Nostalgia and Childhood: Gaming Edition
Where it started
My gaming journey started when I was maybe 6 years old, back in 2003. I recall this one instance fondly. At my maternal grandparents’ house in Tumkur, we had a tenant who was in his 20’s living in a single bedroom on the terrace. I used to frequently visit him, because he had a computer, and I was a curious kid who was very interested by them. He gave me a tour of his computer, and let me play some Quake 3. This was my first experience playing a 3D game, before this, it was just knock off NES games on home consoles when I visted friends. I was so blown away, it took me a while to grasp how cool what I was seeing was. Technology was able to emulate 3D onto a 2D screen, with full control of the environment. I guess you could say that it all started there. He gave me a floppy disk as a souvenir, which I played with a ton, and was fascinated by. I did, however, end up breaking it, so I don’t have it anymore.
At my mom’s
All we could really afford at the time were those cheap knock off NES consoles, and so we got one of those. I was so addicted to that thing, that I pretty much played 6 hours a day with my brother, for months, during vacations. I’m probably more well versed and experienced in playing classic NES games than most Americans born in the 90’s. During this period of my life, gaming was just an escape from excruciating bordom. We didn’t really have cable television, so gaming on that home console was our only form of entertainment. We played so much that the D-pad broke off on both controllers. We continued to play with, even though it hurt, because we couldn’t really get another set. Boredom very much makes you go to any length to get rid of it.
Double digits
I moved in with my dad right before I turned 10. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities, as I was now able to afford whatever I wanted. We got a really expensive HP Pavillion 2005 model. I of course didn’t know anything about computer hardware at the time, so we just got whatever seemed nice, and this thing had a wonderful screen. For gaming? It had a pathetic dual core Athlon and 2 gigs of RAM. It was so so excruciatingly slow, it barely played anything. But this was during the time when we first got broadband internet at home, and flash games don’t really need a lot of horsepower. I cannot begin to give you an idea of how much time I spent playing flash games online. Games2Win, Miniclip, Club Penguin, Cartoon Network India, and many more. My gosh, I spent so much time playing them, I even started winning prizes such as action figures and toys from some of the websites for getting global high scores. This was the period where I got competitive, and tried to MinMax everything I did. Honestly, very impressive looking back at my pre-teen years, at how smart and efficient I was for that age.
I was also introduced to the world of Nintendo handheld games by a kid who was 2 years older to me when I was in the 4th grade. I had gone with my dad to this resort vacation with his medical college buddies and their families. This kid had a GameBoy Advanced SP, and was playing Buu’s Fury. I was fascinated, I went home after the trip and played every main series Pokemon and Dragon Ball game on emulators for GBC, GBA and DS. My dad wouldn’t buy me a GBA even though I really wanted one, as my dad didn’t want me to get more addicted to video games.
2008 was a very special year for me. We got my first gaming computer, because I got really sick and tired of being unable to play ANYTHING at more than 10 fps on that laptop. It had a Core 2 Quad Q9300, 4 gigs of RAM, and a HD 4850. Pretty well balanced machine for the time. This thing was able to play almost everything I wanted. It also allowed me to get into video editing, another one of my hobbies. The next few years were very memorable, as I started playing the huge catalog of classic PC games. The Hitman games, the Splinter Cell games, the Far Cry games, Portal, Half Life, the Crysis series, the entire Call of Duty series, the battlefield series, the Medal of Honor series, and really countless more. If I have to start naming every single game I played back then, it would take me hours to go back and find and list all of them, and that’s going to get very boring for the reader too. I had entirely too much free time back in those days. Two and half months of vacation between academic years was so nice. I will give a special mention to a few games, that were very influential to my childhood. Back then, I was really into online games, so I used to spend a ton of time finding and playing them. Didn’t matter if they were good or bad, if it had an active multiplayer, I would play the heck out of it. Weird games like Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway, really fun games like Unreal Tournament 2007, multiplayer mods for COD 4, and so on. One particularly important one is Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas, a multiplayer mod for GTA San Andreas. This game was a big chunk of my childhood. I met so many wonderful people from around the world, and honestly, it really helped to boost my confidence as a person. I’ve probably spent close to 5000 hours over the course of a few years on that game, playing in community servers, being a server administrator, creating maps and mods, creating videos for demonstration purposes, where I was first able to flex my editing skills, etc. Battlefield 3 was also a huge game for me, it was such a fun game. I spent tons of time playing Rush with my school friends, who are still major friends in my life to this day.
Speaking of huge time investments, Minecraft. I was very early on the Minecraft train. I first came across it on YouTube, by a letsplayer called zxnoregretzzxz, who was a very small time youtuber back in early 2011. He now has a very successful channel called Call Me Kevin. Anyway, this game was unlike anything I’d ever seen, it seemed like the graphics were an afterthought. To someone like me who thought graphics were everything back then, it kinda took me by surprise. I remember the first time I loaded up the game, it took me 5 minutes just to figure out how to punch wood. It had no instructions, and I had to explore and learn everything about it. The first day I played it, I played 16 hours straight. I have never been so hooked on a game. Whenever I got bored of a world, I used to delete it and move onto another one, which I now regret, as I had sunk hundreds of hours into each world, and it would be nice to take a trip down memory lane. Anyway, I played a whole ton of custom maps and mods for the game. Shout out to the CTM maps from Vechs. Of course, getting into Minecraft also opened up the world of Minecraft YouTubers, like BlueXephos and their Shadow of Israphael series, and many other YouTubers, many of which I still watch to this day. Minecraft really changed gaming for ever, and it also had a huge part in my life, as I had just hit my teens when I found it. I think I started off on Beta 1.5, and have put in well over 5000 hours into Minecraft, and counting (I still play and love it).
“You’ll grow out of it”
I did have my GPU fail on me in 2013, and I got a HD 7770 as a replacement, which performed about the same. I still have that fried HD 4850’s PCB framed on my bedroom wall. It was also about the time I got my first smartphone, the Micromax Canvas HD. When preparations for 10th board exams started to become a thing which I had to worry about, I was cut off from a lot of my gaming time. I got very into several mobile games, some games which were time sinks like Restaurant Story, some racing games, some tower defence, etc. I kind of regret how much time I sunk into some of those games, but it wasn’t too much compared to my younger years. I still do play one game from back in those days, Clash of Clans. The only other one I play actively is Pokemon Go, which I got into on the day of release.
After my 12th grade board exams, I was finally allowed to buy a new PC. This was in 2016, and I got what I still use to this day, a Core i7 6700k, 16 gigs of RAM, and a triple slot GTX 1070. I played on the thing a ton before college began the same year. But college came around, and I guess this was about the time when I matured to the point where I no longer got addicted to anything anymore, even Games. Life just got busy, and I didn’t really need anyone to cut me off from things to prevent me from getting addicted anymore, as I barely played of my own volition. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve grown to love good single player experiences. I play a lot less now, maybe a couple of hours a week max. Gaming will always be a part of my life, as its my most favourite hobby, and has been for well over a decade.