Videos games were my first love. I was a kid who didn't make a lot of friends in public school. Actually, until I got to High School, I had almost no friends. Needless to say, I didn't do a lot of socializing. What I did a lot of was sit in my room and click on my Super Nintendo while the sunshine beamed down outside.
Games were my first stories. Sure, I tried to read some novels, I even actually read some good ones; A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Leguin was among my first. But the thing was, I really valued that interactivity of video games. I always wanted to make games, but oddly enough, I gave very little interest to graphics and coding. What I really wanted to do, was write stories for video games.
I sat down with my SNES today and played one of my still favorite games of all time. Mega Man X. In the first stage, which does a great job of establishing the story and the world it takes place, you face a villain in a large robot suit called Vile. A bad guy with a name that means, "icky". You can't kill Vile--no matter how hard you try. In this first encounter, he must win. Because it sets up the game's theme for getting stronger. But every time I sit down to play it, I still fight back against Vile. Not because I don't know that I can't win, but because I don't think X would give up. I don't think he knows that he can't win. It's still a story, after all.
When I was a kid, I had very in-depth fantasy adventures. I even put together a little montage opening and a theme song in my head. I think I was a time traveler, or something. The stories were always about me (I was eight-years old, don't judge). I never really shared them with anyone because they weren't for other people--they were for me.
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