For a brief period in my life - about five or six years - I lost interest in video games. But then one winter a video game store opened in my neighborhood (note: this was well before there was a Gamestop on every corner so it was still kind of a novelty). And one evening I decided to go inside and take a look around. On prominent display was a new console that looked nothing like the beige-colored boxes that I was used to. It was black and stylish with thick fins cut out of its sides.It was the Atari Jaguar. I purchased it and a bunch of games for about four hundred dollars.
It would be easy to make a joke about buying such an infamous flop being my greatest video game regret but, the thing is, I didn't regret it. Not at all. By pure accident, I purchased Tempest 2K, Doom, Alien Vs Predator, Flashback and a couple of other good games. Basically, I lucked into buying the best games on the system.
And those were some great games. I had never played Doom before and it was amazing and atmospheric and so much fun. Tempest 2K kind of blew my mind. The mix of retro graphics, addicting gameplay and pulsing music found in so many downloadable games today really had its start in Tempest 2K. These and the other games filled up thousands of hours of my life for the next two or three years. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
But here is where the regret comes in. Years later, I was seized by a weird kind of mania. I had to declutter my life. I began packing up books that I was never going to reread, old clothes I had outgrown, dishes, hangers, old gym shoes, just about everything that I wasn't using at the time and put them in the dumpster.
And at the bottom of a closet, dusty and forgotten, I found my old Atari Jaguar and about a dozen or so games. I remember thinking: should I keep this? I'm sure it still worked. I clearly remember picking it up, toying with it for a moment, and then slowly walking down the stairs to the dumpster. I left my boxed console, its dozen games and two controllers sitting on the side of the dumpster, facing out into the alley. I remember thinking that some lucky kid would probably find it and give it a good home.
The next day the dumpster was empty and the box was gone. What happened to the console? Was it thrown in the back of a garbage truck with the rest of the trash? Did the trash collector take it home for his own kids? Where did it end up? I didn't know and I never will.
I was immediately filled with regret. Why didn't I give it to a younger relative or better yet just let it sit in the back of the closet? Who throws away a perfectly good console and a bunch of working games? Who does that?
I still think about that console once in a while and how I got rid of it. It was almost as if I had abandoned a pet I had grown bored of. I feel bad about having done it. Almost guilty.
It would be easy to make a joke about buying such an infamous flop being my greatest video game regret but, the thing is, I didn't regret it. Not at all. By pure accident, I purchased Tempest 2K, Doom, Alien Vs Predator, Flashback and a couple of other good games. Basically, I lucked into buying the best games on the system.
And those were some great games. I had never played Doom before and it was amazing and atmospheric and so much fun. Tempest 2K kind of blew my mind. The mix of retro graphics, addicting gameplay and pulsing music found in so many downloadable games today really had its start in Tempest 2K. These and the other games filled up thousands of hours of my life for the next two or three years. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
But here is where the regret comes in. Years later, I was seized by a weird kind of mania. I had to declutter my life. I began packing up books that I was never going to reread, old clothes I had outgrown, dishes, hangers, old gym shoes, just about everything that I wasn't using at the time and put them in the dumpster.
And at the bottom of a closet, dusty and forgotten, I found my old Atari Jaguar and about a dozen or so games. I remember thinking: should I keep this? I'm sure it still worked. I clearly remember picking it up, toying with it for a moment, and then slowly walking down the stairs to the dumpster. I left my boxed console, its dozen games and two controllers sitting on the side of the dumpster, facing out into the alley. I remember thinking that some lucky kid would probably find it and give it a good home.
The next day the dumpster was empty and the box was gone. What happened to the console? Was it thrown in the back of a garbage truck with the rest of the trash? Did the trash collector take it home for his own kids? Where did it end up? I didn't know and I never will.
I was immediately filled with regret. Why didn't I give it to a younger relative or better yet just let it sit in the back of the closet? Who throws away a perfectly good console and a bunch of working games? Who does that?
I still think about that console once in a while and how I got rid of it. It was almost as if I had abandoned a pet I had grown bored of. I feel bad about having done it. Almost guilty.