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I like to tell people that my first game console was the original gray Game Boy, because it's still current enough in the collective mind to resonate.

Though more accurately, my humble Gaming beginnings were cultivated on an old PC, pre-Pentium.

Last chapter I talked about having early access to gadgets and devices at home. One of the most important device milestone in my life was when my parents bought our first personal computer.

We had a close relative who ran a custom PC-building business since the 1980s. He offered to help build a machine for us at a discounted family and friends fee.

So 8-year-old me watched my uncle open up big cardboard boxes and put several box-like things together.

After all of that was done, he handed over a smaller plastic case.

"... and this is all the fun stuff", he winked.

Once upon a time there was a storage medium called the 5.25" floppy disk.

and on these disks that look like mini vinyl records are 0s and 1s that formed a big part of my childhood entertainment.

Our computer ran on MS-DOS, so it took several rounds of trial-and-error to figure out the command prompts that would launch files off of these disks (built-in manuals are our friends!).

A:\>Klax.exe

and press Enter on the keyboard.

One of my favorite DOS games at the time was called Klax. It's basically like playing Tetris while lying in bed - the tiles fall towards you at an angle, and you need to stack like-colors together to cancel them out.

This was a very difficult game for me at the time, but everyone in my family enjoys a good challenge so we kept playing Klax even though we didn't have a good winning strategy for a very long time.

and that's what Gaming is - it lures us in with a seemingly-solvable challenge, dial it up to 11, and always leaves us yearning for more.

We may not be very good at it, but we loved it, and we always came out of a session frustrated with joy (complex emotions +1).

A few years later, my uncle told us it was time for an operating systems upgrade.

Welcome to Windows 3.1!

There is an interactive tutorial mode in Windows 3.1 that I played like a game. You follow the on-screen instructions to click here and there, trying out the various features of the OS.

I played it every day for months.

Several times, I got stuck and didn't know what to do to move forward. My parents didn't either, so we kept turning the machine off and back on again.

(PSA: cold booting should not be attempted at this frequency, and not over a Windows tutorial)

This OS gave me a few more games to play around with, such as Minesweeper (I couldn't figure out how this game worked for years) and Solitaire (I liked clicking on the back of cards for the animation, like the sun wearing sunglasses).

Along with this new OS upgrade, my uncle also installed a second floppy disk drive onto our computer. This time, the disk became smaller, with a metal flap that should have been rebranded as the Original Fidget Toy.

This time, my favorite game on the size-reduced floppy disk was Bubble Bobble.

It is a platformer with endless stream of fruits and enemies, special-skill bubbles to trap them, and a dragged-out lesson to teach kids how to spell the word "EXTEND".

My family fought over screen time every night so that we could each try to beat the previous high score.

If you recall from my last Gaming post, my dad is the actual game champion in my household. There was a period when my sister and I stopped playing Bubble Bobble because it seemed to never end, and we were losing interest.

However, my father persevered. One evening he suddenly shouted at the computer. We went over and found that he has reached Level 100 (the Final stage).

I still have not beaten my dad's record.

These games accompanied me throughout my childhood, like that teddy bear that became tattered or the safety blanket that started to smell because we refused to wash our scent off of it.

Whenever I think about Games, I think about those binaries and pixels that traveled from their floppy disk homelands in order to perform captivating dances on my screen,

to provide us reprieve from the daily grind, and to carve out a space where we are always welcomed.

-------------------------- # To Be Continued # --------------------------

This is Part 2 of my on-going series about Gaming and how games impact lives.

Do you have a gaming story you'd like to share? Comment or DM me :) I'd love to hear them!

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