Stories of video gaming and family

[J T]

I like when people tell stories about gaming with their family members, and how it helped them to connect, or led to sibling rivalries, helped them through a difficult time, or just baffled their parents with their obsession. Whatever it may be, if you have a good story about gaming with your family, please feel free to share it.

[ElkinFencer10]

When I was about 5, my mom and I were moving, and I kept getting in her way, so she said "Hey Stephen, here's this Nintendo I won on Jeopardy a few years ago that's just been collecting dust. Play this and quit being annoying." Nearly 20 years later, I blame her for my obesity, anti-social tendencies, and not insignificant debt.

[MrPopo]

Your mom was on Jeopardy?

[ElkinFencer10]

Your mom was on Jeopardy?

Yeah, in early 1992. I was only a few months old. She placed third - she went against a journalist and some physicist or something - and her consolation prize was the NES that's currently sitting in my game room. Pretty damn good consolation price IMO.

[MrPopo]

So when I was a kid I tended to play by myself, rather than engaging with the other children. As my parents found out I'm much smarter than my peers and I'm a big introvert, so I was happy to do my own thing and move at my own pace. So my mom got me an NES so that I would use it to socialize with the other children.

Needless to say, that was a bit of a backfire.

[foxhound1022]

^ This was kind of the same with my parents as well. Also, they had to come up with different punishments than, "Go to your room".

[Tanooki]

I got nothing my dad avoided it at all costs. I know my mom and her friend had fairchild 2's back in the day only because I found them and played the hell out of it in the garage for years growing up on a spare TV I setup in our third car garage I made into a clubhouse of sorts. Other than that I know I've caught her having interest in the original SMB back in the 80s and a passing interest in Pac-Man/Ms Pac-Man then and into the future (usually using the MS Arcade version on a computer) but at least she tried. Some years later my brother got her a DS with some games, she seemed to barely get that kind of Super Mario, but did enjoy the adult stuff (picross, brain age 1 and 2, big brain academy, mahjong, and crosswords) in bed before going to sleep in the evening. None of us ever played games together or anything.

[Xeogred]

My sister once erased my 101% (or whatever the max was) complete file on DKC2. Think she did this with Super Mario World as well. I don't think it was intentional as she was 5. But still.

I've already mentioned this in the SNES anniversary thread, but that's the console where my dad and I connected the most. He's a musician and has otherwise kind of ridiculed my hobby most of my life, but we had some good times there. It's thanks to him and some friends that I discovered weirder games like Lemmings, Lost Vikings, Out of This World, Flashback, etc. Games I was a bit too young to fully figure out myself until I played a bunch with him and his friends. We were also very obsessed with Super Ghouls n' Ghosts, and that was one I owned. Heck, thinking about it now I think it was one of the rare times my dad bought a game for himself somewhat.

To this day, I can picture my dad and his friend putting a ruler or piece of paper up to the TV to measure and calcuate out the Lemming's stair building direction and projectory.

My dad and I beat Actraiser together, since I couldn't really fully read much at that point, he did the reading and I did the gaming. It's fascinating because of the HEAVY religious overtones in this game and my dad was a psycho Christian back then, so I'm shocked we beat that together looking back on it and he didn't seem to care.

Dad fell out of it until the PS2 dropped, when it came out his best friend (whom has always been a big gamer and gave me Blaster Master as a kid, then bought me Perfect Dark for no reason, such an awesome dude!)... he brought over his PS2 when it was new and we played Madden 2001, Track & Field, and SSX. We all loved it, even though something like Track & Field is something I'd never bother with nowadays, at the time it was crazy to see the graphics and all that. My dad got so obsessed with SSX, he bought a PS2 for it and the PS2 was the "family system". As you can guess, it eventually became mine. That is until we moved again at one point and he aggressively wanted it back in the living room or something, so that's when I got a slim.

I actually never owned a PSX growing up though, so the PS2 was my way to play a ton of JRPG's and whatnot. Previously I loaned my friend my N64 for his PSX for a long time. And I somehow scored tons of PSX games growing up, still a lot of black label editions. I traded a skateboard for FF7 which seems hilarious to me. Kind of like trading people Pokemon cards (that I never bought) for N64 games.

Had a different family situation when I was super young (1-4), so I actually gamed a LOT with my grandpa which was awesome. We played Battletoads and TMNT3 the most... we beat TMNT3 all the time. I wonder who else can say they beat a beat em' up with grandpa heh. I was spoiled and was able to rent games constantly, which was usually Battletoads or Mega Man games. He also loved Dr Mario and Tetris, they eventually got an SNES so they had that and Super Mario All Stars I think. We were both neck and neck when it came to Dr Mario. My grandpa actually like DKC so much when I showed him it, he asked to borrow it once. I bet if I had exposed him to more growing up or he tried more games out, he would have been really into it. At least the 8-16bit era. Great times.

I don't think my mom could beat 1-1 in SMB1. To this day she sometimes has trouble turning on a computer. Tech and mom don't mix.

[Exhuminator]

I've been gaming for 34 years so I have stories.

A quick one... I first bought a Wii in 2011. I played it a lot with my daughter from 2011-12. Then we didn't play it much. In 2015 I was uninstalling junk off the Wii, and started going through the calendar clearing out system notification entries. But then I came across an entry I hadn't seen before:

"Hey daddy I love you!"

My daughter had left that note on the Wii calendar three years prior, and I didn't even know it. If I hadn't been OCD cleaning out the Wii's memory, I never would have found it.

All the feels.


And JT if you've never read this...

http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/a-t ... -crossing/

[J T]

That story about your daughter is super sweet Exhuminator. And yes, I have read that Animal Crossing story. I actually had that story in mind when I started this thread. It's so touching.

Here's a few of my own funny memories. I was obsessed with video games as a kid, even more than I am now. My friends had to have a mini intervention with me at one point because I could turn any conversation topic back to videogames and they were frustrated because they couldn't talk about anything else when I was around.
"Oh so the Bronco's won the game last night? That reminds me of this game of Tecmo Bowl I was playing where..."
"Oh, that's a real interesting newspaper article, it makes me think of playing Paper Boy when..."
"You guys want to go to the skate park? You should have seen some of the moves I did in Skate or Die last night..."

Anyway, yeah, I was irritating. My parents got the worst of it though since they had to live with me and had zero interest in video games. I was constantly trying to explain why the graphics in Ninja Gaiden were such an AMAZING advancement, or why the music in Gumshoe was SOOO infectiously good. It was a constant battle of them feeling like they had feigned interest enough that they should be able to leave, and me not feeling satisfied that they truly "got it" and feeling like I had to further explain until their enthusiasm reached the same level as mine (spoiler: it never did).

I did eventually convince my mom to play Lady Bug on the Colecovision at one point though, and she got into it. She played more and more, and one night stayed up well into the wee hours of the night getting to the horse radish level and playing for high scores. For those that don't know, each level of Lady Bug has a different fruit or vegetable, and horse radish is the last level, which just repeats infinitely. It plays at a super high speed. My moms was hella good. This quickly made me realize the problem with trying to get my parents to care about video games though: I had to share. Suddenly their disinterest in my main hobby was welcome.