A screenshot from Lumines for the PSP.

My first exposure to video games was at the Sears Roebuck store in Greenwood, Indiana, in about 1973. I was nine years old, and already well onto the nerd path that would define the course of my life. I watched reruns of Star Trek religiously, for instance, as well as the animated series of the same name on NBC Saturday mornings. I spent the vast majority of my meager allowance on comics, especially the sixty-cent one hundred page issues that DC put out every month. There were maybe two new stories per issue if you were lucky, and everything else was reprints. (Turned out that was a great way to learn about the history of comics, both creators and characters.)

Something that really grabbed me at a visceral level, though, was anything electronic, especially if it had LED displays or flashing lights. Electronic calculators were just coming out, and I spent a fair bit of time loitering around the counter at Sears looking at these insanely expensive things. My dad, who was a machinist and engineer, eventually bought one. It was probably about two hundred dollars, which was a small fortune back in those days, and it had a ten-digit display, and was about the size of a James Clavell novel in paperback.

I was allowed to play with this calculator from time to time, if Dad brought it home from work. There were strict rules, though. I could only use it at the dining room table. A clear dining room table, mind you; no glasses of Wyler's Lemonade or bags of Kroger potato chips around. My hands were to be washed and thoroughly dried before touching the calculator, inspection to be performed by both parents before beginning. In retrospect, I can understand. The calculator was easily the most expensive object in our household, not including the recently-acquired color TV set (which also had its own set of rules and regulations for operation), or one of the two enormous Fords parked out front.

We didn't go to the Sears store too often, partly because my parents don't go places just to shop, and partly because we weren't really in the Sears league, financially. We were more Ayr-Way or K-Mart people. If we had had Wal-Mart back then, that would have been the place.

This was Teh Badass, in 1973, believe it or not.

But right by the front door was a serious object of fascination for me: a giant wooden cabinet with a TV built in, with the legend PONG across the front.

I'm not going to go into detail about the game, or how it worked, or any of the other details, which are all part of history now. (I will note that, back then, you got two games for a begged-from-Dad quarter.)

But that was it for me. I was a video game junkie from that point forward. We moved back to Seattle not long after, settling in the same suburb where I lived as a child, and where I live now, come to think of it. A new mall opened up nearby with a whole arcade inside, and that was where I spent most of my teenage years and discretionary income.

But even then, I was starting to get a little... disappointed in the industry. There seemed to be a real lack of originality out there, to the point where games began to be denominated by type: side-scrolling shooter; first-person shooter; overhead driver; and so on. The market, which consisted mostly of teenage kids with pockets full of quarters, didn't really demand much in the way of originality, and so none was provided.

Radarscope, by Nintendo. This game ate most of the money Lincoln and I earned in 1981.

If you're around my age, and I know that I am, you'll remember the arcades of the late seventies and early eighties. They were usually dark and noisy. You walked through the front door, or gate, or hole, or gangplank, or cave entrance, or whatever sort of fiction you were expected to buy into, and the first thing you generally saw was the Top Game. Possibly, if the arcade was doing well, there might be two Top Game cabinets. So, Space Wars, Asteroids, Tempest, Defender, Pac-Man, what have you.

Surrounding the Top Game cabinets in rows on either side were the games that had, until the new Top Game came out, been the previous Top Game.

Surrounding those were the copy games, games that were just a hair on the legal side of copyright infringement: Mr. Do!; Dig Dug; thirty variations on Pole Position, and the like.

In the back were the old games, the ones where the joystick maybe didn't go left all the time or you had to wiggle the Fire button to make it work. Maybe the Taito logo was burned into the screen permanently, a ghostly image in the background. These usually had cigarette burns on the front, a sure sign that the machine had spent serious hours in a bar.

Waaaaaaaay in the back were the pinball machines, and then the one kid who worked there making sure you weren't pushing Canadian quarters into the games. He generally had a permanent scowl from dealing with kids all day long, a Marlboro Light jammed into the corner of his mouth, and a Hoky mechanical broom which he pushed around the nasty carpet in a vain attempt to scoop up ash and Orange Julius straw wrappers.

Tempest, another money-Hoover in its time.

You could never get near the Top Game. There was always one guy who somehow was an immediate expert at the Top Game, or had figured out the cheap strategy for infinite lives (I knew the Asteroids one; another friend of mine had all the Pac-Man patterns memorized), and who could play for three hours on one quarter. He was surrounded by a cadre of admirers, usually slightly younger children who really should have been in school, who were hoping against hope that the Game Hero would get bored and hand off his five hundred and thirty ships to one of them. Occasionally he would, and the lucky kid would burn up all those ships in about seven minutes.

Arcades were mostly a pain in the ass, as far as I was concerned, so the advent of home systems was a really great idea for me. My parents bought me an Atari 2600 when I was in the Air Force, and I've had pretty much every system ever since, although I'm not caught up on the current systems. I'm holding off on the Xbox 360 until after I come back from Japan this Christmas, and Lincoln will buy the PS3 the day that Gran Turismo 5 comes out. Right now I have a PSP and a DS for in the truck, and we have a Wii and two PS2s (one American, one Japanese) at home.

But the originality issue has always come back to me. Most games, like most TV shows, most comics, most food, and most of everything, are derivative crap. I don't have infinite time to sit around and play games any more, like I did in my twenties and thirties. (Earthworm Jim, you owe me three years of my life back.)

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. An excellent Wii title.

So I spend my time looking for games that are original or that move the medium forward or that use the technology in innovative ways. For instance, I'm pleased with the Wii and its innovative and intuitive user interface, and I enjoy playing Zelda and Resident Evil and Wii Golf. It provides a nice contrast to playing, say, Halo on the Xbox, with its confusing and annoying controller.

I also enjoy games that give a nice alternative to the ultra-realistic graphics so common in games, and that's where the games of Tetsuya Mizuguchi come in.

Mizuguchi, originally from Hokkaido, never really thought about a career in video games until he interviewed with Sega upon graduation from Nihon University. He worked on another favorite game of mine, Sega Rally Championship, and eventually became Chief Creative Officer at United Game Artists, a division of Sega.