My Gaming History Part 1

Hi, i'm Phil, just a gamer who happens to write music for the best gaming site in the world, Giant Bomb. I have been playing games since I was like 5 years old. (Cue time travel music) I remember the first time I ever saw an arcade machine, Pac-Man in fact. My family was at the TG&Y in Lawrence, KS, I am pretty sure I was trying to get my parents to buy me a Star Wars action figure when I noticed these amazing sounds coming from a room by the checkout lanes. I went in and was blown away, games with these crazy colors and sounds. My dad had a pong machine, so to see these really amazing looking games in color was exciting. I had to play, and play I did.  As strange as it may sound.. I was a changed man..well kid. Pretty soon after we got an Atari 2600, my friends and I played the hell out of that thing. A few years later we upgraded to the new Atari 5200 with the most insane controller ever. Enjoyed that as well, but not to the same level as the 2600. At the time gaming was on the decline, my interest went away for a little while.

My return to gaming was the NES. I remember being at Oak Park Mall in Kansas City and the Kay-Bee Toys there had a promotional poster for this new system that had a Robot that came with it. Being a dreamer, I had hoped that R.O.B. would be your gaming buddy and help you out with stuff. Boy was I wrong. I had to find out, so I saved up all summer by mowing neighbor's lawns. Eventually I had enough to pickup my new system, when I got home I was treated to Super Mario Bros, I couldn't believe how amazing it looked. It had the graphics of the stand-up arcade machines, on top of that, the game was amazing. Again, my friends and I would talk for hours about the stuff we found in games like Zelda, Rygar, and how amazing Double Dribble was because it had an animation of your dunk. Wow, I am sounding really old, but I'm not...