their hair done. $10 in quarters and an over-active imagination, I would literally hog the Pole Position II machine for extended periods, tossing tokens into it like water. This was about as close to actually driving a car could get until they got the next game (below). I would throw a ten in the token machine, get a whole friggin roll, and then go to town playing this more than anything else, because it was the most "forgiving" of the arcade car games. I like cars, a lot, so of course I would naturally gravitate to anything with a steering wheel, shifter, and pedals in it. Hard Drivin'Arcade, Atari 1986 Pole Position II was where it started, this was what I saw as "the future". Literally, Hard Drivin' was a buck a pop (4 quarters) to play, and had the most realistic driving experience in the whole arcade. I was about seven or eight when it showed up. Basically, you had a force-feedback steering wheel, all three manual transmission pedals, a gated 5 speed shifter, a friggin IGNITION KEY...if anyone wonders why as a middle aged guy I'm so "obsessed" with Drive Beyond Horizons - here's your answer, this was basically Drive Beyond Horizons in the 80's. I sucked at it, and the swing-out seat moved too far from the pedals when I got into an intense good run with it, but it definatley had an impact on me and left me thinking "What if we had games in the future where you could muck about with all aspects of a car". AdventureAtari 2600, Atari 1978 This was truly my first self-discovered videogame, on my first console (atari 2600 4-switch Woody, 1989 Xmas). The cartridge was ridiculous enough....a orange dragon that looked like it was made out of mandarin oranges was holding a key on the cover, while a almost microscopic night was leaving the Micro Machines castle in the background. Then you put the game in, and it got even weirder....I'm greeted with a gray screen with pink walls and a single number in the middle. I hit reset...I can move this little square around with the joystick. There's a key, let's see what it unlocks (tries it on castle portcullis)...whoah...cool. Then I grabb this "arrow" wondering what the heck it's supposed to be, and accidentally kill a dragon. I think I spent more than six hours that afternoon exploring and mucking about with Adventure and I hadn't even found the easter egg yet. It's still one of my favorite games of the Atari 2600 era to this day. The Legend of ZeldaNES, Nintendo 1986 My oldest sister babysat for extra money in high school, and during that time she became a babysitter for two rich kids in Beauregard AL, and the son got a Nintendo for Christmas. So of course we had to see what it was about. He got this game and Super Mario Bros. 2 for it, and when we played Zelda, Immediatley I thought of the game for the 2600 above, and that basically sold me on Nintendo, and made me pretty much a Nintendo fanboy for the first half of the 1990's. Zelda, to me, was basically Adventure on steroids. I would get this for Xmas with my first NES in 1991 and it became a pretty standard go-to for me. BigfootNES, Acclaim 1989 In the early 1990's, before that Johnny come-Lately Anderson family, Monster Jam, and Gravedigger...we had BIGFOOT. And I was a HUGE Monster Truck fan at the time, with Bigfoot being my truck of choice. So obviously under the tree in 1991 was this game. Bigfoot, looking back, was kind of like if Drive Beyond Horizons was 8-bit, and became The Activision Decathlon when you got to the race-track. Basically, you drove through the wild, collecting money and power ups for your truck, then assemble your truck before the race, and then win the race for high score. Highest score gets a picture of Bob Chandler in all his glory with Bigfoot #5 - the famous one with the 10-foot tall tires from an Alaskan Land Train (visible in Bob's office in the VHS tapes of the time). Being such a fan of the truck - bad game or not - I was going to BEAT this one. Bigfoot was the first NES game I ever completed, at age 9, with a Joystick controller for the side scroll sessions. I've only gotten better since then...now at 43 I use a Gamepad but hold it like I'm EVH playing Eruption, a technique I developed in my 20's realizing a guitar neck isn't the only thing I can do right-hand-hammer-ons on. Super Mario Bros. 3NES, Nintendo 1989 The power of Super Mario Bros. 3 in the late 80's/early 90's cannot be overstated. Pretty much any person you ask from a casual gamer from back in the day all the way to a current era gamer-nerd type, will understand the popularity. Super Mario Bros. 3 was so big, it sold more than the Beatles catalog, was more recognizable than John Lennon, and that's saying something because the Beatles said they were "bigger than Jesus" at one point, lol. I remember renting this 3-4 times, and then for my 10th birthday, we went to Peachtree Mall to buy a copy - for EIGHTY FUCKIN' DOLLARS! Yes, one of the most common carts you can find for the NES, a literal Pack-In with later units, and it cost as much as some budget handhelds cost now, or more. Today, you can find ungraded copies (which I consider a scam) all day long for a buck and a quarter because EVERYONE had it. Well...why was it so great? Well, if Super Mario Bros. put the NES on the map, Super Mario Bros. 3 really showed what could be done with it in the side-scroller genre. While more interesting and lesser-known diamonds in the rough have been discovered since "collecting" became a thing, nothing will touch the original power of this NES release. TetrisNES/Game Boy, Nintendo 1989 Another big one that hit hard. Tetris, from about 1990-1992, was friggin EVERYWHERE! This was another game, like Super Breakout, that my mom would get obsessed with. Now, Super Breakout on the Atari was one thing, but this...I remember pissing my menopausal mom off by losing her "High Score" off the post-its she left on the cartridge! Me, I blame Tetris for the reason every one of our moving house or road trips goes smoothly. What was great about Tetris though, was it was a start of the "relaxation" genre for me. That's right, before Drive Beyond Horizons, Backrooms: Expedition, or Pools, or Babbdi...we had Tetris. I had it for the Game Boy I got too. Ultima (III): ExodusNES, FCI/PonyCanyon 1988 My Sister's college friends had a copy of this and gave it to me to mess with one night when I was like...9 or 10. It was in the original box, with the manual, the whole 9 yards. This was my introduction to CRPGs, and what an introduction as none of it made sense to me at the time. These days, I can rock this, and have beaten Exodus. But back then, holy crap, it was like "let's make up four funny looking characters with weird 5 character names and see how long they last once our EXP hits level 5 level after spamming Repel/Undead and Missile to death in every battle". It kind of put me off the RPG genre because Ewwww....MATHS! And it made no sense that the characters go up in EXP to level 5, get stuck there, and then I'm getting chased around by bugs that look like UFOs, giant scary Dragon things, and guys in black scuba gear - none of which looked like what they were supposed to represent. Later I revisited this after y ears of Dragon Quest, and I finally get it, but back then, YIKES!! Super Mario LandGame Boy, Nintendo 1989 A girl named Ashley on the school bus had this for her Game Boy. I wanted it, and would borrow her Game Boy a lot. Eventually we would play 2 player against each other on the bus when I went halfsies on a Game Boy and Super Mario Land for my 9th Birthday. I played the HELL out of Super Mario Land. People don't realize what a big deal this was at the time. If you wanted to play Mario back then, you had to go home, and if you were spoiled like me - you MAYBE had your own TV - and then you had to sit in a chair, and play with a full fledged Console you couldn't take with you because no other adult but your mom and sisters trusted you with connecting an RF switch to a TV. Apparently I was very advanced at that shit for my age. Then the Game Boy came out, and other units may have had color, but the Game Boy had BATTERY LIFE. A quad of AAs would last me 3-4 months of nonstop bus-rides home. However, I had to stop playing this on the bus because we got a psycho bus driver named Mrs. Bandy who scared the hell out of all of us, and threatened to take the Game Boy Away. Super Mario Land 2: The Six Golden CoinsGame Boy, Nintendo 1993 And if Super Mario Land 1 was great, Super Mario Land 2: the Six Golden Coins, was my FAVORITE. I bought this for my 10th birthday in 1993...I think. I remember it was 1993 because my TRUCK was also brand new when I got this game, and the first road trip with the Game Boy, this game, and that 93' Explorer - was to Florida. I spent that whole trip riding down to the Keys in the Explorer with this game in my hands and a McDonalds 20pc McNugget (hit my growth spurt) as soon as the sun came up. On the way back, it was me, a new cat (Aurora), the Game Boy, vegging out in the back seat of the Explorer...starting my off/on eras of having cats for co-pilots while gaming. And this game was a gift that kept on giving, so many bloody secrets, every time I was playing it, it would become my next big thing to keep me looking. THIS was back when Nintendo knew what they were doing. The Secret of Monkey IslandPC, Lucasfilm Games 1989 This game was the real reason I got into computing, and how I cut my teeth on MS-DOS as a kid. I was about 10 years old when my oldest sister got this and hid it on her collegate 386. She then walked me through accessing it from the DOS Prompt - cd\monkey.vga, and then monkey, then use the Dial-A-Pirate wheel to match up the faces, put in the date that matches the location, boom. My previous encounter with Microsoft Adventure as an 8 year old really messed with my head, to the point I thought computer games were kinda' low key, maybe even a little boring...then I see this. You can walk around everywhere, talk to everyone, and photorealistic portraits during conversations really impressed the heck out of me. Plus the fact you couldn't die was a real benefit. Ultima VI: The False ProphetPC, Origin Systems 1990 I got this for my 11th birthday in 1994, and I remember it because I was playing it with one eye open as I got PinkEye and was quarantined to my sister's house for the whole week. So that's all I did, listened to A-ha, and played Ultima VI. While Ultima (III):Exodus for the NES was a brutal CRPG that looked like a JRPG (and was deceptively complex), THIS was super complex, but not hard at all. Here was a game in 1990 where you could walk around from town to town, GTA/Postal 2/Sandbox style, and everything felt like it was a smooth transition from one place to another. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's RevengePC, LucasArts 1991 Of course, having loved the first game, my sister borrowed this from my bro-in-law's friend who loaned it to him. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge had a bit of a vibe-shift from the first game...gone was the 80's style attempts at realism, replaced by wonky wacky 1990's style artwork. And despite me being somewhat...uh...90's Adverse at the time (I really hated the 90's in a big way), I liked this game. However, this was the first game that truly stumped me on a logic puzzle. There's a part, in hard mode, where you had to win an alleyway gameshow scenario, and to do it, you had to cheat. To cheat, you had to go to another alley, knock on a door, and this guy would stick his big hand out and say "if this is 4 (holds up weird hand gesture), then what is this (holds up another weird gesture)". I was stumped by that puzzle for over 20 years! Freddy Pharkas Frontier PharmacistPC, Sierra 1994 I remember this game because I was explicitly told I could not play it until my sister finished it because it was filled with "Lewd Humor and Sheep Jokes", and it was made by Al Lowe - who made Leisure Suit Larry. This was actually the first (of very few times) a computer got me in trouble. My sister wasn't home, and I decided to try and use my newly acquired DOS skills to access Freddy Pharkas...and I got in, and opened the latest savegame, and it's Madame Ovaree and Freddy, in bed together, talking, and honestly, I watched the whole cut scene, at 11 years old, and thought "WTF? I thought this game was supposed to be "bad for kids"" - yeah, I saw worse on Nickelodeon shows at friend's houses or whatever. Disney has edgier stuff than this. Of course I was later allowed to play it where I got stumped on the farting horses puzzle (you had to quickly capture a horse fart in a brown paper bag wearing a makeshift gas mask made of a bucket and coal, then use a spectrometer to find out lentils were used to poison the horses, and then make some Tyloxpolynide or some weird shit like that to make them stop gassing the town to death). Later I woudl beat this game in my 20's with the much more upgraded "talkie" version. Super Mario WorldSNES, Nintendo 1991 Jeremy and Octaw were two saudi kids living behind my sister's Apartment in a group of townhouses, and me and my ol' pal Jonathan would go over and hang with them and play SNES. Later Jonathan got one, and then I went halfsies with mom on my 12th Birthday for an SNES. This game was the big reason why. People forget, this was the first Mario Game that you could SAVE in. That's right, before that, you had to play Super Mario 1/2/3 all in ONE sitting...but Super Mario World introduced saving, and it made my life of gaming that much easier at the time. It also was high time I had something like that, because I would take up the guitar not long after this. Illusion of GaiaSNES, Enix 1994 Illusion of Gaia is a weird story. Back then, around age 10-13, I had a habit of looking through the scrambled cable TV channels, and I found a whole upper echelon of channels we didn't even know we had on basic cable, which included QVC. QVC, for me, wasn't about shopping, which is what it basically was - home shopping network...but rather, sort of like a MST3K thing for me. I liked to watch it to make fun of it. You had all these hosts that were total goofballs, and this mulleted manchild named Jeffrey was demoing "the hugest game of 1994" - this one. So of course, out of curiosity to see what a trainwreck this was, I rented it, and it kinda' warmed me up to the Action RPG genre more, a genre I'd gone cold on. Dragon Warrior IVNEs, Enix 1989/1992 Illusion of Gaia got me into Action RPGs again since the Legend of Zelda...but Dragon Warrior IV was another interesting one. See, my bro-in-law had Dragon Warrior II, and since I had Ultima:Exodus at the time, only my older DnD loving sister would play it. I believe she got stuck on the Water Flying Cloth part of that game... more on that one later. Anyway, In 9th grade, I still hung out with some of my Auburn friends, one of them was William, and his dad was a huge RPG nut. He actually had my copy of Ultima: Exodus (which I'd later buy back), and he had THIS game. I decided to give it a shot since I was now a teenager and therefore "mature" enough to handle an RPG. This to me, is STILL the best 8-bit RPG to start with. It has a good story that's not just the regular tropes (like DW1 - ie get magical artifacts, rescue a princess and get strong enough to kill the big bad guy), and is far deeper and more complex than anything I'd seen in a video game up to that point. Sim City 2000Macintosh/PC, Maxis 1993 A friend in my sister's collegate hood had this game on his dad's Mac. We would play this, building cities, while listening to the Bee Gees for some reason. It wasn't very often, as we usually were tag teaming Super Mario Bros. 3 in a group of peers in the den, but I really liked this game enough to remember it about 5-7 years later when I got my first actual computer and started digging around bargain bins for a copy. I think this was the root of my obsession with games where you build stuff. Eventually I got a copy for my 1st 486, but I had to wait a couple years to use it because I didn't have an SVGA card yet. Crusin' WorldN64, Nintendo 1997 High school was a drought for me with *modern* games. All my classmates were playing stuff like Tekken and this, and I was at home still playing my old 8-bit stuff as I delved into the early "retro" scene (back then called "Vintage Videogames" or "Classic Gaming" a little later on). Through a bandmate, Zach, I had a chance to borrow his N64 and the Cruisin' games (well ,the first two at least), and of course, anything where you can drive is my kryptonite, so I spent maybe 2 months borrowing these and getting my initials all over the high score lists. While I like the first game...a lot, the second game really stuck to me. For awhile, I really kinda' "modernized" a little bit, but I was still 90% guitar, 10% gaming, and 5% of that was modern gaming. Twisted Metal 2Sony Playstation, 1996 PostalRunning with Scissors, 1997 Artworx S*rip P*kerPC, Artworx 1986 Tank WarsPC, Kenneth B. Morse 1989 Robot Arena 2: Design and DestroyPC, Infogrames 2003 Upon a rather tumultuous breakup, and fed up with the music scene and all the "groupie wars" and other shit that went on with my own generatoin, I focused on my main career - I.T., and intersped between making demo CDs and learning how to setup a TCP/IP network with a flip-flop Proxy-Server setup to share our 56K dial-up internet in the house, I was playing some modern computer games. That period of 2003-2006 had a real upside of being able to buy some pretty strong, but rather cheap, NVIDIA GPUs at Wal-Mart for $50 new. One night when upgrading to the MX4000 PCI, I also picked this up for $3. I liked Battlebots and had watched a few episodes, now here I could make my own Battlebots and commit to actual battles where you could put your designs to the test. Eventually I got into installing mods and using crazy parts on it. The SimsPC, Maxis 2000 The Sims was one of those games that when it came out, I didn't want anything to do with it - the premise overall is pretty stupid. You already have a real-life, and spend that real life working in a system where the odds are stacked against you...well, now I have little "Tamagotchi People" that I need to direct their lives like some kind of omnipotent being in a rigged system!?!? Yeah, John, go use the toilet, Jane....go make yourself some food....Junior, play with that rocket I just put in the backyard, and don't set the house on fire (or the sorrow clown will show up, goddamnit!), John and Jane...go look for a Job! However, I found a niche in this game as an architect, just as much as I enjoyed creating Sims of people I don't like and driving them absolutely kookoo in a "house" made of fences with such amenities as the open floorplan toilets, and the swimming pool with randomly dissappearing ladders! Even the Sorrow Clown went insane dealing with my craziness. That's at least, if I wasn't making quasi-gothic McMansions and building a giant guitar shop with no purchasable merchandise using downloaded objects. GTA 2PC, Rockstar Games 1998 And when I wasn't tormenting Tamagotchi People with open floor plan toilets and the random downloaded firearm in a glorified bull pasture passed off as a "home", I was tormenting this strange 1940's style city as a criminal with a police scanner voiced by what sounds like Buddy Hackett! RacerPC, Racer.nl 2005 Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend/AWPPC, Running with Scissors 2003 GTA: Vice CityPC, Rockstar 2004 Five Nights at Freddy'sPC, Scottgames 2014 An old friend of my wife's shows up with her kid, and he's obsessed with this game. I'd heard about it before, and avoided it like the plague (because I happened to be looking for, and later was lead guitarist in a horror rock band fronted by a "Freddie", and found this in google by accident and hated the description). Tired of me having another marathon of Dragon Warrior IV on the Wii, my wife insisted that I get into this game instead - and she regretted that decision ever since! Here was a basic PC game in 2015 that I could easily grasp. Not 9000 buttons, plot not a big deal to actually enjoying it (oh god, the f***ing lore!), just classic, Atari-style, reflexes and strategy. 250MB of horror hilarity and creepy nostalgia for $7 on Steam. I ended up riding out the whole series through "Ultimate Custom Night", and am one of the few people who likes "FNaF World" (lol, Freddy Quest or Freddy Warrior I call it). But I think what impressed me the most was that one guy managed to pull off an entire media franchise, putting out new releases every couple of months that got better and more challenging than the last - only to blow it all away in the end with people who have no business parenting getting their toddlers into the game (facepalm), and worse yet, contributions to the Trump administration by Scott which ultimatley got him "soft-cancelled" in the gaming community in 2024 after they were revealed on OpenSecrets.org. So I can't really condone the series anymore, my politics just won't let me back into the fold anymore. PoolsPC, Tensori 2025 On a Saturday morning I got up and at the time was really into the whole "Backrooms" thing. So I fired up this "pools" game on YouTube, a quiet lets-play without commentary, and liked the chill vibe I got from it. So I got it on Steam, and started playing it soon thereafter. I think it was free even back then (not sure though) since I was on a free kick. BabbdiPC, 2025 Drive Beyond HorizonsPC, Tacty/Santor Games 2025 Remember Hard Drivin' above. Well, I'm bored on a weekend in 2025 and decide to look at Steam for some "backrooms type" games again where I can wander around aimlessly without any penalty...only to find this weird retrowave-themed driving game where you can drive aimlessly without (much) penalty. I download the demo, fire up scenario, and here I am, in first person, in a garage with a dilapidated old 4-door economy sedan covered in rust and a paintjob that looks like something you'd see a very poor person do with rattlecans stolen from the Lowes garbage can. I spent at least three months playing the demo before biting to get the full version of the game. It led to me getting back into building a dedicated "gaming PC" again - though it barely passes as that (basically an office PC with a GPU that's probably running hotter than it should). In february 2026 I wound up on the beta testing team, only to get invited over to alpha testing afterward, where I've been since. So now there's somewhat a legit reason for me to be playing this game at least 4+ hours a week trying to break things and find bugs in it to report to the dev team. All the while living out what was basically a dream game idea of mine from age seven back in the eighties, lol. |
