I thought I’d follow Lisa’s lead from last time and post about how I discovered video games.

For me, I fell in love with gaming the moment I sat down in front of my parent’s monster television set (and by that I mean it was a tube television set inside of a solid oak frame – which means it was a monster to move because it weighed a frickin’ ton. I mean, the sucker survived getting struck by lightning for Pete’s sake, but I digress…) and switched on the Atari.

That’s right, I lost my video game virginity to an Atari. I loved my Atari so much, I would spend night after night working it into such a frenzy, it got all hot and bothered. I mean that literally by the way. Playing BurgerTime or Frogger happily as can be and BLIP the little circuits couldn’t take it anymore and all I was left with was a television screen full of one very frozen game. My parents actually got hooked in too – I think at last count (before they sold the system) we had over 90 games. But BurgerTime was my favorite.

The shininess of the Atari took a while to wear off, but only in the respect that it was replaced by the wave of the future…the Commodore 64. I still remember sitting in front of it one Saturday afternoon, the little DOS cursor just a’blinking and writing a page worth of code simply to change the background color of my screen. Blue to purple in all its 8-bit glory! Whoa, what a concept! And boy did those pixels sure as hell hurt the eyes. The 64 was my very first foray into programming. I was hooked.

That was until Nintendo came along. Ah…Mario, those were the days. Believe it or not, I still have my original Nintendo and it works just fine. Even if you still have to blow on the cartridge a little or fiddle with the spring loading area. It’s stacked in there with all my other gaming systems. Luckily, I married a fellow gamer (his SEGA didn’t make it thought a recent move) so we’ve been able to pass that love along to our daughter. Saturday nights in our house can either be quiet as someone works through a task on Skyrim or rowdy as we all grab a remote and attack each other with lightsabers in Star Wars (we, er, actually have the glowing lightsaber for the Wii controllers too).