He took great pride in his PC, as he had fashioned it from the best parts he could find. He furnished it with the best software he could get from the second-hand dealers at conventions, and old friends he had on UseNet, as he was an old 70s computer nerd with some reliable connections.

Even though the monitor and tower were small by today’s standards, it was housed in a massive wooden complex taking up half of the room. As a child, I thought that computer desk went up for miles into the ceiling. My father would obsess himself with the filings of the floppy drives and placement of operational manuals, over which I thought was an insurmountably high dais of a desk, into the night.

But once mom had stored away the remains of the beef stroganoff diner, and dad had settled down to have a beer and watch a budding Wolf Blitzer on CNN talk about the OJ trial, I would invariably chat up with the quote, “can I play on the computer?”

And the few times when I got to sit at the computer desk alone, I felt an anxious electric beam course through my body. I was accessing something adult and complex. For my understanding, I was at the altar of infinite knowledge. There I could play anything. Anything at the time meaning Chips Challenge, Space Quest 2, Kings Quest (4?, I can’t remember), or a sliding puzzle game that came with the system. Not much control, or omnipresent power, but for a 5 year old kid interfacing with a powerful new technology by himself, in this grand wooden alter of floppy disks and manuals, it felt amazing.

In absence of the rare singularly powerful computer time, we would often have “family” computer time. This is not as horrible or tiresome as it may sound. We would huddle together as a four member team in the little wood panel den and try to solve puzzles in Space Quest 2 together. Sometimes when our brains got fried, my parents would let my sister and I do sliding jigsaw puzzles of pixelated skiers, or let us play an odd Burger Time game where you played as a Fairy Godmother collecting pennies… Don’t ask, DOS was a weird time for games.

Of all the memories crystallized in that small room, with that impossibly large computer desk, I remember Wolfenstein the most. Wolfenstein is one of my earliest gaming memories, one that my dad excitedly showed me late at night while I was up a bit past my bedtime. He and I sat on desk chairs while the glow of Id’s seminal shooter framed our massive computer desk, adorned with stacks of floppy disks and DOS manuals. In the den, we laughed about killing Nazis and collecting gold trinkets. My small arm would jet out from the chair, pointing right onto the screen while I said, “click there, on the wall! I think there is a secret there, dad!” And sometimes, behind the shitty pixelated portrait of Hitler, there was a secret room, and we would collect the stolen Nazi gold, and he would laugh at me with his funny glasses and I would laugh back, not knowing what I was laughing at but loving it anyways. Then we would rejoice in our findings before going on to kill more Nazis. And then my mom would come down the hallway and tell me I had to go to bed.

Chris Boudreau is a writer/guitarist/pizza maker/cat toy magnate. Talk to me https://twitter.com/herewegomez8