I have been playing video games for 45 years, but everything has a beginning.

My beginning with video games was essentially also the beginning of the video game industry itself. Here is my story (cue Law & Order bangs here).

I have always had a fascination with video games, beginning during my early childhood. It was the mid-1970’s and I was about 3 or 4 years old. My family had a standard Pong video game. It had Pong, which was essentially tennis with the players represented by vertical lines, and a block for a tennis ball. Although it looked extremely primitive even back then, I was mesmerized by the fact that I was able to control something on the television screen instead of just watching it. The other varieties that came with the Pong game were some form of hockey, which I never wound up playing much, and handball, which was the only game that I could play by myself (although it didn’t stop me from trying to play Pong by myself using both controllers.

The day everything changed:

When I was about 5 years old, my parents took me to a Playboy club resort for the first time. Although it was fun to look at the many women with bunny rabbit ears walking down the corridors, I was most interested in the outdoor kiddie pool. Nearby the pool though, was a room that was about to change my life forever. It was my first experience going into a video game arcade. I will never forget that moment for as long as I live. The only thing that would surpass that early childhood memory was going to Disneyworld for the first…