A brief personal history 

I love old, weird games. That’s probably obvious, and that’s why I started this blog. Writing about the netherworlds of classic gaming is as much a fun, educational project as it is a personal one, so I feel obliged to give a bit of personal background for my obsession, my experience, and the unconventional childhood that let me down this bizarre and obscure road.

I grew up in a techie household. My parents always tried to stay at the cutting edge of technology, especially in computers. Early in my life – possibly in one of my first memories – we bought an Apple IIe and a boatload of random disks. We kept this routine up through the rest of the 90s, eventually adding a Perfoma Mac, an IBM 486, a top-of-the-line Dell, and a secondhand Acer. At the same time, I never remembered existing without immediate access to a game console. We owned an NES, and a Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and PlayStation came almost immediately afterward. Our entire family hovered around these devices; we sometimes waited in turn to use the computers and consoles, at least until we all had enough space for our own. By the time I started kindergarten and first grade in ’95, my brother and I shared two game consoles, a Game Boy, the two Macs, and the Windows 3.1 machine. The fact that my elementary school used the same Apple IIes and Performas we had at home only cemented my descent into computer-dom.

The best part of these endless devices was the games. All the games! Computer games provided the greatest source of entertainment during my early childhood. My parents rarely let us play console video games, and when we did, my older brother usually called dibs and hogged them by playing Mega Man and other single player games. I loved to watch, but when it came time for me to play games on my own, I went back to the computers. Our endless arrays of floppy disks and free demos from magazines and parents’ friends provided a constant stream of entertainment. Some of it went over my head, but most were mindless fun for a 4- or 5-year-old.

Then school hit. Ouch.

I quickly realized that real life and social interaction weren’t cutting it for me. I was one of the weird kids who avoided other people and retreated back into made-up stories and fantasies. My favorite parts of the day came from building stuff like marble contraptions, drawing made-up characters and people, reading or being read stories, or doing independent work. Outside a small handful of friends, people were the plague. (That and playing house. God forbid playing house.) So naturally, following past generations of socially disgraced losers, I ran off to computer games. I loved rooting through the demo discs that came with our regular purchases of computer magazines (especially MacAddict). Our local library fed my appetite even further with a rotating stock of Mac (and later on, Windows) CD-ROMs. The educational stuff appealed to me the most; even the reference CDs, like atlases and TIME almanacs, provided some of the best fun I ever had.

But one game changed everything. To commemorate our new computer, my grandma bought us a “Top Ten Mac Pack” collection of random Electronic Arts CD-ROM games. Among them was The Labyrinth of Time, a first-person adventure game put together by two friends under a tiny independent company. The personal story behind the game flew past me, but its art didn’t. What greeted me wasn’t a fake-looking world like most game consoles up to this point provided. The cutting-edge graphics dripped with polish and an unreal style. Suddenly, computer games opened an entirely new world. I had grown accustomed to them looking as cartoony as they did, especially given the tech limitations at the time, but seeing The Labyrinth of Time‘s universe nearly shattered my world view. I was a creative kid for my age, but the new frontier this game opened up dwarfed everything I had ever known in comparison.

I became addicted. In the years following, I burned through The Journeyman Project and Spaceship Warlock. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis came next. Soon I started branching out, taking on new genres through the Sim series and console actions games like the Metroid series or Zelda and its contemporaries. And then the multimedia-heavy PlayStation hit, once again completely upending everything I knew about video games. The later Final Fantasy games blew me away. StarCraft thrust me into the strategy genre and my first entirely customizable experience. Even the PlayStation demo discs felt revolutionary. But most importantly, despite the highlights, every single terrible, half-rate game I rented or took out of the library made a lasting impression. They were unique experiences crafted by creative people, and no matter how bad they got, they were all different.

Years went on and I changed. My tastes shifted to first-person shooters, war games, and console action titles. I finally started to crawl out of my social hole, eventually even choosing to talk to people. New, sleeker consoles came out, and I upgraded to a faster computer running XP. But regardless of how much I moved on and changed as a person, the games from my childhood – floppy disks, CD-ROMs, shareware, the Super Nintendo, and PlayStation – kept calling me back. No matter how great newer games were, they felt less genuine, and they meant less to me. I had to return.

In the summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school, I dug up my old copy of Myst. By the end of the summer, I had finished the entire series. My old fix was back, and I started finding (through a purchase or other means) the games I never completed or didn’t quite remember from my earlier years. Even ones I had never played or heard of. As technically archaic and inventively dated as they were, I really enjoyed them, and that was that. They were products from a bygone, simpler era, both for gaming and for me personally. I felt an unusual personal attachment to them, and most importantly, once again, they were unique.

I’m in college now, I’m an occasional gamer, and these games still make up a decent portion of what I play. Don’t get me wrong: my 360 and laptop graphics card still get a workout, and online Flash games are my lifeblood. But there’s thousands of completely unseen and unnoticed gems from the 80s and 90s, trainwrecks or otherwise, and I really get a kick out of them. On one hand, it’s a little weird for me to be revisiting things from my childhood on such a regular basis. Yet on the other, now as a maturer person, I can better appreciate their quality and the work put into them. Even beyond their nostalgic value, these games offer a ton of original content. They can be raw, crass, completely awful, or amazingly awesome, but they’re certainly interesting. To quote a quick email correspondence I had with the author of Something Awful’s Video Game Article, “In a way it reminds me of all those cool gyrocopters and wing suits that people tried to fly with. Sure, they didn’t go anywhere, but a lot of that stuff is really cool.”

I love these games, and no one has even heard of half of them. And I guess that’s why I started this blog. For every StarCraft, there’s a hundred MissionForce: Cyberstorms. It’s about time someone gave a shit about them, and hey, I have webspace. That makes me the captain on what I hope is an interesting trip down gaming’s forgotten road, back to a more innocent time when I was a kid, the world was smaller, the industry was simpler, my family was tighter, the games were more original, and something like The Labyrinth of Time, a second-rate Myst knockoff made by a pizza delivery guy, could change my life.

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