Written by Amber Ahlborn
At some point in the 1980s, the year nebulous in my memory, my mom bowled with her team every Thursday night. I loved Thursday nights because dad let me stay up late to watch M.A.S.H. and Benny Hill. Sometimes he and I would hop in the car and go visit mom at the alley, and that was the best. Dad would sit and watch mom bowl. Me? I would squeeze every last quarter I could get out of him. With a fist full of change and dollars soon to be converted into change, I’d walk down to the alley’s hamburger bar, snag a stool, and drag it through the glass doors into the arcade. Without deviation, I’d position my stool in front of the “Ostrich Game” and stay planted there until I ran out of money. I’m speaking of Joust of course, but at that age I could neither reach the controls without a stool to sit on nor read very well.
The Atari 2600 became my first home console. I had around a dozen games for it. I owned the usual suspects like Pac-Man, Pitfall, and Frogger, but I especially enjoyed playing Kaboom with my half brother. He was over ten years older than me and I put everything into trying to beat his high scores. Super Mario Bros. 2 ushered me into the NES era and I became a dedicated platformer fan with a little beat’em up on the side thanks to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The Super NES became the first home console I bought with my own money (well, technically about 40% of it was my lunch money). With the SNES came a host of more firsts that introduced me to some of my greatest gaming loves. I discovered Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Mega Man X. Star Fox lead me into the third dimension and Chrono Trigger showed me that RPGs were not boring. While the N64 and Playstation fed me more of what I liked, the Gamecube and PS2 broadened my genre horizons even further.
Ico was the first game to give me a naturalistic puzzle environment to climb all over, and ever since I have loved these types of games. Pikmin primed me for future strategy titles and Katamari Damacy helped form my love of the really weird. With the advents of the DS and Wii the firsts keep rolling in.
What are your firsts? Did your tastes progress to ever widening genres or have you stuck with one obsession? Are you so new to gaming that everything is a first? It feels appropriate at this point in time to pause since the industry has recently experienced a few firsts itself. For the first time, graphical prowess is not the only draw for home consoles. The evolution of what games are and can mean to people marches on.
Looking off towards possible future firsts can be both encouraging and disheartening, depending on your perspective. As a primarily Wii gamer I’ve certainly hit both extremes. I’ve had the pleasure of playing my first “casual” games. I’ve also suffered my not-so-first frustrations with seeing deeper games watered down or shuffled to other systems. Even so, I keep a positive outlook and encourage all gamers, veteran and newcomer alike to keep the door open to firsts. You can never tell what your new love will be if you never bother to look. Give a try to that game you might be inclined to write off as “just not your thing”. It might be the very best thing you ever played.
For the first time ever, I played a video game with my mom. Every Sunday night we go bowling in my living room… and I always thought I hated sports games.