When I was a kid I had terrible taste in video games. And thank God I did because otherwise I would have fallen into a niche or relied on other people to tell me what to like.  As most ten-year-olds did, I had my impressionable qualities and I did adopt certain interests from my older brothers and my friends at the time.  But, that’s not to say I didn’t develop my own ideas of what was good. And it was those ideas that stuck around well into my twenties.

I just threw a pretty vague idea at you.  Sorry about that, reader, but don’t run away screaming just yet, I’m about to make this a lot clearer.

Nostalgia is a huge part of who we are, a huge part of who I am.  Things that I liked in the past are now defining characteristics of who I am today. Take for instance Banjo-Kazooie. This game is the first game that I remember playing, and it’s often the game my dad refers back to when we talk about my childhood.  For hours we would sit together and I would play and he would joke about never getting a turn.  I don’t remember beating the final boss or collecting all of the Jiggies, but I do remember the sense of adventure that came with the game. Ah, now we’re in familiar territory.  If you’ve read anything else on my blog, you might have realized that this kid talks about adventure and discovery a lot. It’s true.

Now, when I say I had terrible taste in video games when I was a kid, I don’t mean that Banjo-Kazooie was a bad game, I just mean that it wasn’t the popular choice in my neighborhood.  The taste I had in games didn’t fit those around me, and I didn’t realize that that wasn’t such a bad thing at the time, so I assumed that I just had bad taste. However, that fact only made me like the game all the more. I liked being the only one on the adventure or, even better, I loved being able to share the experience with only my dad.

Today it is so easy to find and play a game from our childhood. Even buying a current game is so much easier when you consider digital downloads, the abundance of stores that specialize in video games, and shopping online, but when I was ten things were a bit more complicated.  If you wanted to play a game, you had to work for it. Every so often I would come across money for a game which at $50 had been an astronomical amount for me to just come across.  I would usually find myself waiting for Christmas or a birthday to come around so I could buy the game I had been pining over for months. It hurt, a deep emotional hurt, to have to wait for the game to hit the shelves, then wait again for the time I could afford it or ask for it. That’s a lot of strain on a small child’s emotions.

Then, when that moment came, when I finally set out on that journey up to the peak of Spiral Mountain, the sense of adventure took over. I didn’t see a set of pixels on a screen, I didn’t hear recordings of music played back through the crappy speakers on our convex television. No, I felt the grass between my toes, I salivated at taste honeycombs, I could smell the belches coming from Captain Blubber.  And the music, let’s just say, if my mind falls into that vacant sort of drift off mode we all fall into from time to time, then I often find myself humming Grant Kirkope’s Spiral Mountain theme.

While my brother’s played WWC wrestling or Halo or Half-Life, which don’t get me wrong are all great games, I would wait and wait for my turn on the television so that I could slap in my copy of Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo-Kazooie and explore and discover and get lost in an adventure all my own.  I’m not trying to build bridges where there aren’t any, but I could definitely make a solid attempt at blaming my drive to see new places and meet new people on the games that entertained me as a child.  For me, the idea that there might be my own Spiral Mountain hiding in the woods in Oregon or a Donkey Kong Island off the coast of Florida gives me such pleasure. And the fact that those things might be there and I might be missing out on them, that kills me.

I have a recent example of this.

When I was eleven or twelve I picked up Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. I’d just come back from watching Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone in the theater and I craved more of the wizarding world.  Thus started my obsession with The Boy Who Lived. That’s right Potterheads, I started with book 2.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, this would later be my drive to take a solo trip to London in my mid-twenties.  The first time I am able to go out on my own, cross an ocean and make the world a smaller place for myself, and I choose a place that has deep roots in my childhood.  Now, I knew that London would have some connection to Harry Potter when I bought the tickets, I even knew that there were tours around the city to take people to sites specifically related to the stories.  The fact that I knew all this was over-shadowed, though. While I planned the trip I had fooled myself into thinking that I had picked London for much more logical reasons:  They spoke the language, the currency was relatively easy to understand, the people don’t hate Americans and the food would be close to what I thought food should be.  This was to be the first step out into the world, nothing more than a gateway to more adventures.  I wanted to take it easy, slide into the pool inch by inch rather than dive into the deep-end.

So that’s what I told myself. And maybe I didn’t know it at the time of planning the trip, but I figured it out really quick when I set foot in King’s Cross Station for the first time. When I caught site of the platforms and the trains and the people I knew right then that I had come all this way just to get closer to what I loved since I was a child, and closer to my childhood self. And all I can tell you now is that I don’t regret a moment of it.  I don’t regret the money I spent on the plane ticket, and I don’t regret letting my ticket to Matilda the Musical go to waste so I could get last minute tickets to The Cursed Child Part one and two.

I’ll tell you one thing, reader.  Feeding my nostalgia with trips to far off destinations felt good and it helped me accomplish something that I never thought I would need to accomplish.  It made me feel valid. Those adventures I went on with Banjo and Harry as a kid through books and in games made me feel great, but because my older brother’s didn’t like them or some of the people I hung around with laughed at me or at the idea of a talking bear or a boy wizard, that feeling seemed to be paired with another feeling: Ignorance.  I felt ignorant of the world. I felt that other people understood the way things worked better than I did.  I began to think that the adventures I believed in were childish and immature and that I would eventually have to grow out of them.

Feeding my nostalgia by exploring the grass fields over a small mountain, ducking into a cave on the side of a valley or walking down the streets of London, that took all those negative feelings away.  I realized again what I had seen as a child. I saw the adventure.

The truth is, I had lost something in the years that passed since first playing Banjo-Kazooie or seeing Daniel Radcliffe pick up the wand in Ollivander’s.  I had lost the feeling of exploration and excitement of setting out on a journey.  It slipped away somewhere during high school and got buried by an adult job.  Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve found it again.  I found the adventure when I followed the steps of Harry and I’m sure that if I ever find my own Spiral Mountain I’ll sit back and let the music flow through me completely at peace and ready for anything.