Chapter 1 — The Evolution of a Gamer
When I was around the age of 11 years old, after moving into a bigger house in a better inner-city Cleveland neighborhood, our gaming experience leveled up dramatically. At first, our consoles were set up in the attic, but a few years later, we moved everything to my father’s basement lounge. This would become a space that would shape my entire approach to technology, sound, and video fidelity.
My father was a skilled tradesman—a journeyman welder, carpenter, and gardener. He built his own stereo system from scratch, designing wooden enclosures for massive speakers and wiring them for balanced highs, mids, and lows. It was here, in this basement lounge, that I had my first exposure to audiovisual technology. This began with understanding video signals, as we moved from RF coaxial cables to RCA composite cables with our game consoles.
I was amazed by the fact that just changing the way we connected each system with different cables made the picture dramatically sharper, eliminating the fuzzy static interference we had accepted for years. Terrance led this project, taking notes from the way that some of his friends had their consoles connected in their home. He then showed me how he hooked up the game consoles directly to my father’s stereo system instead of the TV, with the red and white cables, which was left and right audio. This made the game’s music and sound effects boom with clarity and depth. I watched and listened in awe.
Terrance's role in these early stages of my games culture journey was definitely more of a mentor. He introduced me to so many things, from comic books and music to television shows, anime, and video games. As my older brother, with his nine-year advantage, he always had a deeper understanding of many things. His guidance laid the groundwork for how I would interact with youth in the future, something that would come full circle later in my life. His mentorship, along with my father’s later influence, helped shape how I learned, explored, and ultimately shared and taught others. These experiences, from the technical insights to the cultural lessons, have shaped my approach to life. Between my older brother and my father, so much of what I cherish today was born from their guidance.
These weren’t just minor upgrades, they completely transformed how I experienced gaming. It was my first step toward understanding technology not just as a tool, but as an art.
One of the greatest days in our gaming lives is what I now call “The Super Nintendo Christmas.” Anyone who was there to experience the jump from the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System to the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System knows that this moment was nothing short of revolutionary. This is what I imagined it must have felt like going from black-and-white television to full color, from mono audio to stereo sound.
Nintendo’s marketing slogan at the time was:
“Now you’re playing with power… SUPER power!”
And they weren’t lying.
On Christmas Eve, Terrance and I went to bed early, buzzing with excitement for what was waiting under the tree. We had been looking at the photos of SNES games in magazines, heard all kinds of rumors about what it would be like, and I had even seen one playing in real-time at Woolworth’s store in downtown Cleveland. We knew our mother had gotten the Super Nintendo because we had discovered it hidden away before Christmas, but she wouldn’t openly admit it, nor would she let us stay up until midnight to open it. So, our plan was to go to bed early, so that we could wake up as early as possible to play it.
But when we woke up and rushed to the Christmas tree to open it, it was gone! We were completely bewildered but immediately went to search around the house, only to find that our sisters had already beaten us to the punch! They had unwrapped the SNES before we even got out of bed, but ironically and hilariously, they had no idea how to hook it up. We all laughed about it before my brother and I took over, setting up the system with precision and excitement, ready to experience what was promised to be the next level of gaming.
That Christmas, we received four unforgettable games that redefined everything we knew about gaming and showcased the SNES’s technical advancements. It began with Super Mario World, the perfect showcase game, proving this wasn’t just a better Nintendo, but that it was a new generation. Followed by U.N. Squadron, a cinematic, side-scrolling shooter with thrilling music, deep mechanics, and pulse-pounding gameplay. Alongside that was Gradius III, a fast-paced, high-intensity space shooter that introduced us to sprite scaling and parallax scrolling. And then, there was Super Castlevania IV. A game with a soundtrack so incredible that we spent hours just listening to its orchestral compositions in Sound Test mode. Each one of these titles, two of which were arcade games prior, completely immersed us into games culture even further as our appreciation for games continued to grow. But the single most important Super Nintendo game for us—the one that would utterly revolutionize our understanding of storytelling in games—was Final Fantasy VI.
Final Fantasy VI wasn’t just a game for us, it was an epic, a novel, a work of art.
Everything about Dragon Warrior that had captured my imagination as a child was expanded, refined, and elevated to new heights. The story was gripping. Every character had depth, emotions, and struggles that felt real. The villain, Kefka, remains one of gaming’s greatest antagonists. And the game's music was emotionally stirring. Nobuo Uematsu’s compositions weren’t just background tracks, they were an integral part of the storytelling.
Unlike Dragon Warrior, where Terrance narrated every moment for me, we played Final Fantasy VI together as equals: We analyzed the plot twists, debating character motivations. We strategized our party compositions, experimenting with the best setups. Whenever we encountered a word in the game that we didn’t know, we tried to pronounce it and figure it out together. Even our sister Jocelyn, who rarely played games, watched along with us, captivated by the story and characters.
Final Fantasy VI changed how we viewed video games forever. It wasn’t just interactive entertainment, it was a cultural artifact, an intellectual experience, a shared moment of discovery. That realization would stay with me for life.
The emotional impact of the "Super Nintendo Christmas" sparked a larger interest in sharing gaming experiences with others. It became a primary method of bonding with friends, when we could share our experiences and feelings when playing games separately, with one another in school or in the neighborhood. These bonds would become even more powerful when we experienced games together, and there is no doubt that this formed a major part of my identity and I believe many others' as well.
At 14 years old, my gaming experience expanded beyond consoles. I started living with my father in another Cleveland neighborhood, where I gained new skills that were not just limited to gaming, but in electronics, technology, and craftsmanship. He saw my passion for computers and one day took me to buy my first personal computer with Windows 95. It changed everything.
At the store where we purchased the computer in Berea, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland’s west side, the man in the store talked to us about all the different custom-built PCs that we could buy. He explained everything, and this is where I first began learning about motherboards, central processing units, random access memory, sound cards, and graphics accelerators. We decided on a computer that fit within our budget and brought it home. Within that first year, I began experimenting with all the things that could be done with computers, from basic graphic design as I learned to make pixel art, coding with BASIC and Visual BASIC, audio recording with the microphone tools, and of course, stepping into the world of the internet. Within the next four years, I had already built a second computer after buying the parts online and having them mailed to our home. I had taught myself HTML and basic web design, installed new operating systems, and began to play computer games online with the rest of the world.
The shift from consoles to PCs was nothing short of an enlightening experience. I was connecting with games culture globally, in real-time. No longer did we have to wait for games to be translated and localized, I could play and experience a game in its native language when it was originally released. Additionally, the wait for information through mediums like gaming magazines began to vanish, as information on all of gaming was available to read via the internet. And then, being able to communicate with gamers not just outside of Cleveland, but gamers from other states, countries, and continents became possible, in an instant. The game that brought all of these things together, was Phantasy Star Online (PSO). PSO would become the next game in my life, following Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy VI, to shape my understanding of what was possible through gaming. PSO was the first major console action role-playing game (RPG) that was online. I was able to play with the friends I had made all over Cleveland, over the internet while we were all at home. I was able to play with new friends that I made online, and some of those friends would be in Mexico, Brazil, or Japan. PSO itself was also a masterpiece of a game from both a technical and experiential perspective. It was a Sega Dreamcast game, and this console was like a bridge between console and PC gaming for me, featuring the highest resolution graphics I had ever seen from any console, ever. The game featured so much amazing artwork, character design that allowed the player to customize their own character that they played online with, and an absolutely amazing soundtrack featuring tunes that were orchestral and yet electronic with synthesized sounds that were beautifully composed. From a gameplay standpoint, it was absolutely so engaging and fun that I am not ashamed to admit that I have played it for well over a thousand hours, which is typical for most who experienced PSO in all its glory.
These experiences, from mastering AV technology to building my first computers, were all laying the foundation for something bigger:
The birth of INFINITEQUE.