A Portrait of the Author as a Young Gamer

It's Spring Break, 1995. I'm ten years old, sitting in my friend's bedroom, in front of a computer that isn't mine, watching something load that I have no framework to understand yet. The game is Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. The box art is simple and the title is blunt and the whole thing looks, honestly, a little silly. I have no idea what I'm about to see.

The screen fills. Units move. Workers scatter toward trees and gold, axes rising and falling with mechanical purpose while, somewhere across the map, an unseen enemy is already building an army, and that battle will soon commence.

I don't move, I just watch. I am wholly spellbound. But to explain why this moment hit the way it did, I’ll have to begin at the beginning.

My father was a tech enthusiast. In the years before home computers were an assumption, he built one. Building a computer today takes on the shape of a “LEGO set for adults” sort of afternoon; take prebuilt parts, put them into the proper slots and sockets, watch a YouTube video if you have any questions. In the primordial days of the early 1980s, you had to build things for real. It was an 8088 platform, installed in a motherboard he had to solder himself, and it sat humming in the corner of our home with the quiet authority of something that cost real money and real attention. I grew up with it the way other kids grew up with televisions, and I never questioned it, it was just there. It was just ours.

What I didn't understand at the time, and wouldn't understand for years, was that my father had built me a classroom.

I learned to read playing Reader Rabbit. I learned arithmetic from Math Blaster. I learned deduction, lateral thinking, and the patience to work a problem from multiple angles from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego – a game that taught me, without ever knocking me over the head about it, that information is a resource, and knowing how to gather it is a skill. None of this felt like education. It felt like play, because it was. I certainly didn’t process this at the time, but having these be the first, formative experiences with computers (and games), the lines between entertainment and learning would forever be blurred.

But a computer was not the only tech in my life.

When I was five, my parents took me to visit friends of theirs who owned a Nintendo Entertainment System. The adults did what adults do when there's a five-year-old in the room – they handed me a controller, showed me how it worked, and went to have conversations I wasn't invited to. For the next few hours, I was gone. Tetris. Super Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda. The controller fit my hands like it had been waiting for me, and the worlds inside of the screen felt inexhaustible.

My parents could tell.

We owned an NES before the month was out.

The NES gave me something the computer hadn't, not exactly: pure play. The joy of moving through a world for no reason other than the movement itself, the satisfaction of a jump timed right, a puzzle solved, a level cleared. It didn't ask anything of me but attention and reflexes. For a five-year-old, that was enough.

But minds grow. And as they grow, they start asking for more from the things they love.

A few years later, the Super Nintendo arrived in America, and my father offered me a sweetheart of a deal: If I could save half the cost of the console on my own, he'd cover the rest – matching funds, plus tax. I diverted every dollar of my allowance immediately. No deliberation, no negotiation. I'd already decided. My piggy bank went into my closet, and every coin and dollar bill I could lay my hands on went into it. I think I even started asking for extra chores in the hope of earning a little extra, a rare act borne from the impatience of a child who wants something badly enough to actually work for it.

I got the SNES. And the 16-bit graphics were better, yes, and the sound was richer, and all of that was satisfying in the way that upgrades are satisfying. But that wasn't why the SNES was such a great game system.

What mattered was the cartridges.

The extra storage capacity meant publishers could fit more into a game – and sometimes that just meant extra levels and graphics, but sometimes it meant more story. Final Fantasy II. Final Fantasy III. Chrono Trigger. These weren't arcade games you played until you ran out of quarters. They were narratives. Characters with names and histories, worlds with lore and consequence, choices that carried weight across hours of play. For the first time, games asked me not just to engage with them, but to care about them too.

And I did. Completely.

And once I understood that games could do that – that they could tell a story worth caring about, deliver it across twenty hours, and make me feel something real at the end – I couldn't go back to the version of games that didn't. The threshold had moved. Play alone was no longer enough. I needed the story, too.

Which brings us back to Spring Break, 1995. My friend didn't own a game console, but he had a PC in his room, and his parents had recently bought him a game. He showed it to me the way you show someone something exciting that you can't quite explain yet – with a kind of restless energy, like the experience was still moving through him and he needed somewhere to put it.

He finished the mission he had been playing. He graciously got up, gestured me to the chair, and I sat down at the keyboard.

Rather than thrust me into a campaign without any context, he set up a basic custom match against the AI, and I processed the plot roughly as its most reductive summary: orcs bad, humans good, fight. I was ten years old; the nuance could wait.

What I couldn't ignore was how layered the game was.

SimCity had already taught me to plan. To look at a blank grid and project a city onto it in my mind before I placed a single zone, to think three steps ahead, to understand that decisions compound and that a bad road layout at the start of the game will punish you for the next two hours. That kind of spatial, sequential thinking had become native to me. I did it without noticing.

Warcraft took that and said: “Okay, take it further.”

Peasants gathered resources, chopping lumber and mining gold. That gold funded farms to feed your population, funded barracks to train your units. The gold also paid for training footmen and archers and knights, a whole army! Those same units would then need to be directed toward an enemy that was – right now, at this moment, without waiting for me to finish thinking – already doing the same thing on the other side of the map. Every process ran in parallel. Every decision had a cost and a timer. I couldn't pause to plan, it was all happening in real time. The plan had to live inside the action.

This was not a game about city building, resource gathering, or strategic building, or tactical fighting. It was a game about all of them, all at once.

It was a game about thinking under pressure. It was about holding multiple systems in your mind simultaneously, which meant your attention was a resource, to be allocated as needed, knowing when to press and when to pull back, reading a developing situation and reacting before the situation concluded with you on the wrong end of it. It was chess, except the other player didn't wait for your turn.

I loved it, even as I was getting wrecked by it. I thought about it while biking home, I thought about it at dinner, and I thought about it long after I should have been asleep.

Unfortunately, I had one problem: my home computer was old. Not “vintage” old, not “charmingly retro” – genuinely, functionally old. The monitor was monochrome. The processor was slow enough that "slow" barely covered it. Warcraft would not have run on it. Warcraft would have laughed at it.

So, every day I could, I rode my bike to my friend's house.

You might think that two players trying to share a single-player game would be an exercise in frustration, and you'd be right. So, we took turns. We gave each other advice. We debated about strategy. We got better – not despite the constraint, but partly because of it. Having to articulate a decision to another person, to say why you were pulling the troops back or pushing toward the mine, forced a kind of deliberateness that solo play didn't require. We were, without knowing it, teaching each other to think.

Later that year, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness released. It was everything the first game was, expanded and deepened and refined. Naval combat. More unit types. Richer strategy.

Didn’t matter, my computer didn’t even have a CD-ROM drive, I wouldn’t be able to play it.

That would have to change.

The summer of 1996, my family bought a Compaq Presario desktop computer. It’s been thirty years, and I can still tell you everything about it. Pentium 1, clocked at 166mHz. Twenty-four megabytes of DRAM. A 2.5-gigabyte hard drive. No network card, but a 56K modem whose tones are now permanently etched into my brain. No graphics accelerator. All accessed via a 14-inch monitor.

It was nothing special, but it had a CD-ROM drive.

Which meant it could play Warcraft II. Obviously. What else was I going to use it for?

There is a specific texture to that era of gaming that is almost impossible to describe to someone who didn't live it – not just nostalgia, but a particular sensory thickness. The sound of the CD spinning up. The mechanical hum of the hard drive, the slight grinding noise it makes as the head moves. The slight flicker of the CRT monitor.

And the music! Warcraft II had a genuinely great soundtrack. What it also had, if you were patient and mildly curious, was a neat party trick: pull the disc out and drop it in a regular music CD player. The music tracks played. The game and the album were the same object. This, of course, depended on the CD player, sometimes it would get a bit buggy and not play. Since it felt like doing something secret in the first place, I didn’t mind. This was part of the charm.

I remember the narrated mission briefings – a static background, the scrolling text, and the voiceover, the world's story delivered to you in chapters before you were trusted to act in it. Blizzard would carry this convention forward into StarCraft, then abandon it entirely in Warcraft III once the technology made in-engine cinematics practical ways to convey the story. In hindsight, the portrait narration was a crutch built from limitation that somehow became characterful. Its absence from later games was correct and still, somehow, a small loss.

I remember the factions finally diverging. In the original Warcraft, the orc and human factions were functionally mirrored – the same units in different colors, a coin flipped. Warcraft II broke the symmetry. Humans got Paladins and Holy Light. Orcs got Ogre-Magi and Bloodlust. And if you knew what Bloodlust did, and you knew how to use it, the outcome of any properly micromanaged engagement was not really in doubt. Blizzard had made a deliberate design choice to introduce faction differentiation. That was new. It meant something, even if it led to an imbalance.

But the thing I remember most is the battle for the phone line.

Warcraft II came out before Battle.net existed. If you wanted to play with another human being and you didn't have a LAN (I did not), your option was a direct dial – modem to modem, like a phone call, because it was a phone call. Your modem dialed, negotiated in beeps and screeches, and if someone else tried to call while you were connected, they got a busy signal.

This made playing a multiplayer game of Warcraft II a resource allocation problem.

The phone line could do one thing at a time. It could be a telephone. It could be a dial-up internet connection – which, in 1996, mostly meant AOL – or it could be a game. You made a choice. You picked up the receiver, dialed your friend's number, and the two of you agreed, in advance, on a time when neither of you would need to receive a phone call or check your email. You scheduled the game session the way you'd schedule a meeting. You set a time, and you committed to it.

I am aware this makes me sound very old. It should. There was a time when getting on the internet – let alone playing a real-time strategy game across it – required a negotiation with your entire household about who needed the phone and when. The infrastructure of your social life and the infrastructure of your gaming life ran on the same wire, and only one could win.

That wire taught me something I didn't fully understand until later: that access shapes experience. The constraints weren't separate from the game. They were the game.

I think about that Compaq Presario sometimes: its beige color scheme, its silly curved accents, the heft of its steel frame. But mostly, what I remember was what it meant to me as a turning point in my engagement with games.

In retrospect, Warcraft II wasn't the biggest leap forward I'd ever experience from Blizzard. It was a thoughtful evolution of a previous game, but it wasn’t revolutionary. But it was the first time I understood that playing was something you had make time for. That the world outside the game had a claim on your time, and the game had a competing claim, and you, the player, were the thing in the middle – negotiating, choosing, committing.

That hasn't changed. Only the wire has.