I am realizing my life is not really marked by birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, or any of the normal milestone stuff people list. It is marked by video games.

Thanks for this thread, because it reminded me of one I cannot leave out.

There was a week I spent in a mental hospital with a major anxiety spiral. Pretty much everything felt unmanageable. The one thing I could handle was Pokémon FireRed on a Game Boy Advance.

That was it. That was my anchor.

It was actually written into my chart that I was allowed to plug my charger in at the nurses station while I slept so the GBA would be ready the next day. No arguments. No debates. Just accepted as necessary.

Not my oldest game, see my other replies for that, but it is probably the only one I have mentioned that might have saved my life.

Close, but mine was Gorf on the VIC-20, not the 2600. See my other reply for the longer story.

This thread is turning into a memory dump for me, so here is another one.

I go back farther than Warcraft 3. I still fire up Warcraft 2 on DOSBox now and then, usually when I have had a bit too much to drink and want something familiar.

When Warcraft 2 was new, I was a junior computer programmer for a very large corporation, top 25 in the world. I set up a LAN at home using token ring, which tells you roughly how old this story is.

My wife is not really a gamer, although after thirty seven years of marriage and putting up with this stuff, maybe she qualifies anyway. We would sit at our desks, hold our daughters on our laps, and battle each other in Warcraft 2.

The machines were 80286 boxes I built myself from parts. Thanks, CDW back when it still meant Computer Discount Warehouse.

So yeah, I guess I have been around for most of this history. Some people remember patches and balance updates. I remember toddlers, token ring, and orcs on beige hardware.

Oldest game I still play is probably Taipan.

I first played it on an Apple IIe, but now it is just a web browser thing I poke at once in a while. It is basically spreadsheets and bad luck. You trade, pirates wreck you, the math never quite works out, and you lose anyway. I think that is why I still like it. No graphics to hide behind.

After that, Seven Cities of Gold, usually on a C64 emulator. That one still holds up more than it has any right to. You sail off thinking you are doing something heroic and slowly realize you are kind of a problem. The exploration feels lonely. The map still feels bigger than it actually is.

But the oldest one I keep coming back to is Gorf on the VIC-20.

I owned the cartridge. Bought it not long after it came out. I paid for the VIC-20 by walking beans and putting up hay all summer for a farmer when I was eleven or twelve. Hot, dusty work. Long days. I remember counting the cash and realizing I could actually afford a computer.

Gorf was loud, ugly, and mean. The voice mocked you constantly. The joystick barely survived. I loved it anyway. Sitting on the floor, TV buzzing, thinking this was the future and I had somehow managed to buy a piece of it.

Also, side note. I am trying pretty hard to become a professional writer. I write essays and stories over at tover153.substack.com. If anything there hits a nerve, feel free to subscribe.

So yeah. Taipan, Seven Cities, Gorf. Not because they are good by modern standards, but because they still feel like something.

I spent more than two years volunteering in the National Park system. Swore in thousands of Junior Rangers. Stood in gypsum dunes, Civil War battlefields, and a lot of places where kids looked at the world with the kind of hope adults forget they once had.

So hearing that MLK Day and Juneteenth were dropped from the fee-free calendar and replaced with Trump’s birthday just knocked the wind out of me.

MLK Day is a day of service. Juneteenth marks freedom. These days mean something.

Trump’s birthday does not.

I cannot imagine looking a kid in the eye after that oath and explaining why the end of slavery no longer counts but a politician’s birthday does. I will not volunteer under that. Not for one more hour.

The land will outlast whoever did this. The dunes will still glow white. The mountains will still hold their shape. But the values behind the Park Service only survive if we protect them.

If you want the longer version of why this hit me so hard, I wrote about it here: https://tover153.substack.com/p/when-the-parks-stop-belonging-to