When Virtual Became My Reality

I remember when I was young the first time I played a video game. It was as clear as my first memory (which was me at the age of two, waddling down the corridor like a drunken gymnast who failed at the splits, I was after pissing myself). It all started with a program called MS DOS and a game called Sim Farm. For those of you who don't know, Sim Farm was made by Maxis, which went on to make other custard cream-like addictions such as The Sims. Now I don't know why, but even at the age of Five when I played Sim Farm I never considered myself ever to be the farmer type, it just wasn't in my blood. Yet making a 256 colour, 2-D, ever failing farm was intoxicating, I just HAD to spray more and more pesticide to keep my strawberries safe (although if this was reality, my strawberries would probably kill someone or many someone's with the insane amount of pesticide I used).

So Sim Farm was basically my introduction to the gaming world. The next step was when a little grey box that you plugged little grey boxes into Jack Bauer'ed it's way into my life. The Super Nintendo. If Sim Farm was an addiction, this would the the creation that should've made me go into video game rehab. Super Mario World dominated my life for some time, it was sort of the stem of my retarded video game flower. I couldn't get enough of going from level to level stomping, flying, eating, destroying castles, killing koopa kids, rescuing an inept princess who can't even bake a cake without a life threatening situation becoming involved:

"Actually, it's quite disturbing if you think of it realistically"

So Mario played a large part in destroying my social life at my early age. However the next part of my video  game life played (anyone see the pun here!?) a cosmological  obsession in my life that changed how I perceived dimensions in game and also what I (disturbingly, but not dangerously...I think...) drew. It was a new game for the PC and I think it's one everyone knows, it brought "doom" to my social life (I'm having so much PUN!!! writing these):

"Black Friday at Walmart"

If you didn't get it from the pun you're pretty stupid. Anyways, Doom brought violence in video games into my life. Unlike Mario which did it in a subtle way, Doom literally let you blow up creatures into giblets right in front of you, it was an orgy of violence that filled an insatiable pit and left you wanting more. It sounds so sadistic (maybe this game is what made me sadistic) but every time you came across a new enemy you always wondered what it would like after firing a rocket into their face, which often resulted in variations of half-eaten gone off hamburgers from McDonald's. And it was in 3-D, something I had never seen before (well.... apart from reality). So it was just totally Oreo Cookie in my life (it means awesome). However there was one more game that would solidify the very moment when I began wishing video game was reality. You could say it was a "Legend of" a game. And it totally "Zelda"'d my life (ok maybe that wasn't a good one.... nor did it make sense).

"Nintendo: Buy now and exchange €50 for your soul!"

The Goddam Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Renowned world over as the greatest video game ever created, it could make me breakfast it was so amazing (although, it never did :( ). This game shattered my barrier of video game reality and  actual reality, it absorbed me like Brian Cowen absorbs debt. It was my new reality. Any time I stopped playing, it would be like my world was The Sims, I'd eat, I'd talk some sort of gibberish to the neighbours, I'd pee on the floor and cry, I'd develop some sort of ability to accidentally create fires all the time, until I hit pause and went back to reality in Hyrule.

Of course there's many games in between all of those and after, but these were the asteroid hits to my brain and have left large impact craters. But good impact craters, not like the one that got rid of Velociraptors. They have left me with memories more fond than a snack box after a night out and more real than Michael Jackson's nose (although, that's not really hard to achieve), video games are just Oreo Cookie.