Memory Leak Lane: When foxes flew and real men were robots

Set the scene around 1984 at a busy bowling alley. Uninterested in the ball and pin action, a young girl begs a fist full of quarters from her father and walks with purpose past the rumble and crash of the lanes. Upon reaching the snack bar, she commandeers a bar stool and maneuvers it through a pair of glass doors into the darkness beyond. Shoving it up to a brightly painted game cabinet and seating herself, feet dangling, the girl feeds the machine some change and dedicates the next hour to knocking enemy knights mounted upon vultures from the sky and fleeing in panic from a pterodactyl.



As a little kid, I cut my gaming teeth in the arcades. I may have only played two games, Donkey Kong Jr. and Joust, but I would seek them out any time I could. Computers were still exotic things with green screens, found at the back of the school library and at my parents' office. My first interactions with them were via MS-DOS games bearing simple names like Castle Adventure and Bouncing Babies. The Atari 2600 first released the same year I was born and became my first console some time in the 80s. I probably owned around a dozen games for it before my dad broached the subject of upgrading to a new game machine and I made the fateful choice between a Sega or a Nintendo. Mario won the day. All the same, it would not be until I owned a Super Nintendo and the 16-bit wars with the Genesis erupted before I would identify as a gamer, complete with console loyalty. In those days, Sonic was the mascot of evil, even if he did have a damn good Saturday morning cartoon. The N64 came next, and also ended my stint as a Nintendo console fangirl. There was no use denying the siren call of the PlayStation thanks to the likes of Mega Man and Final Fantasy. The GameCube followed, then the PlayStation 2 which in turn bring us to present day with the Wii and PlayStation 3. Of course, in companion to these consoles I owned every iteration of the Game Boy, then the DS Lite, and now the 3DS. In other words, I've been gaming a long time.

I still own a fair number of games spanning multiple console generations. Every few years, I like to revisit the collection and clean house. Tastes change as we age and what was once loved can fail to hold up after a few years have passed. It is time to replay everything. And you, you lucky people, get to watch me go all nostalgic. To the game cave!