As a kid, I started my career as a gamer with a Wii remote in one hand and a nunchuk controller in the other. My youngest years of gaming were spent playing games like Super Smash Bros: Brawl, and Super Mario Galaxy (1 and 2). I cherish those years of my life greatly, and some of those games I still consider my favorites to this day. I eventually got a Nintendo DS in my hands as well and spent most of my time with whatever Pokémon game I was currently working on. Sadly, I lost it in a hotel in Tennessee but that gave me the opportunity to upgrade to a 3DS when that came out. Kid Icarus Uprising is still a goated game in my book, and I had not grown out of Pokémon yet either. It was not until 3rd or 4th grade that I officially branched out of the Nintendo market with my consoles (if we ignore a very brief stint with a PSP. Shoutout Ratchet and Clank). I was over at a friend’s house when he showed me Halo 3 for the first time in my life. All we did was ride around in Forge mode and shoot each other in Warthogs, but it was still an exhilarating experience. This was the start of a lifetime of Xbox gaming that would shape my childhood.
Playing At a Friend’s House:
That was not the only time I would get my hands on an Xbox controller before I officially owned one. I’m not even sure I remembered the name of the game after that night of playing Halo 3, but I sure did recognize it when I saw it on an older family friend’s TV at an Iron Bowl party. He set up a custom mini-game for me to play. One player was set up in a nest with a sniper rifle, while the other tried to ride across an obstacle course on a Mongoose (a small ATV-type vehicle). The sniper had to kill the guy on the Mongoose before he could beat the course. I remember being terrible at the game, but still having the time of my life. When my parents told me that I had to go, I probably broke down in tears (I was still very young, okay). At a later point, I visited a different friend’s house and had a gaming experience like none I had ever had. At school, he had told me about this zombie game that his brother had, and it sounded so scary but so fun. I had to play it. We got there, and his brother was at one of his friends’ houses so we could play whatever we wanted. My friend loaded up Left 4 Dead on his Xbox 360, and just from the starting screen I was starting to regret my decision. The game terrified me at the time, I had never played a game that was even remotely as scary as it. I remember him telling me about how scary Witches were. You would hear them before you saw them. The sound of a young girl crying on its own is enough to make me start sweating with fear, but when you find the source of it, it jumps up and starts clawing at your face with an almost certain chance of death for your character. He also told me about the hulking zombies called Tanks. There so big that they would pick up cars and throw them at you, and you could hear them pounding toward you from so far away. This led to me shaking so badly while we were playing it, that I could barely hold the controller. I do not think we ever beat a single level of the game that night. I am pretty sure I got too scared and asked to play a different game, but that was my first experience with any sort of game like that. Instead, we played through the demo for a game called Castle Crashers. It is safe to say we beat that demo 10 times in a single night. It was such a blast just going through the same mission over and over again. We would try it as one of the 4 different characters that were unlocked for the demo, then go back and pick a different character to do the next run with. After we started playing that game, we did not stop until we went to bed. After that night, I was convinced that I had to get an Xbox for myself.
My First Xbox:
Christmas morning, my 5th grade year of elementary school was hands-down my favorite Christmas ever. When I unwrapped the Star Wars Edition Xbox 360, I was so excited I could have done a triple backflip. It was painted to look like R2-D2, and made one of his noises whenever you would press a button on it. The controller that came with it was gold and painted to look like C-3PO. I turned it on, made my account, and settled on my very first Gamer Tag: Partybear3000. It was a reference to an episode of Adventure Time plus the number 3000 because it was sick. The 2 games that it came with were Kinect Star Wars, and Kinect Adventures. I spent the whole day stomping around as a Rancor and dancing in a Just Dance-esque mini-game to a song about Han Solo. Along with those, my parents also got me a copy of Halo 4. It was the newest one at the time, and I could not have been more excited. I became obsessed with this game. At school it would be all that I could think about. Me and my buddies in class made our own comic book series based on the game (I still have them, they were pretty sick). I can still walk through some of those maps in my head. They were printed onto the surface of my brain. The next game I remember playing on my new console was Assassin’s Creed 3. My parents rented it for me from Red Box (does anybody still use those?). I remember playing while my babysitter and my older sister watched me. I never actually fully owned that game, but it was so fun jumping through the trees and trying my best to sneak around and beat all of the missions. The reason I wanted it at all was because of all of the videos that Smosh and Tobuscus had made based on it. After that game I think I went back and played Halo Reach, because all my friends swore up and down that it was the best one. I cannot explain it, but for some reason, it did not just hit as hard as Halo 4 for me. Looking back at it now, I can confidently say that Halo Reach is a better game, but I think because Halo 4 was newer and shinier and it was the first one I owned, I could not enjoy Reach for what it was. The campaign was fantastic though, and still is to this day. Another game that I was obsessed with from this time was Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. This game single-handedly ruined my sleep schedule. Me and my best friend at the time would stay up for hours playing the Transit map on the Zombies mode. Whenever a DLC dropped for that game, and there was a new Zombies map to play on it was like a holiday. None of the Call of Duty games that came out after that were ever able to meet the obsession that I had over Black Ops 2. There were tons of other games I could go on about for paragraphs, but I will just drop them as a list of honorable mentions:
Minecraft, Castle Miner Z, Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, Battleblock Theater, and hundreds of others.
From Then On:
I think I was in 7th grade when I got my Xbox One. It came with Assassin’s Creed Unity, and Sunset Overdrive. I got online at the same time as one of my buddies, and we were both downloading Unity at the same time. The co-op multiplayer experience of that game was unmatched for me at the time. It was the first game in the franchise to bring in full 4-player co-op, and it was something I had been yearning for since I had been obsessed with Black Flag. Since I got the Xbox One, it was a bit of a downward spiral into what some would call an “addiction” that may or may not still carry over into my college gaming life. Games like Destiny, Halo, and Borderlands defined my childhood. Many kids my age took to sports and whatnot. I did too, but it really was not where my heart was. In 2021 I got my hands on an Xbox Series X, and I am still using it today. My taste in games has changed a lot since I was a kid. I still play shooters, but I prefer a game with some more depth to it as opposed to the arcade shooters I loved as a kid. I’ve developed a love for turn-based strategy games as well, and I’ll always have room for a solid story game. I grew out of a lot of things as I have grown up, but I do not think I will ever grow out of gaming. It will continue to grow with me.
