Current mood:

nostalgic

Reminisce the futurepast
When did varous events happen in my lifetime? Milestones of my development.

I got an NES (Mario/Duck Hunt) I don't even know, almost from before I remember. One of my earliest memories is buying Metrid and Zelda 2. We rented games every Thursday and I played quite a bit of the NES library as it came out. I remember Megaman 4 coming out, and that was early 1992 (I had bought 1 after playing 3). I also read about Final Fantasy II in Nintendo Power (and recogised the name, the first Final Fantasy (released 1990) being my favorite game to rent at the time), and that must have been 1991. I bought Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.. FF3 wasn't out so it's before 1994. Secret of Mana wasn't out either so that means it was during 1993 I got SNES (SMW/All-Stars, on two carts). I got SNES because I'd played Zelda 3 and it was amazing. Sometime after that I got a Gameboy (Zelda 4 pack-in), 1993 or 1994 but long before the Play It Loud campaign. I got FF3 and Secret of Mana at around the same time, before the release of Chrono Trigger but long after both FF3 and SoM were sold out of stores (so few were made..) so they were hard to track down. At around this time I used BBSes (games like LoRD) and played modem games (DooM sure but a bunch of others too). But I didn't use the internet until after FF3 came out, and didn't use it at home until the PSX-Saturn system war began (N64 was still Ultra 64 and was practicaly vaporware at the time). That was,,,, 1995. Summer of 1996 (because Ice Age was new-ish and Mirage wasn't out yet) I saw some boy at summer camp who was carrying around a binder with "Magic" written on it and so I and a friend cornered him and got him to tell us what that was about - and it turned out to be Magic the Gathering of course, so we forced him to teach us. I taught Magic to my older brother and from there got introduced into the Evansville Gamers Guild where I played my first tabletop RPGs....... but that wasn't my introduction to RPGs, I played PBEM games and freeform chat RP on the internet, and I actually hung out on the White-Wolf online chat long before I'd played Mage tabletop. In those days I also met people on the internet by interest-searching them on ICQ and using the "free-for-chat" mode. In 1995 I watched Sailormoon on television.. and a bunch of other stuff but Sailormoon is the important one because from its bizzare (non)-ending in 1996 I found on the internet a much larger series, bought quasi-legal fansubs, and discovered the wonder of anime (of course I had seen a lot of anime before but I didn't think about it as any different from any other media before then).

All this before 1997 (when I got Yoshi's Island, started getting heavy into RPGs, and began my long spiral into otaku subculture - reading lots and lots of fanfiction and the like). Then 1998 I got a PSX, FFT and SotN, and, eventually, Xenogears, and then both Megaman 8 and Megaman X4, which sparked the re-emergence of my childhood joy of playing the early Megaman games and X1 and turned me full-force into a Rockman fan. And in 1999 I got into emulation with the Pokemon TCG on Gameboy (in Japanese) which led to me buying Pokemon Yellow the day it came out (but I was disappointed to learn that the RPG was much less fun). And of course, on December 31, 1999, I met someone who changed my life forever.