Nostalgic Story of the Day: When my brother and I were young we would visit our grandparents in New Mexico. We loved New Mexico, sure, and we loved seeing our wonderful grandparents, absolutely, but two things in particular made those trips incredibly exciting to Jason and I: allowance and Oma’s computer. See, Oma (grandma) tried to stay on top of technology, and she always had a computer that was more powerful than our one at home. Which, for two teenage boys, meant awesome games. And since we got an allowance, that meant we could buy our own games! We were in paradise.
There was a used game store we went to all the time, back when PC games were sold used, that was far better than anything we had back home. My brother was very much into flight sims and RTS games, and to a lesser extent so was I, but I was slowly moving more and more into my love of fantasy and anime. We went to that store some random day, and my brother was throwing me copies of Janes F-15 and manner of flight-sim. But I wasn’t having any of it because I discovered a little jewel case. A little jewel case that had a dragon. And a mage, and a priest, and a warrior. Might and Magic VI. I was in love.
My brother was not.
He tried to convince me to get something we would both like. Something that wasn’t boring, or lame, or silly. But I was having none of it: I wanted this game unlike any game before or since. Looking at that case perfectly summarized what I wanted from a game: dragons, magic, epic adventures and loot. I purchased the game, amidst my brother’s grumbles, and home we went. My brother didn’t even want to watch me play it.
That didn’t stop me.
I played it for hours on end, and whether out of boredom or loneliness my brother finally came and watched me play. Being the younger brother I soon gave in to his requests to let him play, and I didn’t really mind because we were playing the game together. We’d look for traps together, loot chests together, slay dragons together. How could a younger brother ask for more? I got a game that my brother adored and we got to play it together. We played it almost the whole summer. We discovered secrets, we died and raged, we laughed at the horrible jokes, we discovered necromancy and slayed hordes of devils.
All because I took a chance on something new.
Nah, but really, I’m just jealous that you have happy sibling memories. Every time I start telling a childhood memory, Hatter says, “Oh, good, it’s time for Sad Story Hour!”
/sigh