A short history of my love and passion for video games.

Being a child of the 80's I feel that I was lucky enough to grow up in a generation that saw the maturation of the gaming industry.  I have seen video games go from something that only nerds play to an widely accepted form of entertainment for not just kids but adults too.

My First experience with video games was with the family Commodore 64.  We had to load games from large 5-1/4" floppy disks that contained such gems as Frogger and Dig Doug.  We had a very good collection and a pair of toy like red joystick controllers.

With two older siblings we often had to take turns playing or favorite games.  Eventually the Commodore died and we were left without a gaming device for a few years until a friend of my brother was able to give us his old Famicon.  Now this was an amazing system.  It was just like a Nintendo but the 3 cartridges we had contained about 30 games each.

This was our first gaming console and while it was not as new as the Super NES that just came out I was still happy to play games with such amazing graphics on my TV.  The first Mario game, specifically, had me and my brother hooked.  It had a unique game play that allowed you to play cooperatively or competitively in the same game mode.  I don't think it was an intended feature but my brother and I discovered how we could play against each other and have just as much fun.


Then when I was in 7th grade my parents decided to purchase a PC.  It was 1995 and we had a state of the art 486 DX clocked at 66 MHz with  4MB of ram.  But it was not until we expanded to 8 MB of ram that I was able to install Doom.  Doom changed everything.  It was by far the most realistic and scary video game every created.  It was way ahead of it's time not just in graphics but in game play as well.  But what really blew my mind was when my older brother invited a friend over with his computer. And after a day of running wires back and forth and messing around with drivers somehow we managed to connect the two games together.  And the magical moment when you realize that you are in a video game with someone else happened and it was all down hill from there.

From there, my obsession of first person shooters just grew and soon I was playing online against players from around the world.  This was many years before Xbox live or any other internet console service existed.  And it was the early years of pioneering online gaming that I grew attached to.  Having to go to a website and look up IPs so that you could enter them into the drop down console in Quake was the only way to get online at first.  Then websites like GameSpy started popping up and providing more robust connecting capabilities.  Once again, years before Steam existed.

I have collected my fair share of gaming consoles from the (Famicom, SNES, N64, PS1, PS2, Xbox, and Xbox 360) but PC games will always be my first love.  There is something about PC gaming that I always enjoyed over the console experience. I love how PC is always on the cutting edge of gaming.  From the early days of internet gaming to the advent of VR, the PC has always been the platform to push games to no possibilities.  I know VR has been around for years but the Oculus Rift is the first VR experience that will take gaming into the next level.  And I am very excited to see what happens next.