Name: Daniel Lapp
Location: New York
Favourite Game: The Last Blade
Favourite System: Favorite System

My earliest retro gaming memories is of playing Castlevania, with my little brother, on a Nintendo PlayChoice-10 arcade machine in a local pizza joint.

After that my first system was an Atari 7800 donated by a cousin who was moving on to an NES. Most of the games we were given were older Atari games with the collection including only one actual 7800 game; Xenophobe. Because its graphics were so much more advanced than the other older Atari games my brother and I ended up playing that one the most.

Some years later we got a Sega Genesis and this was when I truly became a gamer. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 came with the system and the amazing stages and music instantly hooked me. From that point on I was always a gamer, but it wasn’t until much later that I became a retro gamer.

It was sometime during the era of the PlayStation 2 when I slowly started to realized that gaming didn’t always have to be about advancing onto the next system with the newest graphics. I started to go back to my Genesis. Started learning about all the amazing SNES games I missed out on, discovered systems like the NEO GEO that I never knew existed as a kid, and came to terms with my love of pixels.

Since then I’ve still kept up with all the latest gaming trends, but a part of me is always stuck in the past playing those retro games and always looking to discover new hidden gems. For me there is no greater form of nostalgia experienced than that which comes from playing a good (or bad) retro game.