Man, I could write pages and pages on each panel. I was a Commodore 64 kid, even though by the late 80s everyone else had a Nintendo. My dad also belonged to a game-sharing club, so we had hundreds of games. Couldn’t make heads or tails of half of them, but boy did I have a blast.
New Game Journalism came and went, hated by many because they found it was the equivalent of recipes that put a life story before the list of ingredients, but I liked it because it treated gaming as an experience deeply linked to who the gamer was as a person; you could spin your own unique narrative by filtering the gaming experience through yourself. In most of these panels I can see that these memories are not so much about the games themselves, but about the specific things that stimulated my senses, about my family in the room as I played. While I played a lot of entertaining games, these anecdotes are what I remember most vividly. Dancing to “Enola Gay”. Learning English with my dad. Screwing up classical music. My grandparents curious or dismissive about this new toy they couldn’t quite comprehend.
Good times.
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