I write almost exclusively about video games because they are a pretty large part of my life. However, there are people out there, some of them are you guys, that spend MUCH more time on gaming than I do. The first person I met in my life that was truly an avid gamer was a neighborhood kid who was one year old than me named Eric. We attended different schools so I had never met him despite the fact that he lived across the street from me.
In other situations I would have met all the neighborhood kids, which I did in my own neighborhood because I would go outside and play sports and what not. Eric on the other hand, was really "indoorsey." I literally had no idea that this person who was almost exactly the same age as me even lived in our neighborhood because dude literally never went outside.
One day I was outside driving a remote control car and I guess he saw me from his window because he game outside with his and we started racing. It was fun and we started talking. We were both teenagers and once we started talking I found out that he really enjoys video games. I too also really enjoyed videogames and this was around the NES days so there were a lot of degrees of what liking video games would actually mean from one person to the next. I would spend most of my money on games, but I wouldn't sit there for 10 hours in a row playing them. My parents wouldn't have allowed that even if I wanted to. For Eric, playing video games was basically all that he did.
I guess this was allowed by his parents because his grades were good, he played in the school band, and did enough to be considered a good student, so then the parents just kind of let him do whatever he wanted after all that. What he decided to do was basically be a recluse and master all video games. When I went over to his house and saw that he had an entire area in the carpeted basement that was basically his gaming zone, I was in awe.
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This is not a picture of his area. That is clearly something that has been replicated with modern cameras but it was basically several gaming systems, one of which I had never heard of called a Vectrex, his own television and even what at that time was considered a high-definition monitor.
He was better than me by a long shot at basically every single game. I remember being rather humbled by his abilities one day when a game that I owned called "Blades of Steel" on the NES and I considered myself to be quite good at it.... within an hour he was defeating me at it even though he barely understood the rules of ice hockey.
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Bask in the glory that was 1980's graphics!
The continued this streak when he defeated me at Double Dribble as well. He refused to play any NFL games so the jury will have to remain out on that one. I would imagine had he capitulated it only would have been a matter of time before he beat me at that as well.
There was one particular game that he owned on the TurboGrafx-16 that I think almost anyone would enjoy and honestly, I wish people would continue to make games like it. It was called "Alien Crush" and it was a banger for its time.
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it was a multi-tiered pinball game and certain things you could do on the screen would activate things that wouldn't be possible on a real pinball machine such as taking you to a totally different screen where you would have "boss battles" of sorts. The game would never end just like a real pinball machine, there was no final level or anything like that. You just played for the top score.
One day, I got some super high score just by serious dumb luck (as is often the case with pinball games) and I think this drove Eric a bit insane because try as he may, he could never beat my score. In most games, he wouldn't even crack half of my high score. It became an obsession to him because never in his life had he been bested in any game. This rivalry of sorts carried on for so long that my family actually moved away and he ended up going off to college yet my high score remained. I would remind him about this any time we talked and for a bit after those conversations he would fire up the TG-16 and have a few more tries at it. We made a rule that the high score had to be defeated on the original machine, no PC emulators allowed.
Eric would go on to be featured in global competitions for multiple games including Starcraft and Street Fighter 2, whereas I would kind of drop out of gaming altogether in lieu of drinking and girls while in college.
Then one day I got a letter in the mail. It was a Polaroid in the mail from Eric. It was a photo of him finally breaking my high score on Alien Crush. You have to keep in mind that not only did the TG-16 not have any sort of screen capture, but it didn't even have a memory card to hold the high scores. I have that photo in an album back in my parent's attic somewhere. Even though Eric did eventually get the best of me, I can say that I defeated a pro gamer at his own game. Sure he didn't come back and defeat me, but it took him 15 years to do it!