My gamertag.

I started playing games around the time the SNES came out, but it wasn't on the SNES. It was on a hand-me-down NES that one of my cousins gave me at christmas time... when he got his SNES. It had a bunch of games, most of which I can't remember the names of. I know there was Tecmo Super Bowl (which I could never figure out how to play at my age), some game where you run forward dodging things and jumping over big black gaps in the ground that I've never been able to remember the name of to this day, and of course Super Mario Bros.. I had fun with this system, as it was my first video game system ever, even though I never beat any of the games I had for it. Eventually I guess I grew up, got stupid, and sold it or gave it away. Only now do I regret doing that.

I never had a subscription to a gaming magazine. The reason for this was that I grew up in a lower middle class family. We weren't poor, but I knew what we could afford and knew when not to ask for something. The $10-$20 to get a subscription to EGM, Game-Informer, etc. seemed like a lot of money to me at the time, and I never had a community to see what was good, bad, and coming out soon. So when my real start into gaming started in 1996, when my parents gave me a Nintendo 64 for Christmas, I still did not have any knowledge of what was considered good and bad. I think I somehow still made at least decent choices though; Goldeneye, Yoshi's Story, Pokemon Stadium are the ones that I remember having. I also didn't ever have as many games as my friends did. This, along with my little experience of the console generation before, would play heavily into my gaming name later. I also have never and still don't have anything resembling a PC that can handle PC games, so I never played them.

I had the N64 with just a few games at a time until the next generation came about. I first got an Xbox, then a Gamecube about a year after. (Note the lack of ps1 and ps2 in all this, I was never even introduced to Sony's systems before, and didn't own a ps2 until maybe 2 years after I had both Xbox and Gamecube. Even with the newest systems and games I still wasn't caught up.) I think I finally had fallen into the "hardcore gamer" demographic. I had the Game-Informer subscription at Gamestop, and constantly checked sites like Gamespot for news and reviews. I felt like part of something, and was starting to understand the difference in the way we think of ourselves and the way non-gamers see us. That sounds all preachy, but I'm talking about a few years ago, before the Wii.

When the Xbox 360 arrived, and I had to think of a name to give myself. I reflected on my personal gaming history, and what it meant about me compared to most other people who play video games as a major hobby or job. When all the thinking had finished, I came to my amazing conclusion...I was still a noob. Even with all the interest I had in the medium and read about it, I still had only been putting my toes in the pool at each major era in gaming history. So I accepted it, and made my gamertag accordingly. It was to be cmpLtNOOb, short for "complete noob." I mixed up the capitalization and ways of abbreviating because it just seems like that's what you do with gamertags. Since then I have pretty much used that name for everything gaming related. My gamertag, PSN ID, username on 1up, Giant Bomb, forums, etc.

So now we've come to end of my little tale, hope you enjoyed it. I don't think I will want to change my gamertag, it sort of protects me from being arrogant online, by me basically saying "I suck at games." I'm proud of how well I have managed to keep up with this wildly changing medium, and my gamertag helps me to appreciate where I came from and how I came to be where I am right now: 19, in college, poor, barely scraping enough money together to pay for rent and Street Fighter 4, and getting an Electronic News degree so that I can do the thing that I have wanted to do since I first realized people do it--write about video games.