So I skipped 1990’s school year, ill fill us in on that in a bit. When I do I will mention how the summer of 1991 got shoved into 1993 because it had future implications. This is true, except for one event that is a tie off to things from the 1980s. So we start this section with Boy Scout Camp.
I don’t remember any trips in the summer of 1991, although this was the summer of the fabled scout camp that ended with a big tree going down in the forest and some hitch hiking to get out of said scout camp. It seems there may have been a trip to Chicago during this summer too, getting dates worked out but there might be something here. But this also might be the trip in wasn’t sure about in 1989, so for now it’s just another note here.
Like I’ve said, by summer of 1991 my “who I am as a teenager” had been shaped. But now since this is maybe my first entry for junior high, it needs to be said. Also as stated, my mom, especially, seemed unready for all the changes. I don’t think she ever forgot that young lady’s foul mouth that afternoon in backyard pool (bank that sentence). So, my parents had signed me up for boy scout camp. Which honestly at the time was a mistake and I think they just didn’t want to accept who I was yet. I had already loathed those knot tying fanatics for a while and shipping me off in the middle of the summer to go camping with them was this dreadful sword of Damocles weighing over my legit fun summer otherwise.
But I wasn’t able to weasel out of it. And so, I had to report to our little church run boy scout troop and drive up into the Sierra Nevada mountains for a camping jamboree. Let’s get this out there, I didn’t want to be there. My time in scouts was over in my head. This was a giant waste of time and like fifth grade I wasn’t happy.
But I was just one of I think around eight of us that were going from our little local troop. There I was not wanting to be there, there was Karl, yeah same one as always, with his dad who was one of our two permanent on site scout masters. There was Nate, same Nate as tales prior and, at the time, if not Karl’s best friend he was at the very least Karl’s sidekick. Those two had an interesting childhood dynamic. Then an older kid named Dennis, who seemed and odd fit for the group, he was older, his family was new to the area and those of us that didn’t pay much attention to the church group part of things only really knew him as the older brother to lacey who was a girl in the same grade as Karl, Nate myself and Ian who was another one of our campers. Who at the time I just viewed as pretty plain white bread, super normal.
The other two campers were a kid named Jason, who lived in a neighboring city but used to be in ours and I guess his parents still wanted him to hang out with the kids he knew when he was younger. His mother and mine were actually business partners for a while with the Kaleidoscope singers and I did hang out with him a fair amount when we were younger. But as bad as this sounds, he was kind of too nerdy for the group of boys that were going to scout camp at that point in his life. So, he was just there but out of memory for the whole trip, and then we also had the one scout that seemed to really want to be there, he was a year younger than us, he came dressed for the part and his dad was a sometimes on site chaperone.
This crew was governed though under a head scout master, a man named Chuck, who we could tell loved scouting. He was a member of the church that sponsored the troop but had no kids of his own in the troop and was more of an intellectual trying to be a part-time mountain man. I don’t know how to explain that last part, if you’ve never grown up in a university town and don’t know of parents who are gifted researchers in a certain fields to the point that they almost don’t seem normal, then it’s hard to explain. I guess if I had to generalize it think of him as Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory trying to manage teenagers on a scouting trip while placing his faith in God that things will turn out right. He was a character.
After the early day settling into our campsites, we all had to meet up with the tons of other troops that were there. They had us all meet up in a giant circle. There had to be what felt like a couple hundred campers there, so it was a big circle. And that was the point in which some of us noticed that the other campers might have been more into the events that were coming than we were going to be. Everyone else was uniformed up, most of us were not. Then during the ramblings on about procedure and so on that took place at the camp, we got caught trying to sneak out of the big giant circle by the counselor on the megaphone in the middle giving said instruction.
This was who we were going to be. Early on they gave every troop a large fire axe to chop wood for their campfires. While the closets camp to us diligently chopped wood, too which Dennis would hurl insults at the chopper. Our troop instantly went up the hill adjacent to our campsite in search of larger prey. And so, Karl’s father eventually stopped us when they realized we were chopping down small trees on the hill side to turn into kindling, versus collecting wood and chopping it down to size. Then one of the great mistakes of that week happened. Karl’s dad told us to stop cutting down the small living trees and focus on dead ones instead.
We were teenagers, well all but one of us, the younger as I said was more into the camp and wasn’t a part of this endeavor anyway, and that edict only fueled our stupidity. So, we hunted, and we found the biggest dead tree we could, and started a week long effort to chop it down, yeah it was that big. Groups of us would march up that hill and take turns going at that tree like a baseball player taking batting practice. Dennis would smoke, which was forbidden, but up the hillside where no one knew where we were he could get away with it. The axe chopping would carry with it motivational speech only a teenage boy would find amusing.
So as camp went on, the only real activity Ian, I and Dennis seemed to care about was the destruction of the tree. Karl, and Nate definitely got their licks in on the tree, it was fun mind you, but Karl at the very least had some interest, or feigned at least some, in the merit badge classes. So, they weren’t always there. But the three of us spent most of our non-eating, non-sleep time up there. We from day one were the black sheep troop anyway. Who needed to follow protocol anymore anyway? That attitude was bad for the rest of camp. I remember Dennis just being merciless to our nearby camper with insults, well and to Chuck, and when it came to collecting food, everyone in our group started to get sticky fingers and enjoy depriving some of the more serious campers some of the nicer foods to eat. Yeah, we pilfered the better menu items that were supposedly evenly distributed. Not so when we got all your chocolate suckers.
So, it shouldn’t have been a big surprise that by Friday when one of the other troops finally figured out what we were doing up the hill we got reported. Of course, at this point we were a good halfway through the tree. I remember part of our stern talking we received was about how the tree could topple down the hill and take out the campsites below. Too which I think most of us thought, cool. But the only part of the punishment that mattered to us was that we didn’t get to finish cutting down that behemoth we worked so hard on. Instead, we watched it get chain sawed down as to make sure it feel uphill and away from the camps, it was sad but cool to watch. And it also symbolized the end, for at least three of us, of even caring to be at camp.
You would think with all the shenanigans that now we were under a microscope. Maybe, it didn’t seem like it and as it turns out, after the tree went down, Ian, Dennis and I decided it was time to go home. Dennis said he could get his brother or cousin or some such close relative to come get us if we got back to civilization and a pay phone. So, the three of us just grabbed our bags and managed to just cleanly walk right out of the camp and through its gates to the gravel road ahead. Now this camp area was probably a good few miles up a mountain in the Sierra Nevadas. It was going to be a pretty good hike to get anywhere. But as fate would have it that day, shortly down the road a pickup truck was going down the mountain and we did the natural thing, we flagged him down and asked for a ride.
And there we were, three teens in the bed of a pickup bouncing up and down this gravel road for several miles until we got back to the main road, which luckily had a gas station at it. Now all we had to do was put in the call and wait to get picked up. We were probably only about an hour and a half out from home at that point since the freeway was nearby, the perfect plan. Except Karl’s dad noticed we went missing and found us rather quickly. He loaded us back up in his car, back up the mountain and to camp. Where we explained ourselves and managed to get Chuck to drive us back down the hill to call our parents for permission to leave early. Which we were happy with.
And that should have been the end of that story, we go back down the road, call home and ruin our folks’ free weekends like we felt they ruined our weeks, everyone is miserable, end of story. I knew the ditching out and hitchhiking down the road might carry some extra consequences but not that much. Just the anger of having to come get us would fuel any punishment from that anyway.
But Dennis wasn’t done with his rage, while waiting for our rides he used his pocket knife to slowly un-upholster the back of Chuck’s front seat. You might ask why, but I seriously don’t think there was a reason, at that point I think it was anarchy for anarchies sake. And this all having ties to our parents church the punishment for that week became stiffer for being complicit in the destruction. Ian and I said nothing and to be honest I think at the end of everything it was such a surreal act, that even though I got told not stopping him was as bad as doing it. I don’t think either of us would have been able to even contemplate what to do, it was too weird of a day.
1991 school year introduction. 1990 probably read weird, because my last school section, sixth grade was listed in 1989 and finished in the beginning of 1990. By that standard seventh should have been in 1990 but I realized I needed to change up how I was doing that. For no other reason than I look at 1996 as the year I finished public school, and my brain couldn’t handle cutting things up and having it in the 1995 section.
Luckily the summer of 1990 was rather extensive, but it directly leads into seventh grade, which will start here in 1991. Excellent all clear now. Prior to High School in the town I grew up in you had to do Junior High School. In fact, High School was called Senior High. It’s an older system than the more common middle school to high school format most places in the U.S. use these days. The next three years would be spent at Oliver Wendall Holmes Junior High School, which was an actual stones throw from the L Street house away.
This meant I could walk to school and still make it on time even if I got up late. The benefit of this geography was going to be rather high. Beyond just that, I was familiar with the school, it had been a neighbor since childhood and a playground. The other benefit was just not having to ride my bike all over town to get to school in crazy weather.
I mentioned by bike ride during the 89 earthquake that rattled the world series. Me and that BMX did a lot of travelling 4th through 6th grades. The last year not as much, except for the fact I got a paper route, but 5th grade, back in 88 when I was fighting against Humphries every day, well that was a cross town bike ride every morning to get too.
Those rides give me memories of heading off into the north wind, peddling as hard as I could, wondering what felt off and then noticing all my work had just got me to the end of the block, I still had to make a left and now bike to the other side of town.
That year I would actually meet up with a couple of classmates that lived near the community park in town. To reach them I would have to ride over this overpass went over some train tracks and led into the park. That was one of the highlights though of the ride. Your ten year old legs pump as hard as they can to get up the hill as though you’re in some imaginary bike race. Then once the summit is achieved you speed, either coasting or peddling to make it more dangerous down in the decline.
In 1988 this meant you could speed down the hill and without much adjustment zoom across the exit that led to the bike path for the park. This did however require crossing one of the busier streets in town, and if you were going fast enough the turn once you got into the park was a little intense. Not to fret though, many a young bikers just got up enough speed to have formed a natural bike tire sized trail over a hill that kept the same straight line with your momentum. It was fun, and slightly dangerous.
Dangerous enough in fact that if you go to that same hill, overpass and intersection today they have re-configured the entire bike lane layout, making the crossing have a light and putting it further down into the little league parks which were also a feature of this part of town. Although still the old entrance is there leading to the street confusingly next to the Davis Art Center.
After the danger pass, I would met up in the park with the other couple boys and we would ride on. Past the park there is a shopping center. If anyone had any money we would occasionally make a stop there. One of the major stops was the tiny convenience store at the shell gas station on the corner. We would load up on Pixie Sticks, which for the uneducated is just fruit flavored sugar in a straw, and then continue on our journey.
There was also some sort of “restaurant” there we would sometimes stop at. I can’t remember what their service was, but they had a Joust arcade machine of some variety and I do remember stopping to play that from time to time as well. Whether that was on the way home or the way too isn’t always clear but at some point this paragraph will get expanded upon if I can figure out what the business was.
Our last leg of the 5th grade journey would take us through a residential section in which our school, West Davis Intermediate resided. Now like I said this was 1988, so there was a big election going on. Since there was a focus on this in class, we had developed some major attitudes over it. One of the more interesting ones was a planned overcrossing on my side of town that all the kids were for, for whatever reason we had. So we took it upon ourselves to deface a lot of the “No on measure…” signs in peoples yards.
Harper, decades later would do one school year at the same school. So I explained to Nora the old bike route I had to take to get there. A interesting question was asked, what did my mother make me do on rain days. Mom’s answer was, well I couldn’t pick you up in the afternoon because of work, so if no ride I sent you away.
And I do remember riding in the rain sometimes, most notably the time my bike chain came off on a minimum day where Mom had me biking to that friend with Zelda, Jason’s house to wait until she could come pick me up after school and before work started. The chain definitely came off in the rain and I took a little tumble on Hunt Way in the rain, and then sat there in the road banged up and fixed my chain. So walking was going to be lovely, even if the weather was bad a quick spring got anyone home in less time than it did for another kid to unlock their bike from the bike racks.
Junior High was an interesting transition. We know those Spanish immersion friends I had almost exclusively went to the other Junior High School in town. I had the one year of regular school for the sixth grade, so I began seventh grade swarming with the kids I was familiar with from a few months prior, in a very normal seventh grade pattern. I didn’t know then I would spend forever working in the same town’s junior highs, so know I get it, sixth grade classes swarm back together at the start of Junior High school, even if they dong have the same classes. I was just a normal old fish in a normal old school.
One of those students was Karl, whom I had known for years, however, Karl like some of the other kids in the sixth-grade class I was in had decided to test into the “higher” level of English and math than I cared to bother with, so I got stuck with a fair amount of new kids during my actual classes themselves. This was the big change too, intermediate to junior high means classes instead of a classroom. We now had to deal with a schedule and even though we swarmed back to the comfort of sixth grade not everyone was in the same class periods.
By Mid-October the times, friend wise, were a changing. I met Keith and another Kid named Jason R. who came to Davis via Sacramento and was enjoying getting along with them. Both were into comic art, Jason R. looking at it and Keith making it. Thus, my daily friends were changing a bit. I also had started playing football and went through all those new introductions at this time too. By Halloween I still went out trick or treating with Karl, and Nate and the crowd from sixth grade but this was the last real elementary school shindig I would attend. Not following the major part of the swarms pattern into the different English/History cluster courses made me met new kids and find things in common there.
I used art as the main example, and it was the ice breaker. Since fifth grade I had started just constantly drawing in class during any lecture. By fifth grade teacher, who we keep coming back to here, actually encouraged it because it would cause me to not speak out in class as much if I was intensely into drawing something. I keep the drawing end of things in the sixth grade since it did seem to help me pay more attention to the lectures in class if I doodled away at the same time. I think by that time I had become accustomed to doing homework at home with cartoons on and Mom’s piano students making their noise that my mind couldn’t focus without split attention, it was strange.
However, as we know from the NES era, which seventh grade was part of, the Nintendo was also a huge draw together once the ice was broken. Keith had a couple games I didn’t Gremlins 2, and some NES game called Final Fantasy, who knows if the latter will come into play. Gremlins 2 was oddly fun, and for some reason I distinctly remember Keith knowing some cheat for it so we would always be on the level with the spider gremlin who was the last boss.
Jason R. didn’t have a Nintendo, he had a Sega, so we were his NES pipeline and I know people sell up the hype of the console wars during the 90s, but I literally remember playing the Sega as feeling weird and even Altered Beast not being as fun as the arcade, along with a feeling that if you had the Sega you had the parents that didn’t know enough to get the right console.
Playing games over at Keith’s apartment for the first time is also going to introduce us to Marty, and Chris M. and Chris K. Perhaps Chris one and Chris two in this case. I think technically I met K. first he was closer friends with Keith than the other boys, but Chris M. will always be number one, am I right? Or have I given away too much of the future. But this comedically is funny because this starts the seventh grade and the name Chris.
To help my brain though, those introduction stories I put in a main bio section: https://www.supertrouz.com/history/index.html
Because other than Karl, this fall we get introduced to, essentially new family for the next decade, so, you know mental organization. Plus, when I started writing this all up, I started in 1994.
Jason and Keith, held the morning seventh grade core classes together with me and would then travel on through the day, Keith’s other friends we met were on other schedules, so initially those two were the new exciting friends for seventh grade.
They also had seventh period math at the end of the day with me, and that maybe was most memorable class all year, well at least for a while. Our math teacher, which my mother knew personally, was involved with the senior high school sports program in some manner and so had been replaced with a “permanent” substitute early on during first quarter of that school year. Now in most of my classes early into Junior High seventh graders would have been semi-respectful with the change, out of the sheer fear they all seem to have with junior high the first couple months. However, since Math is regulated suspiciously by the school district, We were in a Math class with slightly “slower” eight graders and then “behind” ninth graders.
The Shadowrun rules book for the RPG used in Math class during seventh period in seventh grade.
So, when we got everyday substitute, those ninth graders would teach us all how to take advantage the situation. This led to Keith introducing me to the art and world around Shadowrun. While I wasn’t a pen and paper RPG player, I dabbled during this time with him and Jason and some other friends we had made in the class. Of course, later that would give us the SNES Shadowrun game to be interested in as well during the SNES era. Which might have skipped us by if not for this time.
But while chaos was afoot in the class, we were enjoying Shadowrun during the free period and just did our thing. Others were getting considerably more rambunctious though. Expectedly then this wouldn’t last forever. Either the sub or the school couldn’t handle the way things had become and the original teacher returned ending out run in the … shadows?
Jason who lived in Sacramento eventually stayed over one weekend, It might have been around birthday time, because we bought at least one box of baseball cards, 1991 fleer if I recall and opened and sorted those. While on my tail end of baseball card collecting, I may have bought quite a few boxes to start the 1991 baseball card season, especially since the Donruss boxes were cheap at the Longs Drugs around the corner from the L street House with Jason.
In kind then, I went and stayed at Jason’s house in Sacramento one time. It was notably the first time I think I had gone to a friend’s that far away from home. It was a rainy weekend and I remember being sad he had a Sega and we couldn’t play our regular lineup of video games. Jason that winter would also meet me on campus the day Davis suffered a windchill that was well below freezing. We had a week or so in the winter that was unbelievable cold for our part of California. Compounded by a very strong wind.
This caused the pool in the backyard to freeze over. This spawned one of the more memorable moments with the first above ground pool we had in the backyard and the freeze would also lead to its demise, but the story isn’t about the freeze ending the pools life, oh no.
The small above ground pool in the backyard of the L street house line with a deck made out of discarded pallets.
The small above ground pool as I remember it would freeze about 6 inches or so due to the below freezing temperatures we would have that winter. Being Davis kids and unuse to such things happening we wanted to play with the ice. My mother terrified we would try and get up on the ice in the pool in some sort of winter Olympics competition, quickly forbode that. But we had something else at our disposal. I’ll get into our family and its history of gaming a bit later, probably, but for now I need to detour to talk about a specific game.
Krystle and Bob playing Let's Go Fishing during the summer of 1990 and a close up shot of the eventual prey.
Research says the name of the game was “Let’s Go Fishing”. It was an electronic board game that featured little plastic fish that would occasionally jump up and open their mouths. Then the players armed with little plastic fishing rods would attempt to catch them. The game had been on display at Kay-Bee Toys in Woodland in the front of the store for some time. It was always great fun, and either me and Dad, or Mom and I, or some combination, would always play it during an indulged run through the toy store.
So, I think for either Christmas 1989 or 1990, the folks bought the game and we would have it to play at home. The game was always a fun little hit with everyone, it was simple catch plastic fish. So, it would be out an about in the house for random play times. In fact, I think still as late as the end of the 1980s my folks were pushing Family Home evening, which if you’re unfamiliar with Mormonism was an attempt at structed family bonding through church decrees. So, on these evenings games would be a thing. The game was around and accessible.
Thus, when we were forbidden from ice skating, the next logical frozen lake activity we thought up was ice fishing and guess which game was about to supply the fish. But before we could fish, we had to get them in the pool, through the ice sheet. Thank goodness that in little league, which I been it what seemed like my whole life, thank goodness they used strong aluminum bats back then so that we would have an easy access tool in the backyard that we could use to smash out a whole in the ice.
Like cavemen we bashed a nice little whole through the thick ice sheet that had formed on the pool, then dropped the little plastic fish into the water of the pool below. After some engineering we figure out a way to fashion a fishing rod that we could use to scoop the fish out and before you know it the next time Mom comes out to check on us, we are out there fishing through a hole in the ice.
The ice freeze though ended up being so detrimental to the lining and so on of the pool though, after our ice fishing escapades that winter, the pool had to be torn down.
Some other features of seventh grade were changing the landscape of life even more. Back in 1990 a Junior High student could leave campus at lunch given their parents gave them permission too. Since the L street house was so well positioned a few houses down the street from the Junior High School my mother allowed me to have a lunch pass. See the location of the house had more benefits.
As I made friends with Keith the fact, I never stayed on campus for lunch became apparent. What I found was the idea of leaving campus for an hour mid-day everyone liked. So, some of the closer friends I was making at the time, Keith and Jason R. being still our main examples at this point, got their parents to get them passes as well. Making lunch time more of a go to my house and hang out time.
Over the years this would only escalate. Chris M. especially would become a fixture at the house for lunch while he was attending our Holmes Junior High. He would almost always make himself Ramen noodles and then sit in the T.V. room and watch stand up highlights on Comedy Central. The daily lunch time shenanigans would bleed into our high school lives and both Marty and Chris M. would start having daily lunches at the L Street house. It was where lunch was served, and it was a mid-day break from well school that felt so much nicer than elementary school lunches had.
When I think back on the awkwardness of sixth grade and getting in line for hot lunch, or having a peanut butter sandwich that had been in your backpack all day, finding your friends sitting somewhere, eating and then hopefully getting a spot to play two hand touch football, to having a short stroll to the house, spicing up some ramen and watching Norm Macdonald talk about how his friend pranked him into chopping up his family and putting them in a duffel bag. Its mind blowing that technically only a few months transpired between both times. The Norm sketch could have happened anytime during the early 90s it’s just the most memorable one I remember seeing during lunch break.
The new friends would expand. Keith already got us Marty and Chris M. and he knew another Chris, Chris H.. My mother would meet another fellow seventh grader Jared’s mother through church and then we would all form a little rag tag group.
It was this group that with Randy, whom the boys knew through skating (skate boarding technically), that would start to play wiffle ball in the backyard once Mom and Dad had the pool taken out after the big winter freeze. It was also around this time that playing with everyone in the garage became an activity too. Long gone were the toy wars of yester-decade though. Instead the Conan the Barbarian mural that Reise had painted on the wall became a dart board for teenagers.
The dart game started off mundane, we had a few darts, we assigned point values to different parts of Conan’s body and tried to stick him. By the time the pool was out and the wiffle ball games turned into wiffle bat sword fights, we had also learned of Mom and Dad’s intention to tear down the wall Conan lived on in order to remodel the house. Thus, the dart game wasn’t a hushed secret and was okayed by adults. Since the wall was only going to be there a few more months before the summer remodel and its annihilation. So as seventh graders creeping towards becoming eight graders now, we intensified the dart game and helped hastened that annihilation. Or at least helped its inevitability.
To add complexity to the game, we started to add new designs to the wall. On the “floor” Conan was walking on we drew some ants, bulls-eyeing the ants gained considerably more points that the famed crotch shot that had been the highest point total prior. And so the game began to feature more wild throws at different goals.
There was a hatchet in the garage. It had been teased as a projectile in the past, but no one dared tread that line. Although before a school dance that year Keith did go pyscho with the hatched on a Ronald McDonald plushie that lived in the garage. So, a precedent for hatched destruction had been made. Sure, enough as the walls time waned down someone finally became brave enough to throw it at Conan.
Then of course the icing on the cake, Dad’s chainsaw which was housed in the garage was always threatened to be the next step in dart Conan game technology. While no one ever heaved it, it was taunted quite a bit and added to a wild atmosphere that was play time in the garage.
Injuries were light though, Randy never seemed to get hurt even when he tried to come in through George’s doggie door and Jared, embarrassed, took my old toy chest to his fingers, but he survived, although if I recall at the time he thought he wouldn’t but I think it was the embarrassment that shamed him internally the most. All in all, those last few months with the garage were its greatest. It’s not like we wouldn’t use the studio in the years to come, but I would say that the Spring of 1991 was one of its heydays and an excellent send off to a space that had been there so much of my childhood to that point. Farewell garage, Darth Vader, Cobra Commander, Megatron and Skeletor salute their lost lands.
image 80 Steve and Bob standing in the studio that was constructed out of the old L street house garage, Christmas 1998, Marty playing games on the border of what was once the wall and home to Conan the Barbarian.
Outside the new backyard that had opened up made for a ton of games there as well. Although in my last year of organized baseball, I was still hanging out a little bit, see Jason and the box of cards on my birthday. So I had a lot of wiffle ball items. And hitting balls with bats is something any newly christened teenage boys can get into. This of course degenerated into using the bats as swords. This is all covered if you checked the Biography section and learned about George, who was the de facto ruler of the backyard at the L street house.
The loss of the pool was great for him, now more splashing and getting wet, and boys to play with after school. Without retreading too much it made him a beloved boy to all. And of course when he was crossed we punished the wrong doers for years.
Backyard games though helped bring Jared and Chris H. over a lot more, the coming summer they would swap roles with Jason and Keith for the most part. That series of stories though confusingly comes in a couple of years, because the pay off from the summer of 1991 is a long story in and of itself. This is why my timeline is getting hard to organize. A lot of the 1980’s was so centered around summer trips and the school year that I could make sense of things that way. Now events one year can have major play down the road. Like with the lunch passes. Sure, we’ve met Chris M. but he doesn’t really start coming to the L street house for a little bit longer, but he was around on this year.
Near the end of the year is when Chris H. really got into drawing alongside Keith and myself and of course we all indulged on the NES in my room quite regularly. That was the other catalyst for the upcoming summer. Chris H. with his broken arm proficiency needed other hobbies while he couldn’t skate board, and cartoons for now was it.
However still by the end of the seventh grade the family friends thing had not totally developed yet. instead by the end of the year a lot of different friends who got to know going to my house for lunch. This culminated during the last week of seventh grade when a large army of us went to the L street house to swim in the pool in the backyard before then returning to school for fifth period. A fair amount of the kids that came to swim were also in my fifth period art cluster class, so we all dripped chlorinated water into the class that day. And oh yeah, Mom and Dad got a new pool right before summer started to replace the old one, sorry wiffle bat games.
The last day of seventh grade would end with a pool trip during the after school galivanting as well. Keith and I hung out with Vanya and Nicole for hours that day riding our bikes around town. After making a lunch stop at my house that included some swimming, in which Nicole’s language shocked my mother (I found out later when I got home which is why I remember that so well). We eventually ended up at another friend’s house, Jeanie, who entertained us while her friend Kim sat in a corner and just cradled up at our outwardness. I don’t think she was expecting such loud friends on a last day of school sleep over.
That’s how it ended, and the summer is a bit of mystery for now. Or you can just skip ahead of 1993, it’s there all of it, newspapers, scandal, and all.
The Super Nintendo (SNES) era Fall 1991 through Spring 1996.
The SNES boxed and a password screen from the game Pilotwings.
Super Mario Brothers 3 had been around for a while and the idea of new stuff on a new system, well we were ready. During the Summer of 1991 we played a lot of Mario, but it was starting to wane. We were older now and wanted our new system and more sophisticated games. So still swollen with my paper route savings at 12:01am on a late August, Dad and I collected the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and came home. I know Keith was there maybe Chris H. and Chris K. was another likely candidate. We started our deep dive into the new Mario game, Super Mario World. Keith with the benefit of his Japanese friend who had been playing the game for a while before on the Super Famicon, knew how to unlock just about everything in the game. Within a few days we had accomplished the feat of beating the game and the secret worlds. Yeah, we kind of destroyed it, it was unfair, thanks to Keith’s pre-knowledge. But this left a hole in our brand-new gaming system.
We would get a ride back to the store and were in search of new titles to play. And that’s when that little kid sense of pride kicks in. Because we really spent most of the time there explaining to older people how to beat the new Mario game in a timely manner. We had a pretty good look at what other titles were out and then drove back to town and rented a couple of them from the video store. Luckily with not very many systems out at this time, renting the games was easy.
Let’s tackle these games because they also have history. Pilotwings, while retrospectively considered to be more of a tech demo than a game, was a game we rented and enjoyed quite a lot. A game about going to a flight school may not seem thrilling, but with the new console environment it seemed innovative at the time. Everyone seemed to have their proficiency at a certain part, mine was the skydiving. In the game you played a “cadet” having to learn the trade of being a pilot from this fictious piloting school in the game. It amounted to mini games of skydiving, landing propeller planes, and doing other weird things like learning to use a jet pack. But the game play isn’t why this game helped define my life in this new SNES era. No, it was logging the codes that had a profound impact on how the next years of my life would develop. That’s an odd statement, let’s explain how.
SNES games were like the NES that proceeded it, on cartridges, so once again the issue of adding more junk to the card’s game board was a consideration, much as it was for the Zelda games of the generation past. Thus, some games didn’t have the ability to save your progress. Pilotwings was one of these. The game instead had something like a six- or eight-digit passcode you could acquire to get to certain parts in the game that you had already cleared. We, the players of the game, had to log those down on a piece of paper so we could use them later once we inevitable failed at something.
Keith started noticing that I would constantly recite the codes to him incorrectly and I would honestly not see how it was happening because I was seeing the mix of letters and numbers differently than he was. His next thought had never occurred to me, but he asked, “Are you dyslexic?”. Turns out it was a good question. After talking to Mom about the issues we noticed and just starting a new school year, I think just the previous week, we had me tested and turned out “yes” was the correct answer to Keith’s inquiry.
How did we miss that for all those years? Thirteen years is a long time in a thirteen-year-olds life, and we missed something that glaring? Well, it makes more sense than you’d think. I didn’t do elementary school the normal way. Earlier I mention transitioning from Spanish Immersion to a “regular” school program. Kindergarten through Fifth grade were all part of the “Immersion” in hopes of making a perfect little bi-lingual student when we came into secondary school.
That being the case my spelling issues through elementary were chalked up to learning a second language in the case of Spanish words, and then the trickiness of going from phonetic Spanish to the Wild West that is English spelling. Even beyond that the immersion program was an accelerated learning program, any issue I had with math computation in elementary school was chalked up to the fact we were working above the average level for kids our age. So, anything that could have identified the problem at a younger age had easy to explain alternatives and I just needed to work a little harder and get gooder. Turns out fostering a competitive elementary school climate can cause damage and mask issues that weren’t being addressed.
That was an interesting twist, so what was the next game we checked out? Nothing major, just a little title called SimCity.
What’s the crazy story with this one? Well, it was SimCity, like Super Mario before it, a game title so well known that, remembering there was a day we went to Videos to Go on eight street and rented the game with no real idea of what we were getting into is hard to fathom.
This was the first game that occupied enough time to make a case for ownership of the title because we couldn’t complete it or rent it enough times to keep the same cartridge. Which we needed because it had our saves on it. SimCity did have the ability to save to it unlike Pilotwings, but it only had two save slots and of course it was on the cartridge, so rentals would still have to go back every five days or so. This was impossible to keep up with. Especially when earning your Mario statue for a megalopolis was on the line.
SimCity was a hit, not just us kids but the adults. This was bigger than Mario, this superseded Mario World as the game for SNES. Chris H. maybe not so much as the rest of us, but yeah it had. This is including my older brothers, who up until this time sort of looked to the goofy platforming games on the NES has as something for the kids and thus a permanent copy had to be bought. Because now it’s a family thing. This was the first surprise must play game in the house. This would help set the precursor to what was coming with the IMB clones, did I say Attack of the IMB Clones? Jokes aside, SimCity was a port over of a PC game and it would be the first modern step in our lives towards the PC.
This game was really a catalyst of showing all of us what computer games could be, even on a console. No longer was a cartoon plumber trying to save a princess, games could be educational while being fun and let you govern your own city. Maybe these computers we hear about, and Mom got so mad at back in the 80s at Sacramento State University have something to them, this computer thing might actually be something.
For those who haven’t figured it out, SimCity is a city management simulator. While that sounds as bland as white toast with no butter, the game plays, to this day even. It makes it fun to zone out all your squares of land you own (It is 1991 so everything is a square pixel) and watch your little city grow into a thriving metropolis. Be careful though, you are working on a budget, which is funded through taxes or bad decision bank loans, and if you get to far in the red you’re cooked.
Before we discovered the cheat codes for free money, my brothers, Steve and Bob had been setting up a working budget and leaving the game on overnight to cash in on. Easy going for them, they come over to visit or on a holiday, get the city going then have me, their baby brother, leave his machine on all night to collect the profits.
Oh well I guess, it is my SNES, and at thirteen like I said this was one of the first times some of the big brothers cared about something I had bought. Now with my own copy we could do these things. Those before mentioned saves slots, well one was mine, then Chris K. and Chris M. bribed me for the second save slot, it was Chris K who would initially win out. However, Chris M. would win out in the long run because Chris K. ended up just getting a SNES and his own copy of SimCity for himself.
The games popularity sparked interest into the computer version, attack of... Which Chris K. and Chris M. would find our friend Sam had on his PC. Finding out what the differences were, may have been the first spark that led to the computer revolution in the L street house. It was also just fun to play for hours. Thank you, Wil Wright. We will return to the world of Sim City soon.
FF2 Us box and a boss encounter from the game in the Feymarch where Chris M. met his match in the shoulder buttons.
Now that SimCity had helped push Chris K. to have his own SNES we were able to bring titles in a little more quickly, even though there weren’t that many available at the time. I could buy one title and Chris K. would get another and then we could share. One that was available, and Chris K. bought went by the name Final Fantasy 2.
There is a name from the recent past, that’s right, Keith, who by this time, well spoiler alert, had moved to Grass Valley, owned Final Fantasy the first on his NES. Chris K. was a good friend of his that lived in those apartments with him and liked it. Thus we had Chris K. who was excited about the sequel, which is why he bought it. My end of the deal, since I was pretty unaware of the Final Fantasy games at the time, especially since to date in American there had just been the one, was then tasked with buying the SNES Zelda game, whenever they finally released it, which was a whole Nintendo story of its own.
I was okay with this deal, I had Zelda 1 and 2. Heck 2 helped me learned real world boundaries and tolerances. So I was down for this plan, to that point, I had only ever head Keith talk about it and that was just the NES one. I was without knowledge.
But in the actual world outside of the U.S., i.e., Japan where the game was from, this was not the sequel, this was the Fourth game in the franchise. So, our Final Fantasy 2 is in reality Final Fantasy IV (FF4). Because of this I will call it 4 from now on, even though at the time though we were unaware of this. So, this game I passed on to for Chris K. was a more seasoned title than I knew above all that other junk.
Did I make a good trade? To me in the end, no. FF4 was an awesome game. Zelda is not bad, hell some argue it as one of the best games to ever be coded. However a lot of those people may not have been born when the game was released so there is a little grain of salt to take with those testimonials. I liked Zelda, A link the Past as it was to be called just fine, but Final Fantasy, it was a paradigm shift in gaming like SimCity had been a few months before.
Of course, this was the game that started bringing Chris M. by the house a lot more. He and Marty had been visitors before, but Chris M. really never left our house after this title, even when I tried to drag him out, by his hair early on in the FF4 lifespan. Of course, by late 1997 the seventh installment was Chris M. and I’s sort of last childhood hurrah with video games before he moved away to start his life in the United States Air Force. So beyond just changing my views on what video games could be, again like Sim City, the series has followed me throughout the years and big moments.
What was the draw. The scale perhaps. The Zelda games, and to an extent games like The Guardian Legend and Blaster Master, had introduced the idea of an overworld with dungeons to explore. But none paired that with the story like FF4 did. Heck Zelda was, save the princess by finding some triangles. A fun game mind you, but why did Link even care?
Boom! Now we have Cecil, the bad guy in the introduction scenes of the game, being controlled by you the player and riddled with self-doubt about the role he is playing in his nations actions upon other peoples in the world. We have characters with distinct themes, like Golbez with his, well with a theme pretty obviously meant to be like the Imperial March from Star Wars for Darth Vader. And we know how Star Wars works with me, the game even has subtle refences to the space opera. At the end of the day, I’ll always chose Cecil with the Crystal sword over Link with the Master Sword in the final boss fight.
Sadly, there is no great FF4 story, well beyond one Christmas story. It was just a multiyear love affair with finding out all we could about Cecil and his buddies as they traveled to the moon to save the world from Zeromous. Yeah there is a twist, the Darth Vader of the story, Golbez isn’t that big bad you’re lead to believe he is for most of the story. FF4 like its subsequent sequels are more an integrated part of growing up in the L street house than a simple story of learning I was dyslexic or kicking out the back of chairs. Sick days playing the game at home, listening to the soundtrack of the game. The game was a turn on and just play deal. In fact, the SNES version of FF4 allowed input from multiple controllers, so if you could handle cooperating with a friend, one could play certain characters and their friend the others simultaneously, making it a social affair.
Okay the Christmas story. December 25th, 1993. Yup two years after we first played the game. Its evening at the L street house, the holiday fun has wound down, everyone has gone home save Mom, Dad, Myself and Chris M.. Chris decides to play himself some FF4. He is in a location in the game called the “Land of Summoned Monsters” or the “Feymarch”. In this dungeon, as they are called, you encounter different monsters you can engage in battle. One of the monsters is called a Conjurer. These little baddies summon other monsters to do the fighting for them. In one particular encounter they can summon these half-spider, half-woman creatures called “Archnes” that then attack your party of heroes in the game with a spell called quake.
This spell, quake is a devastating magic that opens the very ground beneath your characters feet and does earth “elemental” damage to the whole of them. However, there is a spell that one can learn in the game called “float”. If someone is smart enough to cast this on their whole party in this dungeon it causes this particular encounter to mean nothing, since the Spider-woman’s attack can’t hit your characters who are now hovering above the ground she uses to deal out her pain.
So, Chris M. decides to use this encounter to speed or power level his party, depending on which phrasing you like. Those not familiar with the concept, in RPGs characters get stronger over time by earning experience. In most games the bulk of this experience comes in the form of killing monsters. Each Spiderlady Chris M. kills earns him so many experience points, which once he decides to kill the conjurer off and end the encounter will be banked into his characters. The next hour goes by, and Chris M. patiently kills them over and over again, keeping a running tab on how much experience he is due when he makes the call to kill the conjurer.
The number climbs to something ridiculous like two million points. At this point Chris M. decides to make a little joke. On the SNES controller there are two trigger or shoulder buttons on the left and right side. They are called the L and R buttons respectively. If hit and held down in FF4 it makes your party attempt to flee a dangerous encounter. It’s not an easy escape though, the game will decide while you’re holding the buttons down whether you can or cannot flee, or whether the enemy gets to slap you around in the new vulnerable position you’ve put the characters in. This sometimes can save you from dying to a particularly mean beastie, however, running from the fight losses any chance at an experience gain. No reward for being a coward.
Well Chris makes this joke about running from all this experience and oh so lightly taps those two buttons. Now usually running requires holding those buttons down and praying the game lets you run before the monsters eat you alive. In this case, the slightest tap and his party escapes the encounter, leaving Chris, and his hour and a half of work in the dust. This was the time Chris ran from two million experience.
Chris M. acting like he is shooting himself after he accidentally ran away from millions of experience points Christmas Night.
These were just the first few games to hit this era. I would also get another couple titles early on, Super R-Type a space arcade style shooter and F-Zero, which was a great and memorable game that we played a lot of but somehow slips through the cracks but not having anything else happen around it.
Chris K. also stuck to buying role playing games (RPG) beyond FF4 which is branded as a Japanese RPG. He got the more classic American style RPG in the game Drakkhen. Drakkhen was a hot mess of a game, but eventually through trial and error we sort of team played through it, shared between me and both Chris M. and K. Chris K. also got the arcade shooter called U.N. squadron. We played that a lot too, but it wasn’t terribly memorable to me. Well, the menu music is. But yeah, even though we would buy different games, we would trade back and forth a lot, FF4 would spend as much time or more at the L street house as it would at the K street Apartments.
F-zero was a launch title on the SNES that I purchased soon after getting my SNES. My memory says this game lasted years’ worth of playing. I do remember working diligently on the time trails numbers from time to time, and the game’s music ends up almost being synonymous with the early 90s for me. I can remember spending long branches of time at Chris K.’s trying to perfect long short cut jumps on the tracks that had the ability to allow that. Sadly, though as fun as the game was I don’t think playing it ever occurred with a major life event and even though the game was a lot of fun it didn’t break our minds like the Final Fantasy games or change the idea of what a game was like SimCity. The crazy part is though, playing though it now causes as many memories of those time to flood back in as the others. We really did play this game a lot, but then at the end of an era it was just a fun game, and 1991, it had to fight groundbreaking.
Super-R Type, was another near launch title that I bought soon after getting the SNES. While somewhat forgettable as a game, it’s a space shooter, since it was an early title, I do remember playing it. but in a house where we also had F-zero, and Sim City it didn’t really stand out. And I think Chris K. getting UN Squadron didn’t help R-type very much, or UN Squadron either. While different in some way, both games are fast paced space shooters, I guess un squadron is a jet shooter, but the game play was similar and the only thing that really stood out for UN Squadron was the anime art and the weird menu theme song.
At the end of the day in 1991, maybe creeping into 92 here, was that it was SimCity and FF4’s time. Followed by Mario World and F-zero. These were the games we wanted more of, what was awaiting us in the world of the SNES?
A couple things would happen to slow down the straight ingestion of SNES titles in 1992. One we know, is coming is that during this time in the eight and subsequent ninth grade all our other personalities were taking form, so all that time devoted to listening to music, starting bands and the like took up valuable SNES screen time.
Then the big one for gaming. This friend Sam, that had the PC with SimCity on it, also eventually got us locked into computer games. Since Mom also decided she “needed” a computer to run her business. Mom’s purchase of the PC for “business” turned into fighting with everyone, including Dad to get off the PC and stop playing games all the time. This ate into more time that was devoted to the SNES in 1991.
Which sprouted into me weaseling my way into my first computer. From now on all the console eras, or generations if you are a stickler for the media jargon, are intertwined with the almighty PC. So, Chris K. and I aren’t just spending every cent on the next SNES titles because there is so much more to explore with the addition of PCs with DOS and Windows… 3.1. But fret not a couple important titles for this era are still to come and to introduce it there is also another competitor for screen time that needs to be mentioned in 1992, the rebirth of the video arcade.