Video games have always been a part of my life. When I look back, they were present at many seminal moments in my life. This is one of them.

In my third year university, I had a roommate who moved out halfway through the school year after dropping out. Desperate for someone else to share the rent, I blasted out a message across my ICQ contact list. Someone, a guy named Luke, responded.

I had never met him before, and he had added me because we liked the same bands. Actually, our small group of friends was largely brought together by Luke wanting to find people who shared the same taste in music. Either way, I lived in his preferred neighborhood, and his roommate was moving to Amsterdam. It was a match, and we were roommates within the month.

At the time, I had just picked up a $99 Dreamcast. We spent hours talking about music, complaining about our landlord, and, above all, playing that Dreamcast games.

After the term, he moved out and I went home for the summer. We would chat all the time via ICQ, and during one of our conversations, I made an off-colour gay joke.

“I don’t appreciate you making fun of my sexuality,” he typed back.

Aghast, I apologized, but only insofar that I don’t want to offend anyone at any time. But Luke was gay? We lived together for four months, and I didn’t know this? (All the hot women he used to bring home and didn’t sleep with should have clued me in, but I was naive.) I could barely accept this. I apologized a couple more times, and then signed off.

I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him. I was from a small town, and simply hadn’t encountered a gay man before (well, actually I had, but they didn’t come out of the closet until a good while after they left home). It was something I was, I am slightly ashamed to admit, not prepared to deal with. Luke liked to have sex with other men. That was gross.

A couple weeks later, Luke messaged me and wanted to chat about the Gamecube he was thinking about buying. It was in that moment that I kind of realized that this was just plain ol’ Luke, and he was still the guy that loved Crazy Taxi and Jet Grind Radio, and that the person I had come to know in those four months was exactly the same person -- he was just willing to share something else with me. I say “kind of” because I had some growing to do as a person, but ultimately I would get there, and our shared love for video games, if not the same sex, helped.

Part 1: My Father and the Warp Pipes

Part 2: Doomed

Part 3: Tony Gwynn Gets His, to the Delight of All

Part 4: Bonk's Late Night Adventure

Part 5: Hockey Fight in Canada

Part 6: Ambush!