Growing Up Gamer: A Video Game Memoir

By Clark Nielsen

Growing Up Gamer follows one gamer’s relationship with video game consoles over the span of 30+ years, from the NES to the Nintendo Switch and everything in between. Relive fighting with siblings, joining local video game tournaments, and making new friends thanks to a mutual interest in Mario Kart. Explore the frustrations of trying to get into the game industry and then ultimately going at it alone as an indie developer on the Xbox 360 and Steam. Journey to China to teach English, where a Game Boy or Nintendo DS is sometimes the only thing keeping a lonely expat sane. Real and digital adventure awaits in this funny, insightful, and honest memoir about growing up with video games!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clark Nielsen
• Release date: Nov 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463222997

Clark Nielsen

Clark Nielsen is an American-born author, teacher, and web/game developer who's been writing stories since he was six years old. On the non-fiction side, his influences include David Sedaris and Bill Bryson. But when he's writing sci-fi or fantasy, he turns to Jack Vance and Eiichiro Oda.

Book preview

GROWING UP GAMER

A Video Game Memoir

by

Clark Nielsen

Nintendo Switch / Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017-2022 Clark Nielsen

Book cover icons by Lorc & Delapouite (game-icons.net)

Chapter 1 - TI-99/4A

When most old-school gamers were teething on an Atari or Intellivison or Commodore 64, my family owned an obscure, self-proclaimed home computer called the TI-99/4A. Well, it couldn’t have been that obscure if Bill Cosby once endorsed it, though in retrospect, this is nothing to be proud of. Still, I never met another person who owned one of these or had ever heard of it. So I don’t have a lot of gamer cred with people my age or older. But video games weren’t a big deal to me back then, anyway. The TI-99/4A—a device that looked like a big, gray, clickety-clackish keyboard with an adjacent slot for cartridges—was nothing more than a fleeting distraction. I was much more entertained by physical toys. My younger brother and I loved playing with G.I. Joe action figures. We could spend an entire day setting up scenarios for our heroes and then acting them out on the kitchen floor or the living room bookshelf or the tree in the backyard. We had our favorite teams of characters who our stories usually revolved around, and sometimes these stories went on for weeks with us loudly proclaiming, To be continued! at the end of each day. How could a TI game like Alpiner compete, where the rules of play (climb up mountain, avoid falling objects) were much more limited?

The truth is, my parents didn’t even buy the TI-99/4A as a game console. Mom and Dad were very entrepreneurial in their younger years and wanted to use this home computer thingy to develop educational software. Sadly, their idea never came to fruition, and the TI was only ever used for entertainment purposes. My three siblings and I certainly tried to squeeze as much value out of it as possible, but the gameplay concepts at the time were as simple as their bright, blocky graphics. Hell, we owned a Hangman game that was no different than its pen-and-paper predecessor. Another game called Hunt the Wumpus was essentially an alternate version of Minesweeper: move around a pixelated grid to narrow down where the Wumpus was hiding. To this day, I still don’t understand how to play Minesweeper, so as an even dumber kid, Hunt the Wumpus did nothing for me.

The most interesting game we had was an RPG called Tunnels of Doom. Stepping through the game’s faux 3D hallways (that consisted of an amazing three colors) and waiting for monsters to jump out was exciting in the sense that beating these monsters made my team stronger. Unfortunately, the game let you name your characters but expected you to keep track of these names yourself. It would ask, Who will pick up the potion? and then wait for you to type in a name. It never occurred to me that I should write the names down, so I always forgot what names I had used. Was Jake one of them? Sir Jake? Jake the Destroyer? Damn it, I know it was Jake something… Maybe I misspelled it as Jaek? Fine, nobody gets the potion!

After a disastrous spelling bee at school, I couldn’t trust my own spelling and often suspected that that’s what was holding me back in Tunnels of Doom. I studied so hard for that spelling bee, too, only to fudge on the first word given to me. The rules were that you couldn’t backtrack and re-spell a word, so when I slipped and blurted out the same letter twice, like a nervous stutter, I knew my career as a professional speller was over.

Being bad at spelling also made it difficult to play or enjoy any of the text-based adventure games we had for the TI-99/4A. My father, on the other hand, frequently reminisces about how much he liked these games. They were his favorite with their visual simplicity and puzzling logic. I wanted to like them, too. I liked reading, after all. But I liked reading the Berenstain Bears. A text-only game like Pirate Adventure was a tad heavier than my repertoire of picture books. I kept coming across words in the game’s story that didn’t make sense to me. What the hell was rum? I knew I could pick it up, but then it just sat in my invisible inventory, since I could never think of a situation where something called rum would come in handy.

Rum sounds kind of like rung, like the rung of a ladder, I thought to myself.

To the best of my ability, I typed the command into the game, Clamb up rum.

I don’t understand your command, it replied for the hundredth time.

Shut up, you dumb game! I wanted to scream, only I wasn’t allowed to say shut up in our house.

We were a prudish Mormon family, and foul language was as big of a no-no as murder. Shut up and fart were already considered rude, so getting caught saying something like shit meant there would be hell to pay. I mean, heck to pay. If I ever said something bad, my mom would sprinkle pepper on my tongue as punishment. So the TI’s text-to-speech program became my outlet for swearing. I had no idea how you accessed this hidden feature of the console, though. It wasn’t as simple as plugging a cartridge in and hitting start. I had to beg one of my parents to load it for me whenever I wanted to use it. Then I needed them to immediately leave the room afterwards so I could start typing naughty words like damn and penis. But the program was a worse reader than I was and would, in its robotic male voice, pronounce it as pen iss. That always killed the mood. Plus, I ran the risk of someone walking in during one of these TI cuss fests, so I could never fully sit back and enjoy my fantasy of talking to a dirty robot.

The TI resided in my bedroom, which should have been the pinnacle of privacy, but I shared that space with my younger brother, bunk bed and all. Our room was also right next to the kitchen, and closing the door immediately raised suspicions. No kid remembers to close the door when he/she is having good, wholesome fun. I’m not even sure why the TI was crammed into our little room. You’d think parents wouldn’t want to put a device that could play brain-melting video games in the kids’ room. But considering how little interest we actually had in it, our room was probably the safest place for the TI to be.

It was the TV that we hooked the TI to that my parents should have been more concerned about. I don’t know why—maybe it was the loopy antenna sticking out of the top—but this smaller TV set picked up different channels than the bigger, 20" family TV. In fact, it picked up channels that aired many of the shows we weren’t allowed to watch, like The Simpsons and Tales from the Crypt. Personally, I would have been fine if we didn’t watch these, but my older brother liked sneaking a peek whenever possible. I was easily disturbed by implied violence and naked cartoon characters, though, and certain episodes of these shows scarred me for years. There was an episode of The Simpsons, for instance, where Homer joined a secret society but then did something to upset the other members, and they took his clothes away and chained him to a rock as punishment. That image truly bothered me way more than it should have.

Thankfully, the TV was later removed from our room, but so was the TI-99/4A. My dad packed the console and games into a box and put them in one of our yard sales. I didn’t protest. When it came to yard sales, I was more excited about making money than losing anything of sentiment. I would stake out a small section of our driveway specifically for my toys and meticulously arrange them on cardboard boxes like they were displays in a museum. It was so thrilling to watch people take the bait and buy my old junk. But as I was spinning around in delight, rubbing new cash all over my body, I caught a glimpse of some stranger walking away with the box full of TI stuff. And for a brief moment, I thought, Oh wait, I kind of liked that thing…

Chapter 2 - Nintendo Entertainment System

The TI-99/4A may not have enthralled me that much, but the original Nintendo Entertainment System sure did. This was when games felt like games. The graphics were crisper, the worlds felt bigger and more alive, and the system came with rectangular gamepads that made playing much easier. I honestly don’t remember ever finishing any of our TI games, but it was a big deal to beat an NES game. My older brother was so proud of beating all 60 levels in The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle that he insisted my mom take a picture of the end credits and put it in his scrapbook.

I don’t think my parents realized how much more of our time the NES would consume over the TI, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have bought it for us for Christmas. But they did. They made that mistake and then tried desperately to rectify it. Before, we could play the TI whenever we wanted. Now, we had time limits forced upon us. When someone wanted to play an NES game, my mother would set an egg timer for 15-20 minutes. And when it rang, it didn’t matter where we were in the game, what level we were on, what boss we were fighting… we were done.

I was a dishonest kid, though. I blamed a lot of broken stuff on my siblings and frequently snuck extra treats from the pantry. I didn’t think twice about adjusting the egg timer when no one was looking. If I was willing to keep my greediness in check, I could extend my 15 minutes into a full 30. But I was greedy and careless, and the day I thought I was being clever by setting the timer to 45 minutes was the day it all came crashing down. My siblings weren’t idiots. They wanted me off the NES a lot more than the adults did, because they thought they were so important and deserved a turn, too. Naturally, there was a lot of fighting over the NES. But I wouldn’t go so far as to blame Nintendo for bringing out the worst in us. We fought over everything. We would push each other on the trampoline. We would tear the newspaper apart to be the first to the comics page. Blood would be drawn if someone’s bowl of Marshmallow Mateys had more marshmallows in it. The NES was just one more thing to wind us up.

My parents’ solution to this was to periodically ban us from the media at hand. Nothing was more agonizing than being the only kid banned from Nintendo and having to watch from the other room as my siblings continued to enjoy Mega Man without me. Of course, bans only applied when my parents were home, so those few hours between the end of school and when they got off work were to be treasured. 5:00pm also doubled as an all-out shut down everything now, meaning we couldn’t turn the TV or NES back on until our homework and chores were done. This rule really screwed me over when I was all geared up to watch the season finale of Muppets Tonight but hadn’t finished doing the dishes.

Well… no TV for you, then…

And yet, rather than do the sensible thing and put the friggin’ dishes away so I could at least catch the second half of the show, I threw a tantrum and vowed to run away from home. It was already dark outside, but I packed up my sleeping bag and pillow and headed out into the unknown. I got about halfway to my friend’s house when I realized how ridiculous this was, but there was no way I could return home and admit defeat. So I climbed into one of our cars and camped out on the floor in the back, delighted with myself by the thought of how upset my parents would be when they couldn’t find me.

A half hour later, my perfect plan was interrupted when my dad and sister got into the car and drove off with me still hiding in the back. At first, I thought maybe they were going out to look for me, but they didn’t say a word to each other. That actually meant things were pretty normal; we weren’t exactly a talkative family. Twenty minutes passed, and the car stopped in front of my sister’s friend’s house in the next city over. She and my father went inside, leaving me alone in the car. Damn it, Dad, why did you go inside, too?! I didn’t want to be stuck out here! I maintained my hiding spot, though, and waited in the car for 30 minutes until he finally came back without my sister and drove off.

Whew, I can go home now! I thought to myself, really starting to regret this plan of mine.

Only this wasn’t the end of our trip. My dad then stopped at my grandparents’ house, and he again went inside to visit. After another 30 minutes passed, I decided I’d had enough and started honking the horn. My father returned to the car and drove me home, not even bothering to question why I was there or showing any surprise or anger. As soon as we got back to our own home, my mother sternly reminded me that the dishes still needed to be taken care of. I completely missed Muppets Tonight and didn’t prove anything. I was such an idiot.

I’m sure my parents knew I was there the whole time, and this was simply their attempt to teach me a lesson. Oh, they thought they were so clever! Among their other pearls of parenting wisdom, they also came up with this imaginary monster who would come out at night and confiscate any toys we left out. The monster would keep these toys for a week before giving them back, and they would be returned with a red dot marked on them. The dot meant that if the monster found that item again, the beast would keep it for much longer. As such, a lot of our clothes and toys (including the NES controllers and games) had stupid red dots on them. My fake dog poop toy wasn’t as convincing when you could simply spot the ol’ dot on it. Later on, an important item of my older brother’s was taken, and he got so upset that he threw half of his room’s contents out onto the front lawn. The monster dutifully went out and claimed (and dotted) all of those things, too. God, my parents were relentless…

The monster system was particularly embarrassing when we needed to return something that we’d borrowed from a friend, only now it had a noticeable red dot on it. Uh… it came like that? Borrowing was common, though. We didn’t own many NES games ourselves, and of those, most of them belonged to my older brother. It didn’t take long for him to realize he was carrying all the weight, so he decided to screw the rest of us over by charging us to play his games. He put a jar next to the NES with a label that read: 25 cents per game. Yep, that weasel just created an arcade in our home. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction that his scheme worked, but man… I really wanted to play his new copy of The Three Stooges. It was a mini-game compilation where you tried to earn a certain amount of money by the end of 30 in-game days, and every playthrough was different thanks to the game’s random selection. But that randomness also tended to work against me.

I should get another try! I would whine to my brother. It picked all of the same games that I did last time! Or I might plead, I’m not off to a good start. Can I just start over?

My brother wasn’t known for being generous, though, and he never issued refunds. To fight back, I tried creating my own arcade in the family room. For 50 cents, you could enter the arcade and play with any of my toys for up to an hour. Alas, my younger brother was the only person to buy in, that being his place in the taking advantage of younger siblings racket. Oh well. At least we could still break stuff and blame it on our older brother.

But don’t cry for me just yet. My NES years weren’t totally devoid of good games. Almost everyone in town had an NES, which gave us access to better games like Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, and Final Fantasy. Of all the games we borrowed, Final Fantasy was my favorite. Its 8-bit overworld felt so vast and was full of so many unique monsters. The game basically fulfilled what I had been trying to get out of the Tunnels of Doom RPG on the TI. Leveling up an in-game character to make him/her stronger was extremely rewarding, like making my G.I. Joes scale the bookshelf to learn kung fu from the master that lived there. Only the game handled all of the logistics for me and had much cooler names for the new spells and moves that we learned.

Final Fantasy belonged to my older brother’s friend, Sean. This guy was kind of intimidating, because he hit his growth spurt way sooner than everyone else. I didn’t like talking to him at all, but my brother, being the butthead that he was, always made me ask Sean personally