favorite game: earthbound/mother 2
video games have been my favorite since forever. the first console i remember was my parents' playstation one, and i remember the day i woke up to getting a game boy advance sp as a 6th birthday present. i don't really remember why i wanted the games i had (probably because i didnt have much of a say), and while i played a lot of every game i had (shoutout bugs bunny: lost in time, toy story 2: buzz lightyear to the rescue, and kirby and the amazing mirror), growing up, the best way i can describe my experience with games is "learning a lot about what i wanted to play but didn't have".
i wanted to discover everything i could about whatever i could get my eyes on. from what i discovered, before i was born, we had contender, nfl gameday 99, nba live 2000 and madden 2001 (football & basketball games never rubbed off on me, but contender is likely the reason i love punch-out). one day, i found my dad's disk of tenchu stealth assassins, a game i clearly wasnt old enough to play, and had no clue what i was doing, but playing it felt like the real "adult version" of the games i was used to seeing. i loved how distinct every game looked on consoles and handhelds, how crisp the sprites looked in pokemon firered, how 3d models on the ps1 would move and shift even when you weren't moving the controller. occasionally at a neighbor's house, i would get to play super mario world and street fighter 2, or an arcade would have the simpsons (or turtles in time!), and the sprite art was further burned into my brain. ad inserts in magazines and the occasional blockbuster game rental became key art imprinted in my memory. two of my favorite books were guidebooks to super mario 64 and an unofficial guide to pokemon red and blue. it would take a while before i would understand anything technical about them (i used to think the gba loaded sprites the same way an old tiger graphic sheet would, and had no idea how a spritesheet worked), but i was 8, what can you do.
we got a playstation 2 sometime in 2006, and with it, new favorites that i never remembered getting. my frontal lobe developed enough to remember titles and really start to know what i liked, yet i was still terrible at making progress ( sly 2 was my favorite game even though i didn't clear the first world for 3-4 years). i would play the opening levels of my favorite ps1 games over and over, not saving to the memory card since i couldn't figure out that menu properly. i learned about new games from kids showing off their games at school, with 3 or 4 of us crowded around 1 backlit run of sonic advance 2's music park. i learned about the gamecube because of the one friend i had with one. he was the friend that had allllll the games, and we would spend hours playing what was my introduction to smash bros., pokemon colosseum, sonic adventure 2 and the retro mega collection (though we had sonic 3d blast and r on pc, and sonic heroes (my love) on ps2), dragon ball z budokai and naruto clash of ninja. during sleepovers we'd sneak in more gamecube on the muted tv and play gba under the bedsheets, and i fell in love with the spritework of sonic advance 3 and the 3d visuals of sonic battle, and every time i'd go back home i'd just think, "how can i play these on my own?"
both of these fascinations were bolstered by the limited access i had to the iconic gameinformer.
discovering emulation was the floodgates. i'd sneak progress on minish cap and metroid fusion while doing my homework on the family computer. suddenly, the ability to learn about a game became the ability to play that game. i missed out on the ps3 and 360 generation entirely, but i was finally playing the screencaps and short clips i was obsessed with. i have a backlog trailing me from when i was 12 years old, and i'll either finish it or it'll die with me lol