I don't really remember, it's such a long time ago and I was so young. I'm pretty sure the first game I ever played was Duck Hunt, though according to my mother just the other day it was actually Super Mario Bros. Maybe she's right, she probably has a better memory of that time than I have.
I do know all I used to want to do as a young kid was play outside, I couldn't have been older than 5, and my oldest cousin was a good year younger than me. He lived, with my aunt, uncle and my youngest cousin only a short street away, so we were always together. My aunt had the NES, she was quite the gamer back then. They had a friend who worked at Nintendo in the Netherlands and he would bring Nintendo stuff home or give it to my aunt. That way we had a good deal of interesting things over the years; he gave my cousin one of those Star Fox tournament cartridges for SNES, we could have Majora's Mask before it actually released (though sadly that cartridge was severly bugged, but that's another story), he'd get my GameBoy Color a new screen after my dog ate and damaged it and he even manages to get my aunt a perfectly good M82 Demo Unit, you know, one of those NES store units. Obviously giving away all this stuff would end up getting him fired years later, but anyway, I knew my aunt had the NES, and I knew there were games, on it that she liked to play with. It was a new thing for me at the time, I "knew" in the capacity that a "game" was that you could move around a tiny character on your TV using a wired remote.
But I wasn't interested. It feels like it took a very long time for me to get interested, but being so young, everything feels like it takes forever and memory gets blurry after a time. There was a playground with a slide and this rope-bridge-thing in the middle of a large field at the end of our streets, and I never understood why my cousin didn't want to come. Surely this is more fun than moving something around on your TV. I later understood they were playing Super Mario Bros.
Slowly but surely though they lured me in, or, as much as a four year old can lure a five year old anywhere. I'm pretty sure everything was orchestrated by my dear aunt. I'm lucky she did that, I would be a totally different person if it wasn't for her, and sadly I can't thank her for it anymore. I began to watch them playing Mario. Whether or not I'd play at some point, I'm not sure, but my own mother says I did, because she says Mario was my first game and that it made me forget about that slide in the middle of that large field outside.
As far as I recall though, I only picked up the controller after my aunt got the SNES and she moved the NES upstairs. At that point we were given free reigns regarding the NES. The SNES was the 'new' thing now, and the thing she'd play. So my cousin and I would go upstairs, and there it was, that big orange gun. We played Duck Hunt and then played it all the time. I loved it, because the gun was awesome, like a real toy, a real "thing", and not some silly wired remote. With the gun, really called 'Zapper' obviously, it really felt like you were doing something, really 'playing' something.
One day, I was coming back down in the living room in my aunt's house after playing some NES, it was a year or two later now, and my aunt was playing something new on her SNES. What I saw was mindblowing, if you'd believe in 'love at first sight', this was surely it. She just started that game. I saw a character in green coming out of bed, text-boxes telling a story in a language I didn't yet understand, before she could walk all around a small house because of the top-down perspective. Such freedom. Then came the most amazing thing I ever saw when she walked outside. She stepped into this huge world, even though soldiers would keep her on a confined path, it already felt endless. It was raining in that world, fascinating me to the point I forgot the real world existed. And then she came to a castle, where the door was locked. Curiosity peaked, what could possibly be in there? How do you get in there?
My aunt didn't immediately figure it out, and I was called away by my mother, who was picking me up to go somewhere. I don't remember where, and it probably wasn't important. That game though, that was important.
