Popeye: The first video game system I had was an old Atari 2600 from a yard sale. This was probably a wise move on my parents’ part to see if I’d quickly get bored or move on before buying a then-expensive NES that my friends had. Popeye is the one game I know for sure I had for Atari, even if I don’t remember anything else about it. I guess I had 10-12 games? Other arcade classics (Frogger, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Ms. Pac-Man, the Star Wars arcade game – that franchise has had great video games from the begining) we had for our 8088 Leading Edge PC clone on 5.25” floppies. Those were all foundational games for me in my childhood.

Super Mario Bros 3: 1990 is the big cutoff year in my mind. I remember my fourth birthday party in October of 1989 but other than that my memories start when I went to preschool that year. I remember wondering at the dawn of that decade what the years after 1999 would be called (“two thousands” didn’t make sense to me because I had only ever heard of things in decades so logically hundreds would follow the nineties). This game had just come out and I would spend whole days with my friends playing it (I didn’t have a Nintendo yet). I remember staying up past my bedtime with my family one night beating it for the first time when I did get it. Even though I have the most memories attached to Mario 3, I actually prefer Super Mario World.

Dragon Warrior 1-4: Let me tell you about my best friend. We met in third grade and grew up together, and we’re very close to this day. He was very sanguine and outgoing and I reaped the social benefits that come with being a popular kid’s best friend even though I was weird and awkward. He was the only one of my high school classmates who didn’t abandon me when things started going wrong mentally. So yeah, he’s a mensch. Anyway, Nintendo Power had a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style feature about DW1 and, being really into those books, I got interested in it. And then this dude moves to town and he fucking has a copy, and he loves the game, too. We played it together a lot and to this day we’re really into RPGs. I bought the other games in the series as I could find them pre-eBay, calling FuncoLand and places to have them call you if one came in. Even at the time a used copy would set you back $70 in then-current dollars. These games defined JRPGs for me rather than Final Fantasy.

Loom: A very interesting LucasArts adventure game that was my first point-and-click game. If there’s a criticism it’s because it’s really short and really easy, but the interface makes it worth playing. You have a musical distaff (don’t ask) that you can cast spells with by playing four-note combinations, like “open” (ECED), “close” (DECE – see, it’s opposite of “open”), “twist”, “sharpen”, etc. At certain points in the game you get more notes to learn and play new spells, up to C’. Anyway it got me into PC adventure games. I preferred Sierra to George Lucas but this game is number one in my heart. Then King’s Quest 5 and 6, Space Quest 4 and 5, Freddie Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, and Quest for Glory 2, all Sierra.

Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness: My first RTS, actually the first strategy game I figured out how to play ever.

Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar, Ultima VII: The Black Gate Ultima IV was released on AOL as a free download in I think 1998 (and it can still be found for free on GOG and Steam; I don’t know if it’s actually in the public domain or if Origin just willfully doesn’t protect its copyright, and there’s a modder community.) I’ll grant you that it’s primitive, having been released before I was born, but this was wild. It’s a non-linear open-world CRPG before open-world games were a thing. It’d probably take at least a year to beat without any guides.

SaGa Frontier: I know I’ve already said this but this is a great game, if sometimes game-breakingly flawed. There are extremes of difficulty from one screen to the next and it’s as easy to unwittingly stumble upon impossible battles as it is to go a single block too far in the city at night and suddenly be somewhere you really don’t want to be. But it’s just such an awesome game. Someday I’ll go back to it and actually beat all seven (eight in the recent remaster) quests. That will happen after I’ve beaten Ultima V; I got Ultima’d out after the first four games but I think I can carry on after Avernum 2 and then LTTP (you see it that way all the time so I don’t mind it as an initialism.) I need to play games more. I plan on upgrading my PC with Christmas money. Water cooling, a souped-up processor, lights flashing everywhere.

Doom, Ultima VIII: Pagan, Mortal Kombat 2: These were games I wasn’t allowed to play because they were variously violent (MK2), Satanic (U8), or both (Doom). Doom and Ultima I couldn’t get around because my friends didn’t play PC games, but I played my share of MK2 at my friend’s house. I kind of have a hole in a foundational experience of PC gaming in not being that familiar with Doom. Ultima VIII (actual quote from my dad: “No son of mine is going to play a game called Pagan!”) it’s probably better I missed because it’s one of the worst games in the series and it might have soured me to the other Ultima games. As it happens, Pagan is the name of the game world (the protagonist gets sucked into another dimension at the end of Ultima 7 and this is its follow-up, like Cygnus X-1 and Hemispheres.) It’s just a meaningless, but odd, name. It may be influenced by Latin “pagus”, “village” (and a “paganus”, a rustic, hence “pagan”, an observer of the folk religion; it continues in the Spanish pais and French pays, meaning “country”, like the «pays-bas», “low country”, to mean the Netherlands, or the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “Peasant” also comes this root, by way of French: I had a history professor whose pet peeve was when people call the city-dwelling sans-culottes “peasants” as peasants, by definition, live in the countryside) to suggest its bleak isolation.

Ok I’m sick of writing now. This is long enough. I may add to it in a reply. 420 blaze it. Tekashi 6ix9ine got sent back to prison and he’s a snitch. I’m kind of surprised he’s still alive. He’s not an easy man to miss.