About the Author— Me.

One day, I hope to have multiple contributing writers to the Dented Arcade. But for now, it’s just me. So in order to give everyone an idea of where I am coming from, here’s a small auto-biography as it pertains to my gaming life.

Even though I absolutely have my gaming preferences, and the Xbox has long been my established ecosystem, one would be pretty hard-pressed to call me a “fanboy.” I have always been open to playing anything I could get my hands on, though my gaming choices for a long time were obviously limited by accessibility and money.

At first I was a Nintendo kid, not counting my brother’s Atari 2600. I wanted a Sega, because my friend down the street had one. And Sega was “cool.” But come Christmas morning in 1988, I unwrapped a present and revealed the Nintendo Power Set, and I was like “What the fuck, Mom.” Luckily, my mom accidentally made the right choice (in my opinion), and the NES turned out to be pretty awesome. So from there I was a Nintendo kid, and I continued the legacy, owning an NES, Gameboy (birthday present), SNES (mowed a lot of lawns for that motherfucker), Gameboy Advance, and N64 (bussing tables and cleaning bathrooms). I still remember trading in my Gameboy Advance because it had that god-awful reflective LCD screen and getting a GBA SP (which had lights), which I still have in 2026.

As an adolescent, I frequented every arcade in the area, both the stand-alones and the ones tucked into the corners of bowling alleys and movie theaters. The sound bytes still hit for me. I remember hearing “Cowabunga!” for the first time and absolutely losing my shit, and to this day it still gets me. I remember this new fighting game called Street Fighter II that the other kids just couldn’t get enough of. I remember pumping in quarters and tokens to get my butt handed to me in Mortal Kombat, shmupping my way through Galaga and Raiden II, and absolutely murdering in Time Crisis and House of the Dead.

In college I got a PS1 when I could finally afford one, then on 9/9/99 my (ex)girlfriend and I went 50-50 on a Dreamcast, and that was a thing for a (very) little while. Due to the shortage and the absolute madness that was launch day, I didn’t get a PS2 until a year after it had been out, and I had to trade in some old games in order to afford it. When the Gamecube and Xbox released a week apart back in 2001, I (being the original Nintendo guy) went Gamecube, because holy fuck that Duke controller was like holding a football, and the Gamecube controller, despite that C-stick abomination, just felt right. Not the best decision, but I enjoyed it for a while. I then acquired a PS2 that came bundled with Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec, mainly so I could play Final Fantasy X.

Then the library began to stagnate, and the PS2 wasn’t exactly rocking my world after a little while either. I had a job by early 2003 and was able to purchase an Xbox, just as Xbox Live was really starting to get into gear. Also, they had replaced the Duke with the Controller S, which was a huge improvement. I got sucked into the Clancy-verse, and online sessions in Ghost Recon Island Thunder and Rainbow Six 3 became my obsession. I made friends in those lobbies back in 2003 that still exist today, over 20 years later. I had a co-worker come over after work in 2004 and watch me play some Resident Evil 4. She spent the night and… well she’s been spending the night ever since.

I sat in line in a Walmart in 2005 to get my Xbox 360 at launch, settling for the Arcade version with no hard drive because I sat on the fence until literally the last minute. In the spring of 2007, I was able to hunt down a Wii at a Target on a rough side of town, and made the journey to pick it up, walking out of there nervous as hell because they were still pretty rare at the time. I even bought the Wii Fit deck and it told me I was morbidly obese.

My PS3 was purchased after the great PSN crash of 2011, resulting in a pretty good discount as Sony scrambled to regain consumer trust. Remember back when Sony cared about consumers? Good times. Unfortunately it wasn’t the George Foreman Grill with the built-in PS1 chipset, but it was fine. My Xbox One was reserved and purchased at launch in 2013, nabbing me a Day One Edition controller. The dashboard was nothing short of a dumpster fire, but I still have fond memories of game crashes and not being able to get into a party chat. The Kinect was still badass though— that tech was way under-utilized, and I will stand by that opinion to this day.

After that I picked up a Wii U, which was a cool idea, but again, way under-utilized. My PS4 came that same year, probably because the Wii U library was disappointing as all hell and I really wanted something new to play.

I bought an Xbox One X in 2017, from a Microsoft Store that no longer exists. I experienced 4K gaming for the first time with that console, having missed out on the PS4 Pro. After that, the Switch released and everybody lost their shit, including me. I bought the black one that came with Mario Kart 8, because the Odyssey bundle was sold out. My Series S came shortly after that in 2021, because they were all hella tough to find, due to the pandemic and all. Eventually I was able to put a Series X on my shelf, thanks to Microsoft’s All Access payment plan, and eventually I was able to put a PS5 right next to it. Then, after all that, I finally broke down and got a gaming PC, which then opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box known as Steam. Which of course meant I needed a Steam Deck, because duh.

At some point in that history, I also acquired a Nintendo 2DS, but it was such a non-factor that I think I only ever owned two games for it. I found it in a drawer the other day and had completely forgot I had it.

For the past 15 years or so, I’ve been blogging and writing about video games off and on. I have had websites come and go, as hobbies wax and wane and time and money become a factor.

And that’s more or less where I sit today. I own a Meta Quest 3 and am hopelessly addicted to mini golf and virtual pinball. I recently acquired a Switch 2, despite the fact that I own very few Switch games and play it practically never. I passed on the PS4 Pro, and I will likely not get a PS5 Pro either, as I feel the upgrades don’t justify the price.

As far as the PS6 goes, we’ll see what Sony is working on. The box alone isn’t worth the price, and they’ll need to show me what they have in the works now that they’ve all but jettisoned the live-service initiative into oblivion (where it belongs). In my opinion they need to break out of their very narrow focus and start making weird, fun games again.

Microsoft and Xbox, well that’s a tough one. I have quite the extensive backlog of titles in the Xbox ecosystem, but if the next console is a PC hybrid, it might be able to enjoy my (also extensive) Steam library as well… but I have two devices that can play both already, so it will be interesting to see if it can justify its existence. As of this writing, Xbox is undergoing a renaissance/reset of sorts and a whole bunch of variables are still up in the air, so the future in that regard is pretty cloudy. No pun intended.

So there you go. As you can see, my gaming experience and knowledge is quite extensive, and I have experienced most of the major moments in gaming history first-hand. I don’t remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday, but I remember where I was for Halo 2’s midnight launch. I remember my buddy and I scraping together our change to afford $5 in gas, just so we could drive to the only Toys R Us in town and play the Mario 64 demo for the fifteenth time. I remember sneaking my GamePro out in class and gushing over the Donkey Kong Country SNES graphics. Hell, I remember the GamePro TV show. I saw The Wizard in theaters because it was essentially one long Nintendo commercial. I learned about a character named Lara Croft in an issue of Playboy. I could go on and on, but we’ll leave it for another time.

The reason I bring all this up, the reason I just gave my entire life’s history in regards to gaming, is because I definitely have my gaming preferences. I have my platform of choice that I spend most of my time on. And there will probably come a time when I will be accused of being a fanboy to one company or another. And I’ll admit, I’m only human— I can be biased at times. But I am a fan of gaming first and foremost. I was pretty hardcore into Xbox for over a decade, but I even surprised myself at how quickly I fell off once Microsoft started stumbling around and stepping on rakes. Once their future started looking pretty questionable, I started slowly double-dipping and re-building my library on PC, just in case.

While I am invested heavily in certain platforms, I am not loyal to them. I am an equal opportunity gamer. If you’re expecting console war content, you might be disappointed.

Also, I do not have a degree in English, or journalism, or literature. My only qualification is my passion for my hobby. I do not consider myself a journalist, and nor should you. My research skills stopped at a high-school level, so if I’m wrong on something, just tell me I’m wrong and we can make the correction and get on with our lives. We’ll all be much happier that way.

As for what the future holds, well that’s the big question, isn’t it? The future of gaming is probably more uncertain than ever right now. Luckily, the Dented Arcade isn’t concerned with the future. We’ll take every day as it comes, and in a few years this whole endeavor could be completely irrelevant, or the best idea ever.

In the meantime, let’s have some fun. After all, that’s the point of gaming, isn’t it?