I miss video games 🕹️

All my life, I enjoyed being gone. No matter if my brother and I went to summer camp, my classmates and I went on school trips or my family and I went to the Northern Adriatic Coast. I always enjoyed being gone.

As such, I never became homesick.

Being gone

Being gone meant seeing something I wouldn't see in my everyday life. Every year in summer, my family and I went to Northern Italy, to a place called Lignano Sabbiadoro, just at the tip of the Adriatic Sea.

Unlike home, all of a sudden I had access to the sea. I could go for a swim whenever I wanted. There was the beach, which gave my brother and me limitless ideas on how to spend our time.

Build sand castles, take a mud bath, collect seashells or bury our dad in the sand. We spent hours playing Bocce on the beach, a game, where you throw a small target ball into the sand and the players take turns shooting their own balls as close as possible to the target ball. My dad, with his relentless ambition for winning, was unbeatable. If we ever got tired of the sea, we still had the swimming pool.

We played games of UNO with the family and our friend's family, where the loser would get thrown into the water. We played pool ball toss, seeing how many times we could keep the ball in the air, before it touched the water. Sometimes we just hung out on the beach chairs, playing Game Boy games. Yes, much of being gone was about playing games!

Back then, Italy didn't have the Euro, but the Italian Lira. And their currency was nothing less than inflationary. Equipped with 3000 of those bad boys I was a lucky child. I could get two slices of pizza, two scoops of ice cream and still have enough to buy myself an Aqua Ball.

Aqua Balls were popular collectible toys in the 90ies: made out of rubber, they fitted perfectly in the fist of a six-year-old. You could soak them in water and have them squirt it out again through a small hole. There was a variety of Aqua Balls that you could collect: a shark, a frog, a football, a pig. They came packaged in shiny aluminium bags. I loved the mystery of buying them: you never knew what you would get. If you got one that you already owned, you would swap with your friend!

Oh, how I loved being gone.

The arcade

One of the most beautiful associations I have with being gone was spending time in the arcade. That was another place I wouldn't see in my everyday life. For me, arcades only existed in Northern Italy.

My brother, a friend and I spent the evenings in endless sessions of everything the late 90ies had to offer in terms of arcade magic. Point Blank was a light gun shooter, that let you play alone or with a friend in 5 to 20 second long mini-games. In one game, you had to shoot the apple off the guy's head. But all you had was a single bullet, so you had to aim precisely. In another game, you had to shoot the baddies while avoiding shooting the civilians. The light guns of the arcade machine came in blue and pink. Oh, how I loved Point Blank.

But there was so much more. More light gun shooters. House of the Dead, Time Crisis and Ocean Hunter. When I think of some of these game titles then immediately the word SEGA appears in my head (yes, in uppercase letters), followed by a choir of angel-like quality chanting the magical word. SEGA was big in the arcade market.

Apart from the light gun shooters there were the more traditional arcade games, that you played with a red joystick and 6 colourful buttons: the Neo Geo. I remember Puzzle Bobble, Metal Slug or Pang.

And there were racing games! It was so much fun to sit down inside the cockpit of a car. To grip the steering wheel and use your feet to reach the pedals. When you took control over the car, you could feel the steering wheel vibrating, as you took sharp turns in games like Sega Rally Championship or Cruis'n USA.

I could go on forever reminiscing.

Travelling

As I enjoyed being gone so much, it's no wonder that I became obsessed with travelling in my twenties. Likewise, it's no wonder that I set off on this trip around the world in my thirties. And just like in my childhood and pre-adolescent years, I never became homesick.

But now, that I have been travelling for 7 months, I realize that I haven't been gone from home for this long in my entire life. And I realize that I do miss something from my life back home.

And funnily enough, it was the arcade that reminded me of my longing to play video games. When my girlfriend Sophia and I were on a shopping spree in Taipei, I was left alone in an underground shopping mall, on the hunt for Nintendo Switch games (electronics are so very inexpensive in Taiwan).

After I had found the games that I had been looking for, I discovered something far more interesting. A little arcade. In the front it was filled with crane games. In the back it had some legit old-school arcade machines from the good old days. It had some racing games and hidden away in the corner, there it was. Point Blank.

I couldn't believe my luck. I was set back in time. As I inserted coin after coin into the arcade machine, it just hit me. I thought of bygone nights spent in the arcades of Lignano Sabbiadoro, where it all began. I thought of my brother and how I wished that he could play with me at this very moment. I thought of the one thing missing from my life as a traveller.

I miss video games

My craving for video games only intensified when we made it Tokyo. Of course, I had to visit the Nintendo Store in Shibuya. Of course, I bought stickers of Super Mario Bros. 3, one of my favourite games from my childhood. Of course, I participated in a game of Nintendo World Championship, where I battled 7 other visitors of the store.

And then came Akihabara. Spending a day in the electric town must be the dream of so many Europeans, who have grown up with Nintendo. I found old Nintendo games on sale. NES games, SNES games, Nintendo 64 games. I held in my hand Wave Race 64, in its original packaging, the first game I ever owned on my Nintendo 64, back when the console released in Europe, in 1997.

After we discovered the hidden talent of Sophia at playing the crane game, we got obsessed with the little capsule machines, that you can find everywhere in Tokyo. Once you throw in coins into the little machines, it's up to luck to determine which gacha figure you will get. Immediately, I was reminded of the mystery of buying Aqua Balls in my childhood days.

In Japan, I have reached the point, where I just couldn't take it any more. I had to play video games. I thought of the Switch games, that I had bought in Taiwan, that just made my longing to play unbearable. These consisted of Nintendo GameCube games re-released on the Nintendo Switch, that I hadn't played properly in the 2000ies: Pikmin 1+2 and Metroid Prime. I also got the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Cowabunga Collection, a collection of the best Turtles games from the areas of the NES, the Game Boy, the SNES, and the arcade. Man, I'm so retro.

I tried all kinds of things but wasn't able to satisfy my desire to play video games. Emulation just isn't doing it for me. I spent way too much time to get RetroArch to run on my laptop, only to be reminded why I always preferred playing on the console over playing on the PC. Console games just work. You put them in and then you play. And even if I had managed to emulate some old games on my laptop: using my keyboard as a control will just never live up to the haptics of holding a legit SNES controller in my hands.

In that sense, for the first time ever, after being gone for so many times, I finally know what it feels like: I'm homesick. I miss video games.