Hi there!
Hello Everyone!!! I'm a fortysomething retro video game fan, currently living in Seattle, who cut his teeth on the Atari VCS and the 5200 from around 1980-1985, then didn't play much for a few years, then decided to pick up an NES in 1988 with my Domino's Pizza wages after seeing one in action at a friend's house and being extremely impressed. My, how things had changed; Atari was great, but the NES really blew things wide open. I played Double Dragon for HOURS AND HOURS. I wish I still had my original console, not least of which because Kurt Cobain played it once (that's another story), but it was stolen from me by a meth-head friend of my roommate at the time around 13 years ago. :-( After a few more years of not playing much, due to annoying experiences with a couple of thrift-store consoles that only worked about 40% of the time due to the blasted blinking and worn-out connectors, I finally resurrected my NES set-up properly a couple years ago and ordered a completely refurbished mint-condition unit with an original mint-condition 72-pin connector (one that doesn't rip your hand off when you try to pull out a cartridge) and managed to locate some original brick controllers in extremely good shape, with great D-pad and button response. Picked up some classic game carts, swabbed them all nice and clean, and went to town. Earlier this year I was finally able to pick up that genius Bunnyboy's lovely item, the glorious Power Pak, and now I can pretty much play any game I want on the original hardware, including some fantastic titles that never made it over here like Riki Kunio, and the absolutely awesomely amazing RECCA. NES fans have never had it so good! And, although I never really got into the SNES (I always thought the Genesis, my other favorite console, kicked its ass overall in 16-bit land), I now have one for the first time, and am going to pick up the SNES Power Pak as soon as I'm able and will start venturing into some more SNES territory. If Bunnyboy ever decides to put out a Genesis Power Pak (please please please please PLEASE), my retro console gaming happiness will be complete. In the handheld arena, I was using a GameBoy Advance SP with a programmable EFA-Linker cart loaded with PocketNES and a couple hundred games, but I've since graduated to a modded PSP slim with a gazillion games from all the old consoles loaded on it (I mostly play NES and Genesis, of course). I feel so spoiled! And, I'm sharing my retro console and handheld wealth with my ten-year-old son and my girlfriend's eight-year-old son; they're really into the classics now. That really does my old heart good.
Pardon the run-on introduction, but I just had to get it all out. :-)
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Jeremy
Thanks for the warm welcome!
As for the Cobain story, well, in early 1991, my friend/roommate John happened to be dating a girl named Kim Cobain, and one day she asked if her brother could stay with us for a while (we were living in Olympia at the time), as he had just gotten back from LA after recording a certain album, and found he had been evicted from his apartment. So, this blond mellow fellow moved in with us for a couple of weeks until he got a place to stay. John was apparently into this guy's band, Nirvana, but I had never heard of them; he played some for me, but it didn't grab me (I being a New Waver Boy, of course). At any rate, he was very nice and easy to live with the time he was there, and he loved a good round of Nintendo, with which I was more than happy to oblige him. I can't exactly remember which games we played, but Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and Double Dragon must have been in there, because I didn't own too many games (poor as a churchmouse at the time) and I know I had those ones for sure.
He also had a compilation VHS tape of all kinds of weird hilarious clips, like R-rated outtakes from the '70s kiddie show The New Zoo Revue and other crazy stuff. The one other thing I remember distinctly is that we watched Jackie Chan's POLICE STORY, one of my all-time faves, although he didn't seem to like it as much as I did.
All in all, not a terribly exciting anecdote, because he was only with us a short time, and trying to keep a low profile, so we didn't party like rock stars while he was there. After he got really big a few months later, and the entire world suddenly knew who he was, it was pretty wild knowing that, for a couple of weeks, I gave this guy a place to hang his knit ski hat. :-)
Welcome to the site!
Big welcome to NA, dude.
~~NGD