Five Video Games That Have Affected My Life

Ah, the fresh smell of a new 4cr gig. How can I introduce myself to all of you as a new writer and artist? How about delving deep into my psyche and revealing my innermost thoughts and desires? A long look at my childhood and how I became the man I am today? A heartfelt introspective look at what it means to be a mere mortal in these trying times?

Naw, how about a good old fashioned video game list. Yep, that sounds nice. Without further ado, here are ‘Five Video Games That Have Affected My Life’.

5: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!

You know, I was this close to including Super Mario Bros. as the first game on the list. Super Mario has always influenced me. I have drawn Mario many, many times as an artist. I have grown up playing all of his games. I saw the Wizard in theaters. I eat fruity cheerios because the taste reminds me of Nintendo cereal. I even wear t-shirts based off of him. Yet, there’s this problem… Mario is too obvious an answer.  Perhaps it’s best not to talk about him.

So instead let’s talk about Punch-Out!!. The very first video game system I had was the NES. I think I obtained it in 1987. If that was the case, I was three years old. My mother’s cousin, a veterinarian, had a copy of the machine, with R.O.B even. You know, the most loved accessory of all time that Funcoland (which is now Gamestop) wouldn’t even buy off of us. But this cousin realized he had no time to play video games. He was too busy saving the lives of puppies and kittens. And lucky me, I was given the best hand-me-down known to mankind. My father set up the machine in our basement, on a dinky television and I wanted to play a lot. I want to say that I wanted to play too much, but there is no such thing as playing video games too much. Let’s not kid ourselves.

But I was three. Heck, let’s give the story the benefit of the doubt and say it was 1988, which would make me four. Now give a child that old a video game controller, and you’re going to learn the exact same thing you were probably thinking. Babies can’t play video games. So my father often played the games with me, including Gyromite, Mickey’s Mouscapades (which even as a little toddler, I knew sucked), and Punch Out!!. But you see, while I was able to defeat Glass Joe no problem, it was characters like Bald Bull that terrified me. I mean HORRIFIED. Whenever we got up to Bald Bull, my dad would have to take over and try to knock him out while he charged at the screen. But me? I was so afraid, that I hid behind the couch, peaking my head out, and prayed to god that the turkish monstrosity would have a digital seizure, fall to the floor, and quickly die. Maybe during round two before Little Mac got his head punched so hard that his teeth would start shooting out of his ears. Unfortunately, not even game genie could grant my wish.

This was one of my earliest childhood memories in regard to video games. I remember later in life the room that once had my crib turned into my playroom, and the television moved into there. We bought a couch from IKEA, plopped it in front of the television, and all my friends would eventually come and hang out to play such classics as Mega Man, and such catastrophes as Cavemen Games. But this memory of Punch-Out!! affected me in that it gave me a good relationship with my parents. My father didn’t only tolerate the game, but he played the thing when I couldn’t, just so I could see what would happen next. Heck, during college when I bought an NES on ebay, one of the games I got was Punch-Out!!. When my dad saw the copy, he immediately remembered it and began to play it once again. I think he got stuck on King Hippo though. Whatever, he’s no Balboa. It was time to retire his boxing career.

4: Sonic The Hedgehog

Before I begin this one, let us take a breath of relief that this is not included because it influenced me into becoming a furry. I am not. Whew! Crisis averted. But man, did I love the hell out of this hedgehog. In a totally, “you’re my best fictional male friend and I would totally hail a cab for you home if you got really drunk one night during Tails’ 21st birthday party” bromance kind of love and not, “Let’s take off each other’s clothes because I need you” kind of love.

When I was in grade school, my parents worked on opening up their own retail store, and as a present for me in helping them they bought me a Game Gear. I became incredibly obsessed with the machine. it was like Game Boy, but in color! And it only lasted about three hours until we needed new batteries, but come on! Color! And a backlight! However, it wasn’t enough, I wanted a Genesis. By the time I was about nine, what did I get for the holidays? Yippie! A Genesis! But we couldn’t afford any games. Boo! Almost always, we rented video games, and one of the most rented was Sonic The Hedgehog 2.

Fast forward a little bit. That store my parents made? It was across the street from a comic book store, and this was around the time that Archie comics began to release Sonic The Hedgehog comic series. I began to read and collect the heck out of these things. It was a comic story that I followed from the start, and didn’t get lost from the convoluted mess that the 1990s Marvel and DC comics would call a plot. Besides, to learn the “actual” story of the characters I watched on the television that I just so happen to control? Fascinating!

As a result, Sonic The Hedgehog became the character I would draw all the time. All the kids in school began to ask me to draw Sonic for them, and sometimes they thought that was ALL I could draw. Stupid jocks who were stronger than me and could beat me up if i didn’t draw for them, I could totally doodle a Ninja Turtle too! You just never asked! My childhood friend and I began to make our own comic series called “The Adventures Of Spunky and Stinky,” where Spunky looked like Knuckles the Echidna, and Stinky may or may not have been a clone of Stimpy.

Yeah…

We would contemplate where the plot went, why they were fighting crimes, and why they were even friends in the first place (Answer: because I said so). Sonic was one of the pop culture icons that began to trigger my creative mind, and was in fact one of the first comics I ever made. When I was in college for art, I was horrified to learn my mother saved a Sonic The Hedgehog fancomic I made, all faded and mildewy from age.

But perhaps I never would’ve followed comics or art in general, if it wasn’t for Sonic.

3: Sam and Max Hit The Road

Now I might be wrong, but I think I got a Sam and Max/Day Of The Tentacle bundle as a part of a CD-ROM set included with a computer my family bought. That or I was the smartest window shopper in history. I could tell you that those games are amazing and hilarious, but let’s face it. You probably already know that. Then there was a television series that did okay, though it never felt right because Sam and Max’s voices were off. But whatever. These were two characters I enjoyed so much, that when I was around twelve or thirteen years old, I found the e-mail of Steve Purcell, e-mailed him, and got a response. Twice.

The fact that the creator of these characters took the time to respond to a little boy was nothing short of admirable. Like if that dork of a kid wasn’t me, and was another little tyke, and I heard about it, I would’ve gone, “What a good lad that bloke is, pip pip cheerio.” But because it was me, it triggered something in my head. It wanted me to one day do something memorable like him, and as such I have begun to try and find my own “Sam and Max.”

2: Pokemon

Now this one is something I’m a bit embarrassed about. So let’s get it out in the open and accept that I not only played the game, which of course was a very good RPG, but I watched the show also. While the game did come out when I was in middle school, which is an appropriate age to pick up the game… The cartoon began around 6:30am right before school. Except, you know, I was starting freshman year of high school. Uhhhh, I’m pretty sure I was smidge out of the show’s age demographic. What was I supposed to do? I needed something to wake me up, and I hated those early morning radio shows. So Pokemon remained on while I got dressed for class, setting in stone that I was never to get a date that school year. But here’s something that’s really crazy. One day I said to myself, “This is going to be big.”

I knew Pokemon was going to be huge, right when it was starting. I said, “I should make a website off of Pokemon… But everyone is going to focus on the good guys, or the Pokemon themselves… I should focus on the bad guys.”

And what happened? I ended up creating a website called Team Rocket Headquarters. Not only was this a Team Rocket website, it became, without a doubt, the most popular Team Rocket website of its time. And not only that, it was probably in the top ten most popular Pokemon websites of them all. It became an instant success. I mean I even got the attention of Team Rocket’s voice actors to do interviews with me… However, I was only fourteen.

While I received free Pokemon merchandise from anime companies that had partial rights to the intellectual property (like Viz Communications for example), there were things that got too crazy for me to handle. First thing, this was back when the internet was pretty expensive, and my hosting bills ended up around $200 a month. Most fourteen year olds don’t have that kind of money. As a result, I began hoping around different servers, trying to find a good home for it.

The next problem was learning how to deal with anonymity online. When you’re a kid (or manchild) and you’ve got a successful website, you’re going to get people that treat you like garbage. This was only intensified when you open a forum for people to talk in, and when they start saying racist or anti-religious things… A little voice inside your head knows this isn’t really appropriate. You try to keep things civil, but it’s only going to blow up in your face. Majority of the forum will turn you into the bad guy, because you’re ruining their freedom of speech. Because Pokemon fans that are no older than fifteen really understand what freedom of speech really means. This is kind of hard to handle when you’re a teenager who is dealing with normal “coming of age” drama. Picture coming home after a long day from school and you want to just relax, but when you go online, what welcomes you? Thousands of strangers wishing you were dead! Ouch. By 2000, I realized I could not handle the site. I was becoming a jerk just to defend myself, people were douchebag idiots to me, and it was no longer fun. Plus it cost money! I told the world the site was closing up shop, a forum member who I was on good terms with asked me if she could keep the forum alive elsewhere, and I said, “Yeah. I don’t own a forum, because I think a forum is made up of the people, not the founder.” And guess what, the forum is still kind of alive today.

Weird.

How did this affect me? Near the end I began drawing my own comics, and I felt a great sense of accomplishment in coming up with my own ideas, rather than gaining attention for someone else’s. I continued to draw my own comics, despite them being absolutely awful, and soon enough, I was an online cartoonist. Not a big one. Not a talented one, but one that realized he wanted to do something creative for a living, and applied to an art school the following year. I went to art school in the fall of 2002.

Thank you Pokemon. I think…

1: Grand Theft Auto 4

I hope you just made a face that made you go, “How in the hell did this game affect your life?” Well, believe it or not, when I graduated college, I began to do odd jobs. I worked at Apple for a bit, had a few internships at animation studios, and then about a year out of college, got one of my first “real” full time jobs at Rockstar Games.

I worked on Grand Theft Auto IV. Hell, my VOICE is in GTA4. I voiced one of the people in the bowling alleys. One of the easiest sentences to find me? I shout “STEEEEEEERIIIKE!” when a chubby bowler knocks ten pins over. If you start beating him up, I might go “Does anybody see this?”

In other words, I have an idea of what it’s like to work in the video game industry. And let me tell you, it can be rather difficult. While some days you’re going to work the standard 9-10 hours, there are going to be tons more where you’re working a lot more. Now this became a problem for me when I would get home around 1am, eat some food, and then drink caffeine to stay awake to work on freelance assignments. I ended up working around 18-20 hours per weekday, often working on the weekend, and boy was I feeling sick.

I was getting depressed, and sometimes would lose my cool way too easily. I lost a few friendships where I was at fault. I gained a bunch of weight, and I was struggling to have any life other than work on video games. Aside from a steady paycheck, life was not good. Near the end of my run at the company, I got hired by a children’s book publisher to be one of their illustrators. It was at that moment I realized I had to pick one or the other. Do I continue in the video game industry, and work my way up? Or do I quit, and become a full time freelancer, following my passion.

The decision was easy. I told my boss I was giving him my two weeks, which ended up being a six week notice, because he asked me to stay there until the game was released. I agreed. The Friday after the game came out, he escorted me to HR for my exit interview and said to me, “It feels like we’re on Survivor island and you just got voted off. But instead you just won the grand prize.” We were all tired and burnt out. He wanted to be a writer and do more with his own creativity, but sometimes you’re dealt a hand that prevents you to play the game a certain way. The hand I was dealt allowed me to move on quicker than others.

But for me, of all games, Grand Theft Auto 4 was the thing that helped push me in the right direction in my life.

While the recession followed later that year and I lost some clients during it, I do not regret my decision. Money fluctuates, but happiness will always be more important, to me anyway. That stage of my life helped me focus on what I wanted to do with my time. Sure, I might sometimes make less than what I was with video games, but man oh man, did I ever gain a lot more as a person. The experience was necessary for me to mature as a human being.

So now you know a bit about me, and hopefully this made you think a little. Like, can you think of any games that actually affected your life to make you the person you are now?

Share your stories!
Or go play video games instead. It’s all good!

-J