The Men Who Handed Me the Controller

Father’s Day is coming up, so I want to talk about fathers and gaming. I was lucky. I had three father figures who kept me straight, and every one of them put a controller or a keyboard in my hands at some point. Between the three of them, they built the person writing this.

My biological dad got me into gaming. I was around four when he brought home a Nintendo, and some of my best early memories of him are baseball and ice hockey on that thing. This was before the licensed stuff. No Joe Montana, no Tommy Lasorda. The games were just called Baseball and Football and Hockey, before Blades of Steel even existed.

We didn’t have much in common most of my life. We got into sports later, he was big on sports, but the relationship was contentious at times, and he left when I was very young. Before that, though, I remember the two of us driving down to a department store called Brendle’s because there was a new game out, a gold cartridge called Zelda. He said we’re buying this. We took it home and I can’t tell you how many hours we put into figuring that game out. I think we eventually beat it. It wasn’t long before he left that we went back to Brendle’s and picked up Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

A couple years after he left, he came back into my life and I’d go see him on weekends. I didn’t have a Nintendo there, that stayed at my mom’s house. But he’d bought a Sega Master System at a pawn shop, and that turned out to be one of the most important turns my gaming life ever took. If you’ve known me long, or read any of my stuff, you know I’m a Sega guy. The Master System is where that started. Alex Kidd, Shinobi, games I’d never seen on Nintendo and that played nothing like it. I liked how the Master System played, how it looked, and the games. After that I went down the Sega rabbit hole and never climbed back out. Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, Sega CD, 32X. Anybody who knows me will tell you Adam’s a Sega guy, and a lot of that traces back to my dad and a used Master System from a pawn shop.

The second father figure was my stepdad, Wayne. Wayne would do anything in the world for me. When he married my mom he saw I was into games and electronics, and he leaned into it. He was an electrical engineer by trade, a robotics guy. He built and repaired the robots that built silicon wafers. Back when they still made silicon wafers near us. He liked computers too, and I didn’t have one. I’d barely touched one. He had some Radio Shack color machines, Tandys I’m pretty sure, and he set one up in a back room and told me to play with it and figure out how it worked. It’s the kind that had the big 5 1/4 inch drives. But it also had a cartridge add-on, which was interesting to say the least. We had a lunar lander game, the graphics were as plain as you could get. Basically it was just ASCII art and a line for the surface (aka the moon) that you tried to land on. And it had Pitfall, which was the first time I ever played it. That game became one of my favorites on that machine, and years later I picked up Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure for the Genesis. That actual copy is on the bookshelf behind me right now.

Wayne pushed me down the PC road. Without him I’d probably never have become a PC gamer, and probably never an IT person either, which is what I do for a living now. Servers, networks, the whole thing. He gave me the tools and the training to go that direction. Christmas of 95 he bought our first family computer, a Packard Bell Legend, 100MHz. He loaded it with games, and one of them was Myst (I’ve got a whole other piece on Myst if you want it).

But before we even had that computer, he took me to the house of a guy he worked with, a super nice guy with an engineering degree from Purdue, and that’s where I played Wolfenstein 3D for the first time. Later, when Wayne helped me build my first PC and I had nobody to ask when something went wrong, that same guy came over and helped us sort it out.

Here’s the part that matters most for this site. Wayne bought me my first HTML software, WebExpress by MicroVision. That’s the tool Dave and I used to build Playing Out of Control Gaming back in 98. POCG exists because my stepdad handed me a piece of web design software and told me to run with it.

The third was my grandfather. He was an old-fashioned Baptist preacher, hellfire and brimstone, and people assume a guy like that would be anti-technology. He wasn’t, not even a little. My grandfather believed in me, and like my stepdad, he would do anything in the world for me.

When I was young, after my dad left and before my mom married Wayne, my mom would drop me at my grandparents’ at five in the morning. She was a nurse working early shifts, so it was up to my grandparents’ to take me to school and pick me up. I spent my days with them. My grandfather would put me on the tractor with him while he farmed, or have me out in the garage while he restored cars. He was a diesel mechanic on top of being a pastor. There were neighbors with a pool and a kid about my age, and they wouldn’t let me swim in it. So my grandfather put in his own pool. He liked telling people he built that pool for Adam, so I’d have somewhere to have fun at his house.

He encouraged the gaming and the IT both. He always found it interesting that I was writing for game websites in the 90s, and then building POCG. When I mentioned we were getting PlayStation games sent to us for review and I had no way to cover them myself, that I was stuck leaning on outside reviewers instead of me or Dave or the local guys, he bought me a PlayStation. He just wanted to do whatever helped me in life. That was special.

All three of my father figures are gone now. Wayne nine years ago last month. My papa about six. My dad two years ago. While they are gone, they aren’t forgotten. The impact they had and the choices they made in my life helped me become the person I am today.