Growing Up Geek: Dana Wollman

Beforehand, I had conveniently forgotten that I collected Magic Cards. Not only collected, mind you, but hoarded — a feverish obsession reminiscent of an earlier yen for stickers, pogs, and Happy Meals. While some kids played Truth or Dare behind the bus to I.S. 228, I kept my collection on the ready, wrapped with care in a rubber band. i am not sure who I intended to indicate them to, save for a handful of fellows who used to stake out a row inside the front, but when I happened to have something good, i needed to gloat slightly. At thirteen, I challenged a definite boy to a game, thinking that was all of the hint i wanted to drop. He beat me handily, and that i never admitted my crush.

Let’s just say I’ve evolved since then. I remember as little about mana as Peter Pan did about owning Rufio in a dissing contest. I appear to have kicked my shyness habit — a lot in order that my coworkers have taken to calling me “Brass Knuckles.” And while i have not needed to suffer dating for awhile, i adore to think I’ve stepped up my game.

But I’m still a daydreamer — fantasy-prone and sentimental. And that is what it means to be a geek, really — I see now that every one of the things I used to like were just ways for a tentative, meek kid like me to wander off in her thoughts. Back then, i wished to be a Disney animator, and would attempt to stay alongside of The Little Mermaid while drawing flip books of underwater royalty. It didn’t hurt that I also spent a great deal of time in front of our PC — a Tandy from Radio Shack, followed later by a Pentium and an eMachines tower from Costco. The thought was that i might play Reader Rabbit to nail three-letter words, but that ended in taking quizzes in a typing tutorial (you understand, the type you installed off a floppy disk) and tinkering in DOS, writing choose-your-own-ending tales. My memory’s dim here, but I’m pretty sure certainly one of them starred Brian Austin Green of 90210 fame as a protagonist.

In those early years, I got my kicks at an after-school course, where I practiced my two-handed typing and got to play Spellbound and Treasure Mountain when the thin, tattooed teenager leading the gang had decided we’d had enough. Once we visited my uncle, the resident computer nerd within the family, I used to aim my luck at Larry the living room Lizard (aka, essentially the mostsome of the most appropriate game for a five year-old ever), but that got tiresome after I kept making poor Larry get hit by oncoming traffic. And do not get me started on Oregon Trail. i did not own that one, so I needed to wait until computer class in school, where we’d fight to be the only to put in writing smart aleck things on people’s tombstones after they died of cholera.

With few exceptions, my favorite games all had either a historical bent or a futuristic one. I loved Pepper’s Adventures in Time, a narrative a couple of tomboy and her dog Lockjaw traveling to Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia. Then came Conquest of The brand new World, a game I examine in Computer Games magazine (yes, I had a subscription). It didn’t exactly give me a correct education about imperialism, but man, did i admire traversing the coastlines, fleshing out a colourful landscape from what always began as a pitch-black screen. If you’ve played this game before, you recognize that naming mountain ranges (and, possibly, conducting turn-based combat) was the right part.

One day during all of this, I got my first game console, SNES. Rather, my dad and that i got Super NES. It was his idea, actually. I’ve never asked him why he got the sudden urge to upgrade consoles — in any case, he already owned an Atari, which by the early ’90s were unplugged and banished to the basement, where it’s still collecting dust. In retrospect, this was some of the few things we did together, just the 2 folks (the opposite was him escorting me to ice hockey practice where I moonlighted as a Brooklyn Blade). Together, we mastered Donkey Kong Country, with me picking up the slack when he was too impatient to attend until just the last second to press the jump button, sending Donkey and Diddy over broken tracks in a coal mine. We compared scores in Tetris for Gameboy, and he gave me tips for conquering The Simpsons and Zelda.

But our biggest project was Super Mario World. Anyone who’s played it knows there is a lot of levels to tackle — and that i only had much time allotted on weekends and after dinner. I wasn’t half bad, though with such a lot of Koopas and only so few hours to spare, pushing in the course of the game proved a labor of affection. The item is, I never actually beat the sport. While i used to be away at summer camp, reluctantly learning lay-ups and hiding within the outfield, he slayed Bowser. I still give him crap for it.

I gave up gaming a while ago. I grew out of it, as did my dad and frequently every girl I knew. Though I majored in English, my skill set has expanded to singing along to Edith Piaf in garbled French and speaking Monty Python as a second language. I spend numerous time compiling a mental list of items to read and cities to go to. I imagine touring the pyramids, where I’ll take thousands of photos with a camera I’m still lusting after. In case you got me rolling, i’ll go on about why em dashes are my favorite punctuation tool. I grew up, though not right into a reformed geek; only a more well-rounded one.

Dana Wollman is Reviews Editor at Engadget. On Twitter she is @danawollman , where she’s mostly an armchair movie critic.

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This post is tagged: back of the bus, brass knuckles, brian austin green, disney animator, little mermaid, reader rabbit, typing tutorial