My father was a gamer. He played in the arcades in the 70's. He had all the systems during the video game rush up until the crash of '83.
Then he had me in '86. I was playing Mario when I was 4. He played a lot back when we had an NES. He hated to lose though, goodness. Absolutely. Destroyed systems, controllers, you name it. Dad was tough.
Got a SNES after that. He stopped playing after that, as I eventually got a lot better at it. He preferred to watch. Never would allow us to use a cheating device, though. Nor codes. You can't use those.
"That's for pussies! Play it right or don't play it at all!" If I chose the latter he would call me a quitter. Oh, how I hated being called that.
So I stayed in front of that TV, I beat games like R-Type and Gradius III... Not on Easy. Not even on Normal. No, I beat them on Hard, and the hidden difficulties that were harder than that. And I beat them when I was ten years old. Even U.N. Squadron, which is ungodly hard. Beat that too. I would be crying, tears running down my eyes, as he cussed me out for getting my ass beat and not wanting to put myself through another round of Plok anymore. No kidding. He was hard. But I wasn't gonna be a quitter, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let me be one either.
We had a lot of games back then. We would rent them out. Our selling point was that we had all the save files completed, so if you wanted all the powered up characters or all the levels you could see them right away, get your money's worth, decide for yourself if it'll be a good game.
I was a sick kid. Broke my leg because of my bone cancer. Got to sit inside and play games. No computer, no emulator. Just the system, my broken leg in a cast, and dad, watching me go.
Super Mario World - Beat all 96 levels? Half a day.
Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past - No deaths, All Items, No Saving, the fabled triple 000 score - One day.
Final Fantasy III (Or VI) - All characters, all level 99, all spells, all with highest stats possible, all at 9999 HP 999 MP... TWICE. I don't even know the hours I put into it. I don't want to know.
Contra III - Alien Wars. Hard Mode. 'Nuff said.
Super Ghouls and Ghosts - Got the "Real" ending.
I could go on for a while. Those games were HARD.
My dad stopped caring at some point, though. So long as I demolished every game I came across he would be happy. We had over sixty some SNES games, and I happily throttled them all.
My favorite was Star Fox. I loved Star Fox. I still love the series. The characters, the story, the bad voice acting. (Sorry to jet, but I'm in a hurry!)
Eventually in high school I would, for five dollars, unlock everything for people by playing through it and doing it the hard way. No cheating mechanisms, just doing it. Upgraded to a 64.
Goldeneye? Unlock everything, even the bastardly Invincibility cheat - Two days.
Super Mario 64? ALL 120 STARS - 8 hours. The people who gave me the five dollars were utterly shocked when I came back the same day at their door.
Strategy Guides? Never. Didn't need 'em.
Eventually I came across Perfect Dark.
He found that to be wonderful. We would play for hours, running down halls to get weapons and shoot the crap out of Perfect and DarkSims with their stupid fast reloading and fast respawning and all knowing radar and everything...
And we would win, dangit. Sometimes. Dad wasn't good at games anymore, but we tried. We played that game so much.
Then the PS2 came out. We waited in line for it. He got there 6 hours before the release date, and we sat in line. We were first, and Dad was called 1, with myself being 1 and a half and my brother being 1 and three quarters. The others behind us were given numbers as names, and my Dad happily talked about it to these strangers that were all named after numerals. The employees waited on us and gave us popcorn...
It was an eerie feeling.
Eventually it came out with SOCOM. And he finally found the magic of online gaming. And headsets. And communication to the outside world. He hated interacting directly with people, but this was different. He was just a voice, a voice connecting to another voice, and all those voices were playing as a bunch of dudes that would, on their own team, line up and jump off to their deaths like synchronized swimmers, all in a glorious tribute to hilarity. And then they'd giggle like school-girls as the other team wondered what the heck they were doing.
We laughed and laughed. He had so much fun with it, that it eventually burned "You WERE KILLED BY" in his 52" screen. He died a lot, but he didn't care. He just went again.
Eventually I went to college. Got away from the systems. I still would play SOCOM on the weekends (I only played on the weekends, but was ranked in the top 100 overall on the boards, I was a monster.)
I then found myself in MUDs. Didn't care too much for the fantasy, but the complexity was incredible. WoW has nothing against MuDs. Not even close.
Came home and ran it one day. Dad hated it.
His solution? Get EverQuest. That didn't help. I hated EverQuest. He played it though, and he loved it. He liked the difficulty. I hated the monotony.
Eventually he discovered Planetside.
Only one of it's kind (And still none have come close to challenging it), Planetside promised huge battles of hundred vs. hundred vs. hundreds, in a First Person Shooter war. And it did just that. And he played it and played it. I would play it with him too, but at this time I was tired of stomping games. I never was in it for the competition; I preferred cooperatives over competitives. I just wanted to play for fun. I let myself slack instead of giving it my all. But to him it didn't matter. If we got particularly pissed we would hold our own, griping the hell out of how underpowered the VS was. (Hey Lasher, whatcha doin'?)
Eventually Planetside got worse and worse. And my mom finally got into games. We played EQ2 for a bit, but we got word that a new hardcore MMO was coming out - Vanguard. Endearingly given the moniker "Vanslop" we set out to play that instead. He found a class he liked, we gave one to mom, and I found one I liked as well, and we would spend hours throwing buckets of water on the NPC's as we crafted all our equipment. Eventually Vanslop was bought by SONY and became "Easy Mode" so it went out of favor, and I moved out of the house to start my career.
About a year and a half ago, he got sicker and sicker, and eventually went to the doctor to find that he was dying of lung cancer. His smoking habit was getting to him, but he still kept wanting to play. He eventually got us all to go back to Vanslop.
I tried my best to play it up like nothing was happening. I would only talk to him about what we needed to make, like there we were going to hit the new tier pretty soon, just needed to whack more deer and harvest their hides. But he wouldn't talk to me about games anymore. He was just going to miss me when he was gone. No more yelling. No more telling me I was a quitter and a pussy. None of that.
Sometimes the pain was too much for him that he couldn't do it anymore, and eventually he stopped altogether. A half year after that, he died on January 6th, 2011.
I eventually came and took the SNES. And I play those games I did when I was seven to this day, twenty years ago.
They are incredibly easy. I beat Super Castlevania IV in thirty-two minutes.
But even then, as I play them, I find that they're still incredibly hard.
I'm sorry for making it personal... It just came out that way.