PixlBit

December of 1987. It was cloudy, a thin layer of snow painted the dead grass of every lawn and every park. It's funny how we can remember the minor details of a single day. My parents took my brother and I to the Sears that overlooked the murky waters of the Illinois River in downtown Peoria. I recall my parents looking at VCR's, while my brother checked out the baseball gloves. I, at six years old, was at the first of many mid-life crises. A mid-child crisis? At six? Anyway, the video game industry was nothing more than that fun toy that my mom brought home so she could play a shitty game of Donkey Kong, something called Pitfall, and a weird game that consisted of playing as a bug that shot cardboard boxes at other cardboard boxes to get to the gooey swastika center. When Atari became a mainstay of the gated discount bin, I took up.....shitting the bed and drinking orange Kool-Aid. Come to think of it, maybe it was more an identity crisis than anything else.

Okay, back on point. There was a kiosk in the electronics section, where that year's model of the old, SD fatty tv's resided across the aisle from the the latest run of VCR's. In the middle, I found a piece of myself. A tiny, pixelated moustached man; the cross that rendered the joystick of ol' archaic and painful. A scrolling screen? Wow! Why can't I kill that brown thing that walks towards me? Is there a magic pellet, ala Pac-Man? How do I---so many buttons! This one does nothing, but this one makes me jump. Wait....if I hold the button, he jumps higher! Maybe if I----you kill them by JUMPING on them?!?! Hahaha! That's amazing! What's that question mar---whoa, a mushroom! That's weird! What happens if-----okay, you all get the point. I went home and dreamt of all things Nintendo! I had to have one! I begged my parents to buy me the system that came with "the Mario game at Sears!" Well, Christmas came along and I got.....an Atari 7800 while my brother, who had zero interest in gaming, got an NES! We struck up a deal: I'd let him play the 7800, and he'd let me play the NES when he felt generous.

I won't delve into the bottomless pool of details, recollections, accolades, and all things that come into play when discussing the Kings of the 8-bit landscape. Some kids had baseball trophies, while I had a notebook in my dresser drawer that was filled with the names of every game that I beat throughout the years. Those were my trophies.

I had the same, fuzzy feelings for the SNES, but something happened in 1994. I slowly started leaning towards Sony, months before the launch of the PS1. To me, it seemed like the natural progression from the foundation that Nintendo had laid (it wouldn't be until years later that there was more truth to my opinion than my fourteen year old self realized). I would pour through the pages of Gamefan, EGM, Gamepro, and some shitty rag that I can't even remember the name of, marvelling at the blocky textures and the freedom of REAL 3D! The mind-bending 3D of 1993's Starfox would be fully realized with Warhawk! The mode-7 battle frenzy that was Super Mario Kart grew up, started drinking beer, got a license, and became Twisted Metal. they had me at RU(RED E)? 

When Nintendo unveiled the Ultra 64, along with Super Mario 64, I was intrigued but the excitement simply wasn't there. Nintendo wasn't showing the slew of games that they needed to as a way of luring gamers away from Sony's dream box. How could I say no to a system that was about to give me one of the best Castlevania games in the form of a missing link Metroid game? Square Soft pledged allegiance to Sony, and suddenly the sky seemed to be the limit for Final Fantasy. Mario 64 looked revolutionary, but I was a kid who was having too much damn fun popping zombies in the cranium with a magnum to pay that system any mind. The funny thing is, akin to the NES, the fun never stopped, and the games kept coming. I was firmly rooted in Sony's camp. 

(to be continued)