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Video Games Saved My Life!

6 min readMay 14, 2025

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As far back as I can remember, growing up in the 80s and 90s wasn’t a particularly bad time to be a kid; it was one of the best times if I’m being honest. You didn’t get into any kind of trouble unless you were known for doing bad stuff.

One of the things that made my childhood so awesome was video games. At the tender age of 9, I played and beat my first game which was Super Mario Bros 1 at that time. Sometime later, over the course of 2 years, my parents would buy me a plethora of games that I would beat.

I didn’t know much about strategy or what it meant to employ strategy in many of the games I got as a kid, but one thing was very evident about me playing video games and beating them at such a young age, I was very good at them. I had a skill, natural talent.

While I knew kids and neighborhood layabouts who were forming gangs as well as trying to mimic the shit they heard and saw in rap music, I was working through Ninja Gaiden 2 NES, Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II and Castlevania 3 to name a few. Video games allowed me to stay out of jail while I watched others of my kind from afar go in.

Video games made my childhood and my teen years legendary. Summer of 1994, I was playing through and beat Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II. October of 1995, I…

ILLUMINATION Gaming
ILLUMINATION Gaming

Published in ILLUMINATION Gaming

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Rodney McGill
Rodney McGill

Written by Rodney McGill

Writing extraordinaire, I've always loved writing since I was a kid and I'm happy that I am able to become a paid writer like I want to be.