The History of Us as Gamers
By Aaron Kronenfeld with Jeff

In The Beginning. . .

    My brother and I started off our gaming careers with two systems: the Atari and the pc. All I remember about the Atari is moving through a maze while looking over the shoulder of a ball(assuming ball's had shoulders).  Jeff tells me it wasn't very good, and judging from what I know, he's probably right, though the story is different with the pc..  The pc we began playing on was an old pc that only had DOS and used disks for information storage.  There was one game that we played the most on that: Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego.  That games was a classic, our older brother, Shaun, would sit at the chair playing on the computer, as my brother and I sat or stood around, playing along with him.  While the game had a weak story, there was plenty of room for us to add our own stories.  It was us three young brothers huddled around our mother's computer inventing fantastical tales for every stop and bad guy.  Those were truly great gaming times, and it kicked off my personal gaming experience.  There was one other game that we occasionally played on that old computer, and that was Wolfenstein 3-D.  It was my first FPS experience, and for a very long time it was my only experience.

The NES Arrives

    One faithful Hanukah, our video game world was revolutionized.  Our parents bought us a Nintendo Entertainment System, and along with that a Mario Bros/Duckhunt game cartridge and a light gun.  These two games became my life.  I would spend hours playing Mario(though I never beat the game during that time, I wasn't very good back then) and when I got bored of Mario, I would plug in the light gun and go hunting for ducks.  More games followed after that.  There was Mario Bros 2, which always felt out of place, though it wasn't many years that I even learned that games came from Japan.  I never beat that game either, though I did make it to the last world a few times.  There was Final Fantasy, which not only did I not beat, but I didn't even know that the characters transformed until years later.  I also played Dragon Warrior(or Quest, I still have no idea which is correct), which I of course never finished.  The other big game I remember playing was Mario Bros 3.  That was when I truly became a gamer, for not only did I beat, I got every secret, and then I tried to beat in every way possible.  During this time, we were basically Nintendo exclusive gamers.  I moved into the same room with Jeff and the computer that we used to play games on became ours(for our mother got a new computer with fancy stuff like "Windows 3.1").  We got some fantasy RPG's, but we never got into them.  I always felt that they were missing the best parts of console RPG's.  NES was our only system, until one faithful night, which also fell on Hanukah, our world was revolutionized.

Dawn of a New Age

    The revolution was the Super Nintendo.  It was this system that began my ascension to the status of true gamer.  Gone were the days when I would play a game causally and never finish it.  Now I not only beat every game I got, I also got every secret.  This is also when we began playing RPG's for real.  Jeff and I loved FF2(I'll call it by the names from my memories, thank you very much).  WE constantly played it, getting every secret and trying to get our final characters to the highest level possible.  Jeff decided to concentrate on his two favorite characters, Palom and Porom.  He powered them up to the point that they could of beaten Zermus by themselves.  Other classics such as FF3, Chrono Trigger, and Yoshi's Island captured our hearts.  While they were all great games, none of them would have the lasting effect that one game was about to have,

The Great Civilization

    On a day just like any other, I went to my friend's house after school like I always did.  He always had some new toy or game to show me, but this time he had something truly great to show me.  He had recently purchased a game and two expansion packs.  This game was incredible.  We built cities and troops, then went around massacring any who got in our way.  As soon as I got home, I went to the store with my parents and bought Civilization II.  Every gamer has one particular game which truly brings them into the fold.  For both Jeff and I, this game was Civ2.  We would play this game on the new computer in our room nonstop.  I would play for hours while he gave advice, and then he started a new game while I sat by him giving advice.  We played this game constantly for about 3-5 years, and even then we still played it sporadically.  So great was our dedication, that even our computer couldn't stop us, though it tried it's hardest.  Our computer's favorite hobby at that point was crashing.  It loved crashing when we were writing, playing solitaire, and especially when we played Civ2.  It loved most to crash a few hours after we had last saved.  It was common for us to go from knights to tanks, only to have the computer crash, forcing us back to the middle ages, but we preserved.  We never remembered to save, so this problem remained until we got a new computer.  That's why we love the autosaving feature in Civ3, because even though our computers never crash, we can smile at the fact that there are two little boys with a shitty computer who won't have to restart every few hours.

Modern Era

    Since then, I have followed gaming, from magazines to the internet, and I have tried out all flavors of gaming.  I'm also a huge RTS fan, and I own two systems.  I even started playing FPS's again, which I had abandoned after Wolfenstein 3-D, by getting Half-Life and Tribes2. I also play a lot of Civ3, a more then worthy successor of Civ2.  Even my brother, who was initially wary of Civ3, now plays that game nonstop.  A few years ago I discovered the "Internet", and now I get all my gaming news from sites and play games competitively online.  That is how Jeff and I passed into the wonderful world of gaming. W00T!