Achieving peak gamer in the '90s wasn't just a classist comfort, but one that painted being American as a cornerstone of the ultimate gaming experience.Īfter a few years my mom and I inherited my dad's desktop hand-me-downs so my mom could learn CAD programs for her work and I could write bad stories on floppy disks. 'Meet new friends you didn't know you had when you share your interests and hobbies,' purred its ad copy.

But ImagiNation was only available in the US, and at the time, I lived in Singapore. At 10 years old I plowed through male pattern baldness advertorials so I could learn more about the ImagiNation Network, which allowed you to meet and play with real people online. Subscription pages for internet service providers flanked painfully worded ads for male virility aids. By spending so much time trying to follow my dad's journey through the personal computer age, his game paraphernalia took on a near-talismanic quality.Ĭopies of Leisure Suit Larry and fratty computer magazines were part of my technological coming-of-age. I'd lurk in his computer room and soak things up like an annoying sponge. But to get valuable Space Quest time, I'd patiently watch him run 18 holes in Links or defrag a disk. King's Quest and Day of the Tentacle became a conduit to his sense of humor-we tackled them side-by-side, co-op style. These are some of my fondest memories of the home computer, because it extended the bubble beyond my father and myself and I could be excited about games with people my age.īefore Diablo I'd mostly watched my dad play the non-raunchy parts of Space Quest. Crowding around to watch a grown-up face off against The Butcher was magical-an atmosphere of visceral terror among adolescent kids who were witnessing a legend for the first time. Sometimes he'd give them a go, and I seized every chance to explore Tristram myself. For many people these were still baby times, and I was very much a baby user.Ĭonfined to one shared machine, learning about games was a slow, osmotic process, watching and waiting for your turn at the monitor.Īs one of the few kids in school with a computer, friends would come over to gawk at my dad playing Diablo. The computer was still an intimate experience for new users who were excited about games and the fabled information superhighway (or even just the static blare of the dial-up modem). These were the days before broadband and Steam and today's ubiquitous personalization features. In the early '90s I was old enough to sit still in front of a monitor on my own.

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