My Biggest Gaming Regret

You've seen those articles and YouTube videos about people discussing their greatest gaming regrets. It's usually something like trading their entire Atari 2600 collection—console and games included—in exchange for one single copy of RBI Baseball on the NES and nothing else. Or spending money on Aliens: Colonial Marines. Or spilling an entire Big Gulp on their PS1. Or playing BG3 for three days straight without eating or using the bathroom. Or getting Bubsy tattooed on their ass.

If you're wondering about the specificity of the Atari 2600 example, it's because when I was a kid someone actually made this trade with me for my copy of RBI Baseball. Thinking back on that, I hope his parents didn't mind. I don't think he himself regretted it though. At least not that day. I made up the Bubsy one but I like to think there's at least one person out there who did this and deeply regrets it. Imagine having to disclose that to potential romantic partners before they discover it on their own.

My greatest gaming regret isn't all that different I guess, but it did teach me a lot about myself. In hindsight. Which is 20/20. Yes, I'm still bitter about it. I've told my friends this story already. Probably multiple times. It involves my N64, living in New Orleans on my own way before I was ready, and a whole bunch of vampires.

Kidding about that vampire bit. There was only one vampire.

When I was a kid it became a tradition for my parents to give me whatever the newest Nintendo console was for my birthday of that year. This began in December of 1986 when they gave me the NES for my 7th birthday. Then in 1989, a Game Boy for my 10th birthday, and in 1991, a SNES for my 12th birthday, etc.. No they never got me a Virtual Boy. I wanted one but they were smarter than that, and me.

The tradition held for the N64 but it came a little bit later for some reason. I'm not sure if it was because I was significantly older and they weren't paying as close attention to video game stuff or what, but I didn't get an N64 until my 18th birthday in 1997, a full year and a half after the system was released in North America.

I fell in love with that system. I played Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time obsessively, getting lost in their immersive worlds for hours a day. As it turned out, this was very important for me at the age of 18 in 1998. My life was about to change in a big way as I was months away from graduating high school, had become a legal adult, and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. It was a stressful time for me and the N64 was there for me through some really anxiety-inducing uncertainties in my life.

I never got that many games for the N64. Aside from Mario and Zelda, I played a lot of Extreme-G 1 and 2, Lode Runer 3-D (a very underrated game in my opinion), and. . .well I think that's it. Those were all the games I ended up getting between 1997 and 1999. Weird because there were two Castlevania games, a Mega Man game, and a Star Fox game that were released for the system. These are series I had loved my whole life and yet never got their N64 entries. I had a job at that point and could afford to buy them too.

Maybe that was part of the problem. I had a job, I had started [seriously] dating, had at this point graduated high school, still didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I didn't lose interest in games. I was just as obsessed with gaming as I had ever been. I suppose I had also started to make room for other things in my life at that point and wasn't keeping up with it as much.

I still kind of regret never getting those games, especially considering that in lieu of playing them I had a very toxic relationship that year. I sometimes think about all the fun I would have had with Star Fox 64, Mega Man 64, and Castlevania 64. All those happy memories I could have made instead of the unhappy ones I chose to make instead.

You ever just want to go back in time and slap the shit out of your past self? Because I do.

Especially when I consider the fact that I almost immediately followed that relationship up with a potentially even more toxic one, amazingly. This one led to me being pulled even further from my gaming life. It eventually even led to me moving out of state and to the city of New Orleans in early 2000.

When I think about this situation, it's often paired with memories I have never had and I swear they come from alternate realities. Do you ever think about alternate realities? What your life would be like if you had made different choices? And if quantum mechanics are true, those universes are out there. And there are versions of you in those universes that did make those choices.

So I know that there is a version of me out there that does not have the memory of struggling to survive on his own in a big city, having never lived on his own before with little to no life skills. He also doesn't remember not having enough money for rent one month and terrified of being evicted and homeless, selling his Nintendo 64 and all of his games for it at a pawn shop in order to pay rent. That me doesn't have that biggest of gaming regrets that this me does. That version of me instead has memories of playing Star Fox 64 every night. Sometimes I feel jealous of that other universe me.

Yep, I sold my N64 for one month's rent money. It was the final chapter in the Nintendo system that seemed to mark my messy, difficult transition into adulthood by degrees.

My biggest hope is that someone walked into that pawn shop and saw my N64 there with its selection of games, bought it, and took it home to their kid who fell in love with it. And then that kid went on to become a lifelong gamer, even writing about games for a living. This is what I imagine to make myself feel better. Better to believe this than to think that it's sitting in a landfill somewhere.

This situation was a hard lesson for me to learn. It was painful but the pain of it seemed necessary to jar me just enough to get me to start thinking more intelligently about how to live life as an adult. It illuminated for me the fact that I allowed myself to grow up too fast. Before I was ready. And there are most certainly worse mistakes that I could have made in order to learn that lesson. While I'm grateful I didn't make any of those, it still hurts, man.

So am I jealous of that other universe Daniel that didn't have to sell his N64 to make rent? I am. A little bit, yeah. There are other decisions that guy made too that I'm jealous of. He avoided those toxic relationships. He didn't move until he was ready. He saved all his money he made from his teen and early adult jobs. He was smart about a lot of things and prospered because of it in many ways that I did not in my late teens and early adulthood. So yeah, I'm a little envious of him.

On the other hand, he probably has a tattoo of Bubsy on his ass.