Daria

I made one of those charts because gosh darn it organizing things from your life into lists is a great exercise. This list isn't "best games of all time" or even "best games I've played." Instead these are games I remember making a specific impact on my life in rough order of when I first experienced them. A bit of context

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game Though I had experienced video games before, this game hit my local bowling alley where my mom took me every sunday for bumper bowling league with my cousins at the very specific time I was super into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was blown away by the graphics. I was four or five and had to stand on a chair to reach the arcade cabinet controls. This became the reason I wanted to go to the bowling alley. While I eventually got the NES port it wasn't nearly as good, hence the arcade version. This is perhaps my first video game love.

• Tetris (NES Version) Sensing my video game fever, my mom had convinced a distant aunt to give me her kid's old Atari 2600 and a bunch of games. The problem with this was I couldn't be fooled anymore. I knew what video games were supposed to look like. I had played Pac-Man on an actual Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and the Pac-Man on 2600 was NOT Pac-Man. I knew I wanted a Nintendo and I made sure my mom and her boyfriend at the time knew too. Come christmas I excitedly unwrapped some presents and found NES copies of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Game and Tetris, but no Nintendo. When I cried to my mom that I couldn't play these, she joked that maybe santa had made a mistake, but don't worry we gotta put all our presents away now and go to grandma's.

Grandma had of course purchased my cousin and I matching NES sets. When I finally got home and my mom and her boyfriend hooked it up, I got to enjoy my own NES for the first time. At some point I put in Tetris and had zero idea how to play.

Then at new years Mom, her boyfriend and my aunts and uncles took over the NES to play Duck Hunt and Tetris. I remember being upset that they were using my NES. A few days later I again was trying to figure out how to play tetris when my mom showed me how to make a line. I was suddenly hooked and spent hours and hours trying to get higher and higher scores.

My mom never really played video games aside from that evening with Tetris and Duck Hunt. When I think back to my childhood, my fondest memories with my mom were her showing me how to play tetris and playing rounds of duck hunt with her. She had told me the clay pigeon mode in duck hunt reminded her of when she was a kid and her dad (who had passed away a few years previously) took her and her siblings out to the country club where he would shoot clay pigeons. Whenever I play Duck Hunt I remember that story, and whenever I play NES Tetris I remember how proud I was to show her how I could make lines now.

• Super Mario Brothers 3 is my favorite Mario. Mario 3 might be the first video game I ever beat as a kid. I sucked at video games then as I do now, so it was an achievement. The first time I beat it however was with a game genie. Except I never got to see the end, because one of the cheats I was using had a bug that if you beat bowser in the last level and did hold up at the door while the music played, you would get soft locked. It taught me a valuable lesson.

• Zelda II: The Adventures of Link The first time I ever learned about RPGs was when one of the kids I used to hang out with told me that "Role playing games are for fags." I carried that with me for a while, but over the course of visiting various cousins and friends of family to be watched while my parents worked, I got to see others play RPGs and decided to try a copy of Zelda II I borrowed from another friend.

When my mom remarried after breaking up with her previous boyfriend/my brother's father, we moved away from the city and all my previous friends to go live in the country. While I found the solitude and quiet utterly detestable, my mom found jesus and guns and conservative politics. Video games would rot my brain and I had just gotten a NES (several years ago), so no SNES or Genesis for me, which, despite having no friends any more, made me feel even more isolated.

A year or so after we moved to the country, I was playing Zelda II again for the thousandth time when my mom burst in my room to let me know the neighbor's horse barn was on fire before dashing out with my step-dad to rescue the horses. Because we lived in the country, the fire truck took forever to arrive, so the barn was a lost cause. Feeling at a loss for what to do myself, I continued to play Zelda II.

After the fire was put out my dad rushed upstairs to punish me for doing nothing but playing video games while there was an emergency. I'm not sure what a ten year old could have done, and I had assumed if they wanted my help they would have taken me. I'm pretty sure this is where the animosity my step dad felt towards me and video games came from.

• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Shortly after the barn burning incident, my uncle blew his brains out rather than spend another second with my aunt. My family was extremely distraught, and I got sent to visit a friend of the family while they dealt with the aftermath. They allowed me to borrow their son's Game Boy with a copy of Link's Awakening.

I kept the gameboy longer than anyone probably intended, and Link's Awakening was my escape from the nightmare world I also couldn't wake from.

• Sonic The Hedgehog 2 While I never had my own Genesis or SNES when it would have been appropriate to do so, I did manage to play a good number of genesis games at my cousin's house. Sonic 2 was always what I fall back to after I exhausted the rest of their collection. It was better than the first one, and the music was great.

• NHL 94 As a kid I spent pretty much my entire summer at a friend of the family's house while my parents worked, as it caused the least amount of problems compared to staying with my cousins. Those summers were spent playing NES, wrestlling with action figures, and playing street hockey.

To be honest, the first sport I fell in love with as a kid was baseball. When I was old enough to join a little league, I excitedly asked my mom only to be told no, baseball is a summer game and that would interfere with going up to the cabin for summer trips. I could count on both hands the amount of times we actually left for anywhere in the summer as a family.

Around this time the Detroit Red Wings were going through a sort of renascence and were serious contenders for the Stanley Cup. NHL 94 taught me the rules of the game, but also taught me how to love it. No more was hockey just the sport where guys punch each other, it was the sport of kings.

• Street Fighter 2 Turbo Even a rural kid with no friends eventually learned that street fighter 2 was the best game ever made. Turbo was the version I got to play a lot through an old friend from before we moved to the country. I also had a Nintendo Power with a moves list for all the characters, and I would sit in my room just imagining throwing fireballs and dragon punches. Of course I didn't have the hand/eye coordination to properly pull the intricate moves needed to consistently pull off ryu's hadoken, but I did have the ability to mash punch real fast while playing e-honda and hundred hand slapping my way to inevitable defeat.

• Mortal Kombat II Standing in a movie theater to go see a movie no one went to with my brother's dad, I noticed an arcade machine that had more people gathered around it than were in the theater. Of course it had to be Mortal Kombat II. I watched teenagers pull fatalities off that upset my brother's dad. It was the raddest shit ever.

I eventually got to play a lot of Mortal Kombat II years later when I made a new friend at the school I was going to. His parents got divorced and had showered him with every game console available at the time to buy his love. He of course was a spoiled brat (Who repeated the "RPGs are for fags" line a lot) and would only let me play with him if I let him win and do fatalities on me. I was allowed to put up somewhat of a fight at least, but I had to lose at the end.

• Final Fantasy Tactics So a number of years pass and there's this Virtual Boy thing nintendo put out that set my dumbass brain aflight with all the cool things you could do with it. My mom, perhaps being smarter than I knew at the time, didn't listen to me but instead surprised me with a playstation for christmas one year. I had a falling out with the small friend group I had managed to integrate myself with and was not only thoroughly alone, but also incredibly bored at home. I was not taking up to country living like my mom wanted me to. So she relented and got me video games again.

Having a bit of extra christmas money saved up, I decided to get that Final Fantasy I had saw commercials for. I didn't get that because I didn't realize it was Final Fantasy VII, and had grabbed Tactics instead.

This was fine in retrospect. FFT was amazing, and for my first real RPG it was completely mind blowing. I started writing fan fiction for it before I had ever learned what fan fiction was. Years later I would choose the handle I would be known as for the rest of my life, so I chose HolyKnightRamza, or HKR for short.

FFT came at an interesting time in my life. My mom's newfound love of Jesus was forced on us and I was a good catholic kid for a bit. FFT challenged the idea that a church's word was absolute, and taught me history was written by people who had ulterior motives. It would still take years for me to break my faith, but FFT kickstarted it.

• Final Fantasy VII Once I had realized my mistake I saved for a greatest hits copy of Final Fantasy VII. The game was amazing in a completely different way than FFT. Through the next couple of years being a Final Fantasy VII fan, and in turn a Square and RPG fan, became to define Who I Was. Which started to raise some interesting questions.

• Final Fantasy VIII I was beginning to face a problem in school, church and life when Final Fantasy VIII was coming out. If "RPGs were for fags" and I was such a big fan of RPGs now, did that make me a fag? It turns out yes. Sometimes I joke that Final Fantasy made me Gay, but it's probably more literally true than saying "I was born this way" or anything like that.

Final Fantasy VIII's love story, despite being a romance between a man and a women, struck me deep in my teenage heart. Today I can laugh at the awkwardness of Squall and Rinoa's early relationship, but it was a painful mirror when I first played it.

• Tekken 3 while the RPGs made my question my religion and sexuality, the fighting games made me a better gamer. I had made a new friend through church, and he and I would spend hours and hours putting in all our effort to beat each other in fighting games. He was the first friend that let me play a competitive game with him competitively, and pouring over combos and move lists printed off from gamefaqs trying to get better taught me video game systems were much deeper than they appeared on the surface. I still got my ass kicked, but for the first time I could feel myself improving at a game.

• Dance Dance Revolution Best Hits EGM at the time used to talk about those crrazaazy japanese games from time to time. In the neighborhood where my brother's dad lived, a card ship also doubled as an anime fansub rental store and video game importer. Dance Dance Revolution seemed utterly insane, a game that made you dance with your feet? I got a gameshark, a dance mat and a copy of Best Hits from there and fell in love with bemani games.

If RPGs might have made me gay, dancing games absolutely cemented that I was a fag. But in the last few years of high school DDR arcade machines started popping up and I could show off to kids from school on various school trips. I'm not sure how much that helped my case, but I had a good time doing it at least.

My step dad hated that I played this game. He told me I wasn't allowed to play it at home anymore because I would cave in the floor.

• Pokemon Blue armed with a game boy color and a link cable, my last couple years of high school were filled with six on six pokemon battles before class as well. While I've fallen out of pokemon fandom, I still fondly recall those times.

• Doom II In high school I was able to get only from the library and learned all I could about computers at the time. Doom II was the first pirated PC game I ever played, and I would bring floppies to the library during lunch to download wad's. Messing with doom wad's taught me a lot about computers.

• Virtua Fighter 4 Flash forward a few years after high school. I wasn't going to college and neither were most of my friends. We instead spent entire evenings playing Virtua Fighter IV and

• Guilty Gear XX The memories of passing the controller around for these two games while we all stared down the barrel of no future and parents who were getting increasingly sick of our shit stick with me. I might not have a future, but I was a pretty decent Bridget player. (for the group, at the time. I'm terrible again now haha)

• REZ If me bringing VF4 and GGXX to my friends house for us to play for hours and hours and end made me feel like somewhat of a tastemaker, all notions of that got quickly beaten down when I tried to show off REZ and none of them got it.

Rez was probably the first game I ever played that could be considered more art than game. It taught me that while I might have good taste, my peers did not. (I mostly kid).

• Morrowind I spent several years of my life trying to save up for a computer that was My Own. I faced several setbacks when my mom decided to help herself to my savings, the primary lesson taught there was that idle money was money that could be taken. Perhaps not the best life lesson to learn, but my mom only ever taught me how to do things by observing her and deciding for myself that I would do the opposite.

So when I graduated high school and got a bunch of money (that was supposed to be spent on community college tuition) I instead purchased parts for a gaming computer. Armed with a GeForce 2 MX, the first game I christened the computer with was Morrowind, and holy hell what a first game.

I had zero idea how to play games like this, and I spent many hours getting my ass kicked by guards for stealing and murdering. Morrowind was such an alien experience.

• Unreal Tournament In a desperate attempt to get me to graduate on time, I had an elective created for me in school where I was a library computer tech for a few hours a day. My job was mostly to tell kids their report was ruined because they threw their floppy in their pocket and trashed it. But I got to know the actual IT admin for the school, and we had a couple LAN parties at his house. UT was the game of choice, and many many hours were spent screaming at each other in protracted Facing Worlds matches.

• Final Fantasy XI After a few years of flailing at home after graduating high school and not going to college, a friend offered to let me move in with him and his sister and her boyfriend. Instead of getting a job however, I spent 18 hours a day playing Final Fantasy XI with them.

Let's cut to it; my relationship with the game was unhealthy. I ate a single pack of ramen a day so I could afford the monthly fee. I didn't shower for weeks. Occasionally a couple from the linkshell would come over and we'd all attempt Chains of Promathia missions together. One day the wife of that couple asked for a divorce as we were all playing, having just discovered that her husband was cheating on her with another linkshell member in the UK.

But if ever a video game world was home to me, Vana'diel was and still is it. After I got kicked out of that house, and eventually moved to Seattle, I became a much more healthy adult and spent more time in my home away from home.

• Rock Band 2 Many many years later, I had moved to seattle as a final "Get out of MI" act to live with my partner I had met online in an IRC chat room. I got a job at a gamestop so I could guarantee a pre-order of Rock Band 1 band in a box kit for myself. I quit the day it came out. I quickly fell in love with drums, but not the drum kit.

By the time Rock Band 2 came out, I had started obsessively building my own electronic drum kit. It was huge and took up the entire living room. But it was mine, and I had made it because of one of the best video games ever made.

• Dys4ia Having answered the question "Do RPGs make you a fag", I was determined to answer if video games could make me a girl. I had played Dys4ia as a curiosity years previous, but one day decided to go back to it to answer some questions. I don't necessarily think it did, but it did help me get on a path.

• Final Fantasy XIV If I didn't have Eorzea to explore and fight for during the pandemic, I'm not sure what I would have done with myself.

For me most of the Final Fantasies after VIII were a miss for me. They were solid games, but IX, X, XII and XIII didn't hit the notes VII and VIII did for me. I was unsure of the future of the game developer and series that had literally helped define me as a person.

Final Fantasy XIV showed me the future of the franchise is bright and in solid hands, and in turn I began to look forward to my future.