Chapter 2: Ganja Gamer

Growing up I loved video games. My earliest memories all center around my first Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog when I was five. I even carried around a little stuffed Sonic wherever I went. I had my own little TV/VCR combo and learned how to connect my video games to the back of the TV on my own at an early age.

I graduated from Sega to Super Nintendo, and then eventually Nintendo 64. I never had anything right upon release but when the price dropped enough that my parents could afford it, they would get the latest console for my birthday or Christmas.

I like to think of the Nintendo 64 in the 90s as the glory days of my childhood. My video game prime.

Staying up late at a friend’s house playing four player Goldeneye 007 multiplayer matches on Complex with power weapons.

Or working together to beat the dreaded Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. Eating pizza and drinking Soda without a care in the world beyond the games we were playing.

As I got older, I traded Nintendo for PlayStation and Xbox. A friend gave me my first Final Fantasy game in the seventh grade. Coincidentally it was Final Fantasy VII. I instantly fell in love with the genre.

After that, the games I enjoyed most were adventure RPGs (Role Playing Games) where you got to play as a hero. Final Fantasy had a succession of good games in my middle school years between VII, VIII and IX. The original Zeldas and Pokémon initially lured me in on Nintendo to those types of games. PlayStation seemed to have more mature content.

Playing these games with complex stories and themes really affected me and molded me as a person. As a teen I dreamed of being a hero like the characters in the video games I played.

I ended up making friends with another Final Fantasy fan in my sophomore science class. His name was Joseph. Joseph looks like a young Harold Perrineau (Lost, The Matrix Reloaded) with an afro.

Joseph and I sat next to each other in the back of the class and often drew little comics and made jokes instead of paying attention to our teacher. Joseph eventually started coming with me over to Mark's house after school. He too got around $5 for lunch every day and started to throw his in with Mark and me. His extra $5 got us all a better deal.

During science class Joseph and I started our own comic. Joseph was an amazing artist, and I was always good at coming up with story ideas. I can draw, don’t get me wrong, but Joseph was the Vincent Van Gogh of stoner high school artists.

The comic we drew was about two stoner friends who traveled to a fantasy world using a magic bong. The main characters looked like us. Their adventures were partly inspired by our adventures smoking weed on weekends. The bad guy was an evil king (inspired by our school principal) and his army of half pig half police officer soldiers (the school security).

We even made Griffin and Mark their own characters. We rescued Griffin from the evil King's Military school and Mark was known throughout the land as the world's greatest bowl packer. We even called him Master Packer Mark.

Unfortunately, about halfway through the school year, my sophomore year, I got caught ditching class and smoking weed.

Joseph and I had decided to ditch our last class at school on a Friday.

I expected my parents to be at work, so we went to my house and started smoking weed in my bedroom.

About 20 minutes after we started smoking my dad came charging upstairs towards my bedroom. Apparently, he came home early. I heard the pounding steps approaching but it was too late. The door burst open. He came in and verbally ripped me a new asshole. 

“I know what that is, that’s marijuana!”

Imagine that but in an angry British accent.

I was in big trouble. Joseph ran through the house and out the front door as quick as he could.

My parents were furious but most of all disappointed. They punished me by grounding me for several months. I was not allowed to go out of the house beyond going to school or family activities. They also took away all my video games. The only thing I was allowed to do was browse the internet on our family computer.

One day while I was browsing the computer, I came across a website for a computer program called OHRRPGCE. This stood for Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine. OHR was a completely free video game design program.

The website had many easy tutorials allowing just about anyone with a computer and time on their hands to make their own video games in the style of early Final Fantasy.

My parents had grounded me from playing video games, but they never said I could not make my own.

It took me a little while, but I figured out the easier stuff. I did my best to draw graphics on the computer, but I really had no formal training. I can draw pretty good on paper and blamed my poor computer drawing skills on the mouse.

Advanced programing and coding were way over my head. I did everything I could without using it.

I was able to design my first simple video game before I was 16. The graphics sucked and the programming was as basic as possible. But hey it was a video game!

While I was grounded, I was rarely able to smoke. I could not make it over to Mark’s house after school and I did not have any money to spend anymore anyways. Occasionally someone at school might invite me to sneak off campus at lunch or smoke a bowl on the way home after school. But for the most part I was stuck staying sober.

I missed smoking weed so I ended up making it the focus of my first video game.

I based my first game on the comic Joseph, and I drew during our science class at school.

I made crude graphics for all the characters. They paid Joseph's drawing style no justice.

I never really officially completed or distributed the game or the comic. I did give a copy of the game to Joseph and he was able to play it. He said it was the best video game he ever played but obviously he was biased since he was one of the main characters.

Joseph moved to live with his father in Belize our junior year in high school. We wrote letters because he did not have a computer there and neither of us had a cell phone yet.

I continued to write ideas for the comic and sent it to Joseph in the mail. Eventually he wrote me back saying he did not want to work on that comic anymore and gave me full ownership to do what I wanted. I always found it a bit sad when he quit the comic.

I ended up getting distracted with life and abandoning the game and comic but not forever. I always carried the characters and stories with me.

Chapter 3: Kink