I am the king of the mountain
Anyway, before I stray too far off topic, I'll try to stop myself by blabbing about the basics. My pseudo name is, of course, the Old-School Gamer, or OSG to my friends (or anyone else, for that matter). I am also known as Fred, thanks to Tom, who is also known as Rakim. It gets more confusing, I'm afraid. My real name is Phil, or Philip Charles Phil, if you're going by my University application. I am also known as Philbo, Philbot, and Crazy J (don't ask). Now, I'm sure you can pick your favorite name and call me it, but if you are going to talk to me about this site, OSG will do just fine.
Next, I'll ramble on about where this name, Old-School Gamer, came from. Well, in October of 1998, I started to plan a website—an NES website to be precise. Now, I'm usually a very creative fellow. I thought I'd use NES in the name of the site in a clever way. NEScience was the proposed name of the site. As you know, that was annexed and later reused as the title of a section about my relations with NES game characters. Anyway, the reason I did this was because there are lots of sites out there with NES in the title. I wanted to something different. Thus, the Old-School Gamer was born in November of 1998 (November 28, 1998 to be exact). Of course, one month after releasing my site to the general audience I found out about the existence of the Nintendo Old Skool. I felt like an idiot, but kept the name regardless. That doesn't exactly explain the origin of the name of the site, though. Old-School Gamer was originally supposed to be my name. OSG would be the webmaster of NEScience. Get it?
If you'll allow me to reminisce for a moment, I'll tell you my older NES sites. First in line was DPgames, which made its debut in early 1997. If any of you don't remember that site (which is all of you) it offered a few ROMs and a few hacked ROMs that I made. I only have one or two hacked ROMs left on my hard drive. Maybe I'll re-release them someday. The remains of DPgames can still be found somewhere. If we rewind to early 1996, I had a personal website called WTF, which later evolved into something completely different, called WTF?. Anyway, in the early days, the site had a section devoted to Gargoyles Quest II, and a huge section called "Everything you wanted to know about FF1 but were afraid to ask". I was going to recreate the monstrous manual, but found it to be too confusing and cumbersome. I spent 12 straight hours getting it ready, but only made it as far as Matoya's cave, linearly speaking. Besides that, I ran a website which featured my high NES scores. I can't remember its name, or the date it ran. It might even still be out there. Who knows?
As for my history and the NES, in October of 1987, I received an NES. My grandmother bought it for me for my birthday. I woke up on that fateful morning, and my mom and dad were playing Super Mario Bros. We had the NES, two controllers, and the SMB cart. Thus began a saga. At this time, my best friend already had a nice amount of games (most of which I own now). He lent me the Legend of Zelda sometime early 1989, and I was hooked. In October of 1989, I got Zelda and Zelda II for my birthday. I'm spoiled, I know. I would look forward to christmas and my birthday because I was always assured at least one NES game. The most crushing time in that period was when my grandmother called NES games "too expensive" and stopped buying them for me. I must admit that in 1992, due heavily to that and the SNES, I stopped getting new NES games.
In the summer of 1995, I had been relying on SNES games and the few old NES games I still liked to play (Zelda II, Final Fantasy etc). One day, my friend came over and brought Caslevania II. It had been a long time since I played Castlevania II, and it really got me playing the NES again. Now I was playing the NES more than the SNES again. Mind you, I had the NES hooked up to the TV in my room the whole time. Later still, in the summer of 1996, I purchased Ninja Kid from Hy & Zel's for 17 some odd dollars. I remembered playing the game as a kid. This sparked something inside of me. Now I had a new mission in life. Collecting NES games. (What a lame mission)
At about the same time, I stumbled upon the NES Nation. This helped along the desire for NES games and the idea to start an NES site. (Refer to my old sites, earlier in this article; DPgames, WTF, the FF1 site). With minimal success and little advertising, I let the sites sit and rot into nothingness. I believe I sent a link for the FF1 site to the NES Nation, but I don't know if it was added or not. I also recall sending some letters to the eggplant wizard that went unanswered, and I do remember posting on the Monoeye Lair—sporadically. All of the random shitty sites and visiting some of the better sites taught me a little. But not too much. In 1998, I made a crappy little site on AOL Publisher called The Old-School Gamer. It had a few reviews, a top 10 list and an Ask-A-Star section. As soon as I realized that I didn't have to do what everyone else was doing, the site took off. That brings us back to the beginning of the article.
And as for my sense of humor. Uh. If you don't get it, you just don't.
