A Prologue to my Lifelong Love Affair with Electronic Gaming

This is for my siblings Neil and Chinna – my comrades in the rapidly-evolving virtual battlefields – and my good friend Francis Tan, whose love for console role-playing games served as the first tie that bound us together.

My clearest memory of electronic gaming could be traced back to my 3rd birthday. A marvel that I could remember as far as that, yet a shame that I couldn’t remember who gave me the “grandest” gift I received then. It was a Merlin, a handheld electronic game that allows you to play Tic Tac Toe and a few other board games transposed into electronic form – and slug it out against computer intelligence. It’s about as long as your adult radius bone, shaped like a phone receiver. I’ll spare you the verbose description – here it is.

Unfortunately, the only way I got to appreciate it was to tinker the wires looped around the battery slots and pull them out, fastidiously curious about how the darned thing works after being enthralled by my dad, along with an older kid from the neighborhood, giving a Tic Tac Toe demo. It remained in the junk toy basket for quite a while, subject to my relentless poking and wire-mangling. To the outsider, I was the oblivious toddler who cannot be entrusted with a gadget due to my propensity to tear it apart.

I never had another electronic toy until I turned six – an entry-level keyboard synthesizer for my birthday and a FamiCom when my brother turned three later that year. But we’ll save all of that for some other time.