First Encounters With the Geek Kind

Remember your first?

How special that was, and how it sparked a fire within you that would soon consume you entirely?

Yeah, you know you have.

So being in an exhibitionist sort of mood, and sensing that you folks don’t want to see me naked. (do you?) I will, instead, bare some of my geek history and share with you five notable firsts in my rocking geek life.

Interestingly, this list ended up in chronological order--which I didn't plan. Funny how memory works, eh?



My First Comic Book

Memory may be a little off on this as I read a lot of comic books when I was a kid. My favorite was Legion of Superheroes starring Superboy, but I was also a regular reader of The Avengers and Fantastic Four. Based on where I was living at the time, I venture to guess that the first time I ever bought a comic book with my own money (and without parental supervision) was sometime in 1975 when I was eight years old. It was an issue of The Incredible Hulk and while I don’t remember the issue number or title of the story, I clearly remember a scene in which Bruce Banner is falling from a plane and turns into the Hulk before he hits the ground—which, of course, saves him. I also remember coming home with that issue and showing it to my father who had company at the time. He had just been telling his friend what a great reader I was—and there I am coming through the door with a comic book! (He was never a big comic book reader himself, so didn’t understand that comic books were good reading. Still are.)

[Follow-up: The Interwebs is a wunnerful thing. It took less than five minutes to find that the issue I’m talking about was Incredible Hulk Vol. 1 #187, “There’s a Gremlin in the Works!” — story by Len Wein.]

My First Science Fiction Novel

I read a lot of fantastical stories when I was in elementary school—courtesy mostly of Boy’s Life which published a surprising amount of science fiction. The first “long” story—as in novel-length—was something I found in the corner of the school library (1976 if I guess a’right—I think I was in the third grade) by a chap named Robert A. Heinlein called Citizen of the Galaxy. It was about a boy who grew up as a slave on a far off planet who is freed by his adoptive father and goes off on adventures across the galaxy and eventually finding his birth family on old Earth. The story and writing captured my imagination and I went on to devour the rest of the Heinlein novels available at our school. This springboarded me to raiding my dad’s library for more science fiction—of which he had a decent number. But you never forget your first. While Heinlein may not have aged well as a writer, some of his stories remain timeless and I still re-read Citizen of the Galaxy every couple of years just to recapture that early sensawunda


My First Science Fiction Movie

This is harder to nail down. I grew up watching the Saturday afternoon sci-fi/horror matinee shows on TV, and my brothers and I were relegated to the back seat of the car at drive-in theatres to sleep through whatever my parents were going to see—so for the purposes of this list, I’ll count the first science fiction movie I ever saw in an actual movie theater—unsurprisingly, it was Star Wars in 1977 when I was ten years old. Okay, maybe today I wouldn’t count Star Wars as science fiction. I’d call it more science fantasy, but I’m more of a snob now than I was back then. Do I really need to go into the movie’s effect on me? If The Hulk and Heinlein hadn’t already made me a science fiction fan, then Star Wars certainly would have. The special effects were like nothing I had ever seen before on those cheesy 60s sci-fi movies on TV. The effects were even better than what you got on Star Trek. And what a story! And that was only the beginning as Star Wars heralded a new breed to science fiction entertainment.


My First Geek Game

Dungeons & Dragons!

My parents bought me the starter box set for Christmas in 1980 because a friend of mine whose father owned a hobby store was a big fan of the game and needed someone to play it with.

Little did they know it would become an obsession with me for many years to come. The starter set was okay, but within a year I had amassed the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hardcovers (most of which I still have), dozens of modules, miniatures, and a subscription to Dragon magazine. Soon I was writing my own adventures, and when my original AD&D partners transferred to other schools—I found new fellow adventurers.


Those fellow adventurers are still among my closest friends—25 years later. Sadly, I’ve not indulged in quite a long time—and I have pretty much no experience with any rules beyond the original AD&D 1st edition set, but if anyone wants to start up a bi-weekly game and live in the Providence-Warwick area—drop me an e-mail. Ya never know. Until then, maybe I’ll log on for a little more World of Warcraft...which brings me to...


My First Computer Game

We had a TRS-80 Color Computer when I was a kid, but cartridges were expensive and hard to find in the small town I grew up in.

Therefore, for purposes of this list, I’m not going to count any of those games (which weren’t so much games as they were exercises in reflexes).



The first computer game I ever purchased myself was for my old IBM 8088 (a whopping 256K of memory, two disk drives—no hard drive—and a monochrome CGA screen) was Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter from Sierra On-Line in 1986. It was a humorous game in which you guided Roger Wilco, a hapless space janitor, through a giant spaceship as he escapes raiders, then along an alien planet, and then to another spaceship to commit some sabotage. The graphics were incredibly crude by today’s standards, but innovative for the time as you could move Roger in four directions and it included a fairly intelligent sentence parser. And it was a chuckle of a game. I went on to become one of Sierra On-Line’s biggest fans and purchased a lot of their games. Remember King’s Quest? Or Leisure Suit Larry? Yeah, I was a fan of those too.

Well, those are a decent number of firsts.

Another time I’ll tell you of my first anime and mangas, my first convention, my first TV crush, and other notably geeky initiations.

It’s either that, or post naked pictures of myself.

And no one wants that.

Cheers!


For information on how to get your book, comic, movie, whatever reviewed on Falling Off the Shelf, or to send hate mail, feel free to contact me at john (at) johnteehan (dot) com.