I lack most of the videogame culture my peers have. And that’s due to my parents.

So, where do I begin to tell? I’ve been chasing the videogame dream ever since I was little, and probably every little child born in the new millennium did so, reasonably, as arcade cabinets were slowly but surely conceding the crown to the home consoles of that time. Not only that, but the technological progress was so fast, I could only feel excited for every new videogame ad that was served to me, in random electronics shops or via the television.

And… I did start gaming, or did I?

Heh, not so simple. You see, back when I was little I had no videogame consoles, or rather, I didn’t even have the “cheap games” they gave out to children when they ordered their super unhealthy (but fun, at the time) Happy Meal at McDonald’s. My parents were strict with me: videogames are a waste of time, I should focus on productive stuff. Mind you, I was three.

It later became that every kind of play was a waste of time, but for that we need to approach elementary school.

The first lost PlayStation

At around age four (if I remember correctly, which I am sure I don’t) I received, as a gift, my first PlayStation. It was 2004, the PlayStation 1 was already old but I didn’t know better - my cousins had the first PlayStation too, so I accepted the offer. This console was also already modchipped, but the modchip was one of the early ones (those early chips which always send subchannel data even after the initial query, or in other words, unusable for Spyro 3 and later PlayStation games) so my experience was pretty limited to old games (stuff like the first Crash Bandicoot, to be precise.)

My parents, soon after bringing the console back home, confiscated it from me. I wasn’t allowed to play, remember? They didn’t want the others to notice how strict they were with me, and that’s the only reason why I was allowed to accept the gift. It sucked. And then, who’ll buy games for me? My father? Fat chance, he was even more convinced than my mother that videogames are a waste of time. Things would never be easy, would they?

Eventually, my mother collapsed under the marvel of having a home console and she noticed that, with the initial stack of games I was gifted, there was one game which was of a movie she liked a ton: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Yuck. However, now I was allowed to have said console around me, at the sole condition that I watch her play. Double yuck.

Things went about like this until she got stuck on a level she couldn’t complete, and then she grew tired of it and back onto the depths of our home the PlayStation went. I didn’t piece it together then, and it seemed to me that probably other parents did the same with their kids too, but this was abusive behaviour and I was already a victim back then.

I eventually turned six years old, and into elementary school I went. Other kids were having their parents gift them Xbox 360s, and the Nintendo Wii was about to come out. I still didn’t know any better, and by that time I could achieve some hours of play from my own PlayStation 1; hours of play in two years worth of ownership time.

Now imagine how embarassing it is to ask if, say, the latest games were available for the first PlayStation; by that time my peers were playing games with immersive stories whereas I was still playing Crash Bandicoot 1, without any memory card and with one hour tops of playtime, after which my mother would come and unplug the PlayStation to hide it in some shady compartment of our house. Or in other words I was always playing the same levels, and I was forced to speedrun them if I wanted to have even just a glance on what the game had to offer next; and then, it was always darkness and me crying because I wanted to know how a certain game, or story, progressed.

The forbidden Xbox

Holiday season 2006 is when I received my second home console, courtesy of a random stranger who happened to be a friend of my mother: an Xbox, no modchips, just 12 original but second-hand and badly scratched games. Some did still load so whatever. I was gifted this, predictably, on Christmas, and by December 26th the console was nowhere to be found. Not even a day of figuring out how the console worked. Great!

At that point my parents told me that if I wanted to play games I had to get excellent grades every time, and that by doing so I could choose a console to play and they would allow me one hour of play every week, in weekends only, and only if I got consistently excellent grades at school every day - meaning that if for a week I didn’t get any grades because teachers won’t test me on anything, it counted as a week I couldn’t play anything despite it not being my fault. And that hour? It was by the clock; I was expected to setup the console (they won’t have me leaving it plugged and ready), play the game (only one), and unplug everything within that hour. A minute late meant that I would be grounded for months at a time.

By the time I was eight, I played a bunch of very rare times (because their demands were rarely achievable by someone who struggled to study), and expectedly I grew tired of this whole situation, so I lost interest in games, associating them with me being abused and grounded every time.

I accepted a life of books, upon books, upon books, upon whatever my parents watched on television, upon more books. And said books were school textbooks anyway. Basically I was expected to study, and eventually I just embraced that expectation (because I was forced to). The PlayStations, Xboxes, Nintendo Wiis, DSes, PSPs, PS Vitas I saw in the hands of my peers, and the games they played, the titles they were interested in, were nothing I could ever have for myself. I couldn’t even have my own stuff at that point.

However, every holiday season, every other birthday, every other easter, every other celebration, I saw my cousins, my uncles, my schoolmates, my childhood friends, being gifted videogames and game consoles, and every time I tried to ask a videogame for myself I was only gifted clothes (which were shitty in style and didn’t even last long).

Then my brother was born, I was eleven years old. My parents were giving my consoles to him, and he destroyed the hell out of them. He wasn’t even one year old at that point!

Bring Mii pain

When my brother was one year old, I was twelve, and the Wii U was about to hit the shelves. My parents didn’t know any better, but they bought a Nintendo Wii “for the two of us”, except that my brother was allowed to play everytime he wanted, even if he was still a little toddler, and I was only expected to watch over him while he played.

My father wouldn’t buy either of us any games for the Wii, so one year later I just softmodded it to test my luck. The softmod went smoothly, except that my parents noticed it (I forgot to hide the Homebrew Channel to the far right of the channels list) and now they were ordering me to pirate each and every game my brother wanted to play, and that I was expected to “play with him more” since I was so considerate to softmod “his” console (wait, wasn’t this for the two of us?)

The Minecraft chronicles

Tired about it, I turned my attention to computers and programming. I needed to have fun, in a way, so that’s how I began coding. Eventually I discovered Minecraft, which was a game for PC that the laptop I had (borrowed from my father) could (barely) run - and so I cracked it. Didn’t want to get spotted, but after some time they spotted me and I had to tell them that I was running a server (indeed I was already that deep) and selling paywalled content to other children (I wasn’t) to make some money (I wasn’t making any, I just wanted to play with my friends!). They saw the “business potential” of my choice, and they wanted me to show them “how much I earned”. Luckily, Amazon was having price errors all the time, and they put their own Fire tablet thingy at 50 euros by accident, so I wasted said euros to buy it to them while pretending that was worth more (it was, but by not so much more) and that I bought it with money I made off my server. That’ll silence them for a bit, I thought; but eventually my brother had the better of it and I was forced to “let him play too” which meant that I was effectively only allowed to play at night when he was sleeping, and at daytime he was being aggressive towards my friends on purpose because that’s what you do when you’re five and you’re forced shitty YouTube content by your parents “to keep you distracted because you’re hyperactive”.

Other brotherly pain

Some years later, my brother wanted the Wii U. They sourced it for him only. I don’t remember which age I was on this one, sorry. I only remember that he was in elementary school by then, which roughly puts me at age 17. By that time he also wanted a PlayStation 2 because he broke my PlayStation 1 and he couldn’t play some older games I had (Crash Bash afaik) and they sourced it too, just for him; and I was ordered to softmod it and let him play. So I had to softmod a console with no prior experience and I couldn’t even reap the benefits myself, after having my own console destroyed. This felt like dying and being pissed on the grave.

There’s a light at the end

At about the same time, I scavenged my high school and my friends’ places for computer parts, and I frankenstein’d both a computer for me and a homeserver for my other projects. I could play Minecraft without it being a slideshow, and I made sure I had the time of my life (at night, though, when parents aren’t watching). Finally, I could play something alone, on something that I put together, and those moments sparked an interest in PC gaming. That same year I opened my Steam account, because now I had a half-decent personal computer. (It wasn’t any decent compared to the gaming setups of 2017.)

Early 2019, I was finally of age! This meant that I could do whatev- oh wait, my computer’s GPU broke because it’s been in service for a decade and then some, in some other office computers before mine, and now it’s overheating and the fan is grinding on the metal part of the cooler. I need to take advantage of this situation! And so, I convinced my father to buy me a fancy, professional graphics card that was in no way related to videogames, I promise. Except that it was a Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 SE with 8 GB of RAM, back when 8 GB of RAM was plenty and my PC barely had 4 GB of total memory. Time to hit Steam in secr- oh wait, yeah, my parents don’t really give me any money, what do? Okay, the seven seas it is!

Given, my CPU was still an Intel Pentium, I couldn’t afford to run anything my peers could run on their PS4’s, Xbox Ones, or other PCs, but finally I could try something too! With potato graphics, 640x480 resolution and all set to low, but I was waiting my whole life for something besides early PlayStation platformers or block-shaped sandboxes. My parents eventually noticed, but it was too late. I was an adult, and now I couldn’t be grounded in the same way they grounded me when I was little - still, they would whine at me for “having set all of this up alone without considering my brother on it” which meant that I had to distract him because, by then, he also destroyed his PS2 and Wii U. It’s just that I wouldn’t have it that way; instead, I insisted that they bought another console to him, something more modern that could run the games I was running - a PlayStation 4. Except that a PlayStation 4 could run every last game I was interested in in glorious, gorgeous detail and fluidity, so I ended up snatching a gamepad too (just in case my brother broke his own) and, with the excuse of him being violent to his PS4 at day, I would “ground him” to have his console with me at nighttime, pair my controller and play decently.

This way I could play some of the classics: Persona 5, Gravity Rush, Portal, Portal 2, the Yakuza series to name a few.

The remorse

So, the case is closed? Not quite.

2019 was the time Sony looked back at their catalogue, and they decided to remaster Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon; I wasn’t ready, because if, up until then, this battle was about getting the right to access videogames at all as some ordinary kid (then adolescent then adult), now the real battle is gaining everything my parents kept me out of: videogame culture. I never looked back to what I missed: sometimes games I technically even had on hand, sometimes the games my classmates or cousins were talking about. There’s tons of games I never even had the opportunity to check, but they’re cult classics now!

So, the mission has been to play said titles, however I can, meaning that if a remaster or remake pops up I might play that since now I have a computer that’s capable of playing games, but most stuff I know is locked and forgotten inside old consoles - heck, even my old and broken PS1 could be of service here (but I lost it to my brother, RIP.) - and what do I do with all of this? I set out to source the consoles myself, whenever I get the opportunity.

I know, deep down, that I couldn’t possibly get all the time I need to recover everything I lost in videogame culture, but at least I’ll call myself happy after I finished playing the most important pieces of it, from start to finish.

Next in this series: how my boyfriend gifted me a PS2 slim one year ago, and the steps to bring it to 2025. (Soon)