Long time, no post. Haven’t really had the muse to write anything for a while, but lately the big thing around has been Pokemon Go and I’ve had quite a number of people surprised I don’t play. There’s actually reasons for that, as well as for why I never did play many classic games that everyone seems to know about and have known about since they were kids.
“So, Kor, why don’t you play Pokemon Go? How did you get to college without even knowing about Legend of Zelda? What excuse do you have for never having played/watched X game/TV show from the late 80s/early 90s?”
Well, there’s a couple big reasons in particular here. One is that I was very much locked to the whims of my parents as far as games went, and my (two)sisters and I did spend very little time overall playing video games through most of our lives. We had an original NES fairly early on, but it was one of those things that was hooked up to the basement TV and only really saw use on rainy days when there was nothing on TV and/or we weren’t playing with Legos or Playmobil or whatever else struck our fancy in those days. We had a grand total of maybe five games for it… Mario Bros. (the one you could play versus), Super Mario Bros (1), Super Mario Bros. 3, The Little Mermaid, and Sesame Street. That was it. We didn’t really end up expanding the collection at all, and our parents saw no reason to buy more when we barely played those titles, and I can tell you offhand we never got anywhere even close to beating any of those. Heck, I sincerely doubt any of us got halfway through any of those games. We got to see the later game in Mario 3 by using warp whistles some years later, but we couldn’t even beat the first level in the final World. None of us were all that good. But I digress. The real point was that with two younger sisters and myself, my parents would only ever buy games that fell into our collective age groups, and only enough to give us something to play on those rainy or boring days. So why did we never end up with Legend of Zelda, you still ask? The answer is simple: we had never heard of it, nor did it appear on our parents’ radars at any point, so it was completely overlooked.
We did eventually get a Super NES, but it was something I actually won in a reading competition rather than something either of our (now divorced) parents went out to buy, and once again we only ended up with a small handful of games for it. I think our Nintendo 64 actually was the result of asking for it, but then only because one of my friends (one of the grand total of two I had through my grade school years) had one and I wanted to play the same games he could. I barely even remember how that one came about. But at this point we were all well aware that I had ADD and my sisters were still younger than me, so games purchased were of the sort that we could play and drop and pick up again sometime later. I didn’t have a clue what was out there for games aside from the two or three my friend had, so while some people were playing Mario RPG, I’d never even heard of it (nor had I heard of RPGs in general) and my parents weren’t about to go buy a game that would require me to actually sit down for hours to get through the story of.
Of course, Pokemon was originally released on the Gameboy Color. (Edit: It’s been since pointed out to me that it was originally released on the original Gameboy, something I never even knew to this day! I suppose I should correct myself to say that the first Pokemon game I’d ever heard of was released on the Gameboy Color. That said, the rest of this story is still relevant- if not more so in a way, since that little fact is something that I’ve apparently managed to completely miss for 20 years!) How silly, I never owned one. Of course not, I actually had a fully functional original grey Gameboy and three games for it and it was pretty much just purchased for when we had a long car ride or plane ride or something and they needed me kept busy for a few hours. When the Gameboy Color came out, it still worked just fine (heck, it still does!) so no one even thought to give me an upgrade. That just wasn’t done. One of my sisters did end up with one because she requested it for her birthday, and she wound up with Pokemon for it… and at that point in my life, that pretty much cinched it for me that “Pokemon must be for little kids” since she was playing it. Who could blame me? I was in my early teens, and furthermore I didn’t care anyway since I had just discovered the magic that was computer gaming, and online gaming, and “Oooh I can play Star Wars games against other people on our 28.8k modem connection when it feels like working!”
So I never did discover Pokemon or Zelda for several years as I focused solely on my little growing internet gaming world. A few years later, I went to college and found a Gaming Club that had a whole bunch of people I could play games with in person and got into other things that way, slowly expanding my horizons. I found out about things like RPGs and became familiar with Pokemon and Zelda, though I still never did play either one because I didn’t have any real connection to either and I kept finding all these other games to play that just seemed more interesting. My friends from there can certainly attest to that. Everything was new and exciting to me, and playing games (or sequels thereof) that I’d ignored some years back just never made it to my priority list. I had much better things to do, like play the shit out of Dynasty Warriors and Final Fantasy Tactics and Tales of Symphonia and Disgaea not to mention all the tabletop RPGs and board games and other things I did instead of my homework.
Then I graduated, and time became more scarce, and interests far more numerous as my love for anime grew and I spent far more time with that than gaming. And nowadays? Well, it’s hard to kick old habits. Maybe a Pokemon game will come out at just the right time when I’m looking for something different to do and happen to own the appropriate console for it. Maybe my roommate will force me to play a Fire Emblem game by pushing it on me before a 14-hour flight and I’ll actually get into it. Maybe the world will end and I’ll have all the time in the world to actually get through my gaming backlog in the afterlife. Who knows!
One thing I do know is that, as much as part of me wishes I had gotten into some of these games back in the day, circumstances just kept me from actually doing so. I knew nothing about them, no one could’ve predicted that they’d end up being important later on, and my family and I never got into or good enough at console gaming to really wind up with a significant collection.
It could be a whole lot worse. I still have plenty of games to occupy me, and who knows what the future will bring.
Kortir 