CHAPTER 7: THE 16-BIT ERA

As someone whose first console was an NES and didn’t have a PC at home until 1996, the concept of upgrading to a better, newer console was something that didn’t really cross my mind. But, suddenly I started seeing commercials on television for something called a Genesis – doing what Nintendon’t – and pieces in…

CHAPTER 6: GAME BOY

In Canada we have a holiday called Victoria Day, also referred to as the May 24th weekend or affectionately May 2-4, even though it often happens a week or so before the twenty-fourth of the month. In any case, it marks the start of the camping season, and people will tow their campers to RV…

CHAPTER 5: ARCADES

There’s a terrific anime streaming on Netflix called High Score Girl. It’s a slice of life story about a budding relationship between two young kids but filtered through the ‘90’-s arcade scene, in particular the booming popularity of fighting games like Capcom’s Street Fighter II. Due to how authentic the show is of the era…

CHAPTER 4: CARBONEAR

Where I’m from, there are a lot of interconnected towns with very little to mark that you crossed over into a new one other than a sign welcoming you to a new place. A hub of sorts, though not that much larger than Harbour Grace, is Carbonear, a place where many come to get their…

CHAPTER 3: RENTING

There’s a scene in the Kevin Smith film Clerks where Randal Graves, a clerk at a mom and pop video store, goes to a Blockbuster-esque video store called Big Choice video to rent a movie – there’s a reason, you just have to see the film if you haven’t. Upon seeing the sheer amount of…

CHAPTER 2: MY ORIGIN STORY

With the proliferation of comic book movies in cinemas nowadays, everyone has seen there fair share of iconic origin stories: Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider, gaining fantastical abilities that through a twist of fate cost him the life of his Uncle Ben; a young Bruce Wayne witnessing his parents killed before his…

CHAPTER 1: HARBOUR GRACE

Nestled on the eastern side of the island of Newfoundland on the Avalon Peninsula is the town I grew up in: Harbour Grace. A tidbit on Wikipedia puts the population of the town at around 3,000 people as of 2006, but I would wager it has shrunk by a significant margin since then. Today you’ll…

INTRODUCTION

Throughout most of 2019, I found myself unemployed, and to keep my head above water mentally, I threw myself into various projects. One such project was a short, 30,000 word book of sorts about what it was like to grow up adoring video games in my small town of Harbour Grace, Newfoundland in Canada. I…