I’ve never really been a console gamer, and it wasn’t some elitist PC thing. It was survival. Console controllers were always hard for my hands to deal with, long before accessibility was something the gaming industry even pretended to care about. On top of that, I didn’t even own a console until I was a freshman in high school—and even then it was a secondhand Sega Genesis.
By that point, my dad had already settled the debate permanently. His logic was simple and brutal: you already have a computer that can do better graphics and play more games than any console ever will. So that’s what we did. We played games on the computer. Always.
That one decision shaped everything.
While most people my age were growing up on consoles, I was living in DOS prompts, early versions of Windows, floppy disks, and CD-ROMs. Wolfenstein 3-D. DOOM. DOOM II. Quake. Duke Nukem 3D. SimCity. Sierra adventure games that rewarded thinking, patience, and problem-solving instead of twitch reflexes.
SimCity deserves special mention, because it rewired my brain. Zoning, budgets, power lines, watching everything fall apart because you forgot something obvious—and then fixing it anyway. No timer. No kill count. Just consequences. That game still holds up.
Which brings me to modern gaming.
I don’t really play modern titles, and it’s not because they aren’t impressive. It’s because they’re hard in the dumbest possible way. Modern shooters are built around twitch reflexes. Games like Call of Duty® expect you to snap, flick, and react instantly. When you have cerebral palsy, you’re already twitching enough without trying to win a reflex contest against teenagers hopped up on energy drinks. That kind of gameplay just isn’t fun for me.
There is exactly one modern exception: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. It’s slow, methodical, and rewards planning instead of reflexes. That’s the only modern game I’m planning to throw at this system. Everything else is unapologetically retro.
This year, I decided to build the ultimate retro gaming computer. Modern hardware. Way more power than any of these games need. A machine that could run today’s AAA titles but will mostly spend its life running games from the ’80s and ’90s.
Yes, it will run Windows. Yes, it would absolutely be running Linux if Microsoft Flight Simulator didn’t exist. Believe me, I tried. Stupid fucking Microsoft. But here we are.
And I went completely ridiculous.
This thing is going to be hooked up to a 40-inch monitor already mounted on my living room wall. Not a desk. Not a gaming nook. The wall. There is something deeply funny about firing up Wolfenstein 3-D or SimCity on a screen bigger than most TVs people owned when these games were released. Tiny pixels. Massive display. Zero restraint.
The core lineup is exactly what you’d expect: Wolfenstein 3-D, DOOM, DOOM II, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, SimCity, Paperboy, Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge, and the original Test Drive. Police Quest and King’s Quest are absolutely happening, and yes, Myst will eventually join the pile.
Once all of that is running the way I want, I’m going even further back. Atari-era stuff like Super Breakout is on the list. And somewhere deep in early DOS—version 3, I think—there was a stupid little game called Donkey, where all you did was change lanes so you didn’t run over a donkey. Crude graphics. No mercy. I don’t know why I remember it so vividly, but now I have to find it. That and Pole Position. Non-negotiable.
There’s also a very practical reason for this machine.
I do tech support, mostly on the phone. And sometimes—after the fifth call of the day where someone insists their computer is “completely dead” because the monitor isn’t turned on—I don’t want to meditate. I don’t want to journal. I want to open a video game and shoot something in the face.
Not in real life. Calm down. In a video game.
Retro shooters are perfect for that. They don’t lecture you. They don’t judge you. They don’t require a PhD in controller gymnastics. You blow stuff up, you feel better, you move on.
The computer should arrive sometime in early February, and I can’t wait. Once it’s here, the real fun begins: setting it up, dialing everything in, and sitting on the couch staring at a 40-inch wall-mounted screen while playing games that haven’t asked anything unreasonable of me in thirty years.
Sometimes moving forward means going backward.
With better hardware.
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You might also want to include the fact that you’ll be staring more at your PC than your monitor.