Silver Phoenix Labs: My Initiation by Lisa Fox

Please welcome Lisa Fox today to Silver Phoenix Labs!

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My very first video game system was an Atari. I still have fond and wonderful memories of Frogger and Donkey Kong and of course Pac Man. These were good, good, good times, but the moment I became a gamer— a real, true, crazy gamer—wasn’t until I bought my first PlayStation way back in the fall of 1999. And it was all because I had to save Agent Mulder.

I was living in New Orleans at the time, a bartender at one of the many, many bars on Bourbon Street, a “writer” who had grand aspirations of penning the next great work of literary excellence.

Mostly I partied a lot.

I didn’t even own a t TV at the time, but I did manage to watch the X-Files every single week. I was in love (LOVE) with Agent Mulder and I was as obsessed with his quest for the truth as he was. It was a Sunday night like any other when it happened—the X-Files ended, I had a rosy glow of paranoid satisfaction on my cheeks, a smile fit for a conspiracy on my lips, and then I saw it, the commercial that changed my life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTBsKrEOikc

(That commercial still fills my heart with joy)

I had to help Mulder. Had too. And there were people to interview! Danger to defeat! I was ready to be a Special Agent, to take on the Smoking Man. I needed this game. Immediately.

Luckily for me, the person whose house I happened to be watching that week’s episode at also happened to have a car. It took a fair amount of bribery, but I finally roused him from the couch, out of his apartment, into his car, and then off to Chalmette, to the Wal-Mart and my destiny.

That night I bought a TV, a PlayStation, and the X-Files game. I got home, set it all up, got down to business. It wasn’t even a very good game, but the immersion in the gaming experience—the ability to play a story—was incredible. And addicting. The moment I completed the game, I knew I needed more. More action, more story, more bad guys to kill, more worlds to save, more princesses and swords and guns and gagsters and zombies and conspiracies and everything, everything, everything!

And I haven’t stopped since.