When I was in pre-school, I would not answer to my first name, or any variation of it. I would only answer if somebody called me Indy, or Indiana. I would even settle for Doctor Jones. I'd spent afternoons and even days pretending I was on some grand adventure, and I even had a handful of leather whips I'd got at Native American shops in Mackinac Island. I would go in the big pole barn and try to swing across the rafters. This was far more effective than the time I got the Spider-Man web shooters that shot silly spring and not giant spider webs. I bruised my tailbone on the cement.

I don't have a great story about the first game I ever played, or the first movie I ever watched. Whenever that happened, it happened too early and my mind has since recorded over it. It's probably a safe bet though that one of the first games I played was Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures on the SNES. This was the first time I was ever really immersed in a game, and even with those paltry sixteen bits (retrospectively) I was living in the skin of my cinematic hero.

It was my gateway title, and I soon pillaged the SNES library at my grandparents house. Super Mario World, Super Return of the Jedi, Black Bass, and Sonic Blast Man. I'd rent games from the convenience store every weekend, and would buy used Sega Genesis games from Funcoland.

I remember when my dad brought home the Playstation. He brought it home with some boxing game I don't remember very well, and a Pizza Hut Demo Disc.

It had demos for Tomb Raider III, MediEvil, Gran Turismo, Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, and most importantly, Metal Gear Solid.

I played that Metal Gear Solid demo endlessly. It went from the opening scene to the Darpa Chief meeting, and I bet I played it 1,000 times. This was the second time a game had really, really pulled me in! I would wear Ski Goggles around the house and a headband, sneaking from wall to wall. A girl in my first grade class had this purple coat with a bunch of square puffs all over it, and I wanted it so bad--I thought it was a Solid Snake coat. I didn't understand that Solid Snake was supposed to have abdominal muscles. On the playground, I would make daring escapes from nobody on the jungle gym and crouch down under the slide with my hand cupped around my neck, making and receiving burst transmissions on my Codec. My friends played Soccer, and a bastardized version of Rugby--but us American kids didn't know what the hell Rugby really was. They just played a version of football where they clotheslined and punched people. This was the eventual bitterness of disconnect, though. My friends wanted to play sports everyday. They didn't want to play tag anymore, and they really didn't want to play Star Wars. I played by myself.

My dad was into video games and Star Wars too. He was very much a Gen-X'er. He was also deep into sports, and cars. At family gatherings, my cousins and uncles and whoever else would congregate and talk about the big game and all that, and I felt like such an asshole. I was never made to feel like a bad son, but that's exactly how I felt. What kind of a son was I, when I didn't want to play football? When I didn't know any sports stats? Was I even a boy? I remember trying really hard to relate to my friends on this level, telling them one day how I woke up for school late on my bedroom floor covered in potato chips, with Sportscenter on my TV. Somewhere I heard my friend Richard say that the sports commentator Dick Vitale "talks too much", and this would become my line in the middle of people talking over my head about sports.

"Dick Vitale talks too much," I would say, unsure.

In 3rd grade I got a subscription to GamePro. On a month-by-month basis, I seethed with anticipation. I would look at screenshots of new games and upcoming ones and imagine scenes playing out, sort of like paper dolls. Years later an ad ran for The Godfather video game. It was a full-spread and you could see exploding storefronts, the Don with his sack of oranges, people having rooftop shootouts, and I would stare at this ad for hours, thinking of the possibilities. I would imagine all the things I would, and could do in the game. I remember seeing the first look at The Simpsons Hit & Runand being so excited, I went to school and told my friend Devon a bunch of lies about it, basically extrapolating that the stuff I was imaging in my head had to be in the game.

"Yeah man! You can play as Maggie in a stroller and blow people away with a shotgun!"

We would get these weekly, or at least bi-monthly surveys handed out to us. They would ask us if we felt safe at school, how we felt on the bus, how our teachers treated us, and then it had a questionnaire where one would bubble in how many hours they spent a week playing outside, watching TV, or playing video games. I was always very excited when I got to make a dark mark in the bubble that said 20+ Hours. It wasn't all alone time though, and I was delighted whenever I could get my parents into gaming too.

Like I said before, my dad and I played that short demo for Metal Gear Solid a lot, which led to us ending up with Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions by accident. Nonetheless, we played the shit out of that game, and theirs an old home video somewhere where my mom walks through the house, and my dad and I are sitting on the floor playing it. We also had a copy of Namco Museum Vol. 1 and my parents would play Toy Pop and they would call me in to play the bonus stage with the apples. It is one of the only prominent memories I have of my parents being happy together. One of my earliest memories of them fighting is over Norse by Norse West: The Return of the Lost Vikings.

I spent a lot of afternoons walking around the virtual museums while they fought downstairs. As they grew apart though, they still played with me. I eventually received a PS2, and my mom would play The Urbz: Sims in the City, Fatal Frame, and Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. My dad and I would play Star Wars: Battlefront and its sequel, and a lot of Guitar Hero.

Things faded between them, and my brother and I ended up downstate with my mom. She was never home, so we rode bicycles, watched a lot of Scrubs, and played video games. I played Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction until it stopped booting. After that we would marathon Bully. The same way some people go on GTA rampages to let some stress out, I would beat the shit out of waves of people in Bully to counteract the fact that I was called a fag everyday at school because I didn't want to play football in someones yard. Even among the friends I made, I was still "that gay, new kid".

We only lived there for a few months before my parents got together. We moved back with my dad in Christmas of 2007, the same Christmas I got a PS3. I haven't even played a current-gen console yet so I can't speak to it, but booting up Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was one of the most spectacular moments I've ever had in video games. In only a matter of months after this, my parents split up again. My mom only moved across town this time, and things started getting really bad for me. So in games I stayed, and when I packed my black duffle bag every weekend before departing for one of my parents house, it had these items:

• Toothbrush
• Deodorant
• Bar soap
• Shampoo
• Clothes
• PS3
• Controller(s)
• Games

It wasn't that the other house didn't have bar soap or shampoo, but when one has to travel a lot, they find they're not a very particular person, or a very particular one. I remember one day my dad brought home a Zune, and gave it to me. I had never even heard of it, but as someone who had always wanted an iPod and now had something similar, I was blown away. I spent like four hours looking at Podcasts that night downloading stuff just because, and came across the Giant Bombcast by accident. It was in August of 2008, so Giant Bomb was still pretty new. I listened to this on the bus and for hours at night lying in bed. I did this through most of High School. I had a lot of friends, and mostly different sets of friends every year but I still didn't know who I was. I didn't really want to hangout with anybody outside of school and I wasn't participating in anything with my family. I was withdrawn, and in a weird way, the Giant Bomb crew became my friends.

I would have long, drawn-out daydreams where I would see Jeff, Ryan, or Brad in a grocery store or something and they would ask me if I wanted to cover TGS with them. Lately, actually I've been really thinking that maybe I want to get into game journalism, so this dream lives on. Only, I tend to imagine I'll run into Ryan. Then I end up being real sad at work, about someone who is ultimately a stranger to me.

When I was shut-down all the time though, Giant Bomb would make me laugh. They would keep me in the loop, and I did find people in the forums to "talk shop" with about video games the same way my relatives would about sports. It was elating to know that their were people like me. The first podcast I heard right after a Super Bowl, members of the crew would just shrug and say "Because I don't care about the Super Bowl". That felt good. The podcast and the forums were my first windows into the gaming community, where it was the thing that you did, and not just a thing that you did.

My semi-respectable PS3 library was cut in half when my moms live-in boyfriend at the time stole and sold a bunch of my stuff to a pawn shop. My mom tried to tell me that it was one of my brothers friends or a homeless guy she had seen riding his bike in the area. My brothers friends were all under ten though, and that homeless guy lived four houses down from us. He just had long hair and liked flannel. I told her I thought it was her boyfriend, but then she shouted me down. My brother and I's television was stolen, so she changed the locks. About two weeks after, all of her jewelry went missing, including a bunch of gold jewelry my dad sent home from Kuwait when he was deployed. No forced lock, no open windows. She claimed that somebody broke in, took all the jewelry, and also ate half of a stick of pepperoni and left it on the counter. So I guess the Trailer Park Boys robbed us. I still had 15-20 titles though, and I took to bringing them with me to school and keeping them in my locker during the day.

Towards the back end of high school, I ended up meeting the woman who would become my wife, and the mother of my child. I played games to pass the I had between going home at night and sleeping. Situations were breaking down at home; I moved out the day before I finished High School. The year since has been the most beautiful of my life, but also the most different and stressful. I finished High School a year and a month ago. I started college 9 months ago. My son was born 8 months ago. I got my first real job 8 months ago. I lost my first real job 5 months ago, and got a much better job 4 months ago.

Honestly since sometime in 2012, I've been sort of out of the gaming loop. I stopped posting in forums, I stopped visiting press sites. Most of this year I had just been fooling around with indies on Steam, emulators, and a 3DS I had won by chance. It was all pretty rare, though. The few short weeks I faced of unemployment were rough, and retrospectively I'm lucky to have only faced such a prospect for that short amount of time.

That time off though really let me sink into my dad skin, though. I was waking up with my son and letting my other half sleep in however long she wanted, and my son and I would go downstairs. We would play, watch movies and TV shows, and it got me thinking of those salad days of yore with my dad. It made me excited for the first time I could show my son the things that defined my youth. Naturally, I decided to put onRaiders of the Lost Ark. Now, I have no delusions--I didn't think my (at the time) 5-month-old would appreciate it, or even pay attention, but he ended up quietly and attentively sitting through the whole thing. It was obviously the perfect storm of lighting or sound or color or something, because he was just sitting there with me in silence watching it.

When my fiancee was pregnant and it was still a secret, I was writing a lot of poetry, or just little short form prose notes. I would refer to my son as "sesame seed" because I remember when we were reading about how far along he was in development, and sesame seed was just the one I always thought was the neatest. My fiancee was "My matryoshka doll" fiancee. I would wax all the time about how I was making a human being, and how I would get to show a living, breathing person the sun, moon, and the stars. Big stuff. Oceans! I never thought though about the stuff that defined my childhood. I never thought, "Oh, god I can't wait to show my son ice cream." or "Man, I can't wait until we can play Street Fighter II and Tekken.

That's the stuff that really mattered to me, and played huge parts in shaping me into the husband and father I am right now. I don't remember the first time my dad took me to watch a sunset, I remember the first time I stabbed his ass to death in Tekken withYoshimitsu. I remember the first time he spun me out on a go-kart track, and I remember him playing Spider-Man with me on the PS1 and then mailing me a copy ofSpider-Man for the PS2 from Iraq. I remember writing him a thank you letter/christmas card and crying on the page by accident, circling the dark spot and labeling it "My tear". I remember getting up at 5 in the morning on Sunday mornings to watch Bozo the Clown and CHiPs.

That's the stuff I can't wait for. I can't wait to surprise him at school with fast food lunch, or take my family to Disney World. I can't wait to show him all the games I played when I was a kid, and him to show me the games he likes. I can't wait to take my family to the movies. He's really lucky, in that way--he's going to get to grow up with the MCU, and the new Star Wars movies! I can only hope that he will be ready for his first movie by the time Episode VII comes out.

My childhood was cut short, and most of my formative years ended up sour. I went down a lot of rough roads and spent a lot of my teen years not caring about what happened to me in the future, and not really planning on one. No one could have ever predicted my life would have gone this way, but I would have it no other way. I love my wife and son. I love being a father and a husband. I can't wait for all the big stuff, but I'm dying for all the little things.