Nostalgia Runs Deep

     It was November, 1998. I was just two months shy of being seven years old. My dad had just walked in the door from being at work all day and handed me something he picked up on his way home. It was a book, a guide book. As he handed it to me, with excitement in his voice, he said, "Look what came out!" I looked down at what was in my hands, it was the strategy guide for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was fairly familiar with the Zelda series. We owned the original NES game as well as A Link to the Past on SNES. Being so young I had never beaten either myself but I had played them both numerous times, usually just running around the beginning of the game and never making it past the first 15 minutes or so. I didn't really know what I was looking at. I knew it was a new game for the N64 and that my dad seemed excited for it, which both of those things made me excited as well. What I didn't know was that this particular game would change my life forever. Literally.

      A few days later my dad finally brought home the game. We played it together whenever he wasn't at work, but I soon became obsessed with it. I grew up playing video games my whole life but I had never been hooked like this. The graphics, the story, the characters, the music, I loved all of it. I wanted to be in this game, I wanted to live in Hyrule and be Link. So I started to play it by myself whenever my dad wasn't home because I couldn't wait. But me only being six years old you could imagine how many times I'd get stuck and didn't know where to go or what to do. Luckily we had that strategy guide, only problem was that I was ONLY six years old. I was at the age where you are just learning how to read and this guide required a lot of reading. Whether I could read it or not there were a lot of words and it was too hard for me to understand what to do. Instead of reading the guide, I starting looking at the pictures. By looking at all the in-game screenshots they provided I managed to figure things out when I became stuck and continued on with the game. Eventually my dad and I beat the game, we destroyed Ganon and saved Hyrule.    

     Fast forward 18 years and here I am. Ocarina of Time is still one of my favorite video games ever made. So much so that half of my video game sleeve is dedicated to this game. Ocarina of Time is where my true love for video games started. I'm now in school studying Video Game Development, I collect everything that has to do with gaming, whether it be video games themselves (retro and new) or figures, art, replicas, books, you name it, I collect it. I have an intense passion for gaming and it has been a huge part of my life. This little story about my dad and I playing Ocarina of Time is just one of the many, many memories I have that involve gaming. Some of the best times I've had were playing games with friends or family. There's nothing in my life that gives me the feeling of nostalgia like video games do and I believe nostalgia is one of the best feelings a person can experience. That rush of childhood memories and the feeling of being a kid again, staying up late, getting as far as you can into a game before passing out from exhaustion. Through games you can relive past memories over and over again while also creating new ones, and that is an amazing thing. I want to be responsible for making people feel that way. I want to make games that impact people's lives and make them say, "those were the days." So with that, I welcome you to my blog, where I hope to share all things video games. Stay tuned for rants, reviews, developer diaries, and much much more.