I just came across the International Geek Girl Pen Pals Club, and I totally had to sign up. I’m actually surprised I didn’t hear about the site sooner. But then, I’m not your typical geeky girl. I’m more of an 80s-cartoons, The Sims, and Fallout kind of geek. I likely would have been more of a gaming geek, had my mom not taken the Nintendo…
When I was maybe 10 or so, some of our cousins gave us their old NES and a couple games. My sibs and I had never had a gaming console, so even though it was pretty old by that time, it was quite a big deal to us. We LOVED it. If we weren’t jumping up and down with the Super Mario Bros, we were likely running in place with World Class Track Meet (that is, until my brothers figured out they could just sit on the floor and use their hands), or expressing our utter frustrations with the stupid whirlpools in Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival. Yeah. Those were our games. We also had good ol’ Duck Hunt, but Mum didn’t like that game much. I think you could also shoot skeets instead of ducks, but that didn’t matter.
In fact, Mum didn’t seem to like the Nintendo much at all. She had several rules about it, including not playing on Sunday WHATSOEVER. It sucked. A bunch of kids. At home most of the day except for the few (painful) hours of church. Too hot to go outside. And we couldn’t play our games. What else were we supposed to do on a Sunday? Get three-degree burns outside? Take turns mailing each other to India? Volunteer at a soup kitchen? (To this day, I don’t think there even is a soup kitchen within 40 miles of my hometown.) Since there really wasn’t much to do, we tended to just sleep, or fight. I hated Sundays.
And then the worst possible thing happened – our Mom got rid of the Nintendo. She didn’t put it aside for a while, or say we had to earn it back by being the perfectest of children. No. She simply just threw it out. I’m sure gamers everywhere are cringing and face-palming right now. If she hadn’t trashed it, it would probably still work today – those things were the Toyotas of the gaming world. But she did. And why?? She said we fought about it too much.
Now if that were the case, I could probably understand why she’d want to be rid of it. No one wants to deal with a horde of warmongering children. But that wasn’t true at all. We fought when we couldn’t play Nintendo (such as on Sunday, bloody Sunday), not when we were playing it. In fact, some of my best getting-along-with-the-sibs time involved that old NES. It was a family game. Even Dad tried to play it once or twice. (He didn’t get far – the whirlpools got him.) We actively played and watched the fun, (or relatively stupid) games as a team, and cheered each other on. Not one of us ever got to finish Super Mario Bros. Not a single one.
Sometime later, the same cousins offered us their old Sega Genesis, this time with SEVERAL games. Mum threw it out before we even got to attempt setting it up. The Genesis apparently involved fighting.
So that’s why I’m not much of a gaming geek. Not that I didn’t have the potential – I didn’t have the consol.