Katsuhiro Harada@Harada_TEKKEN
LOL hahaha. Of course.
Here’s the reality: video game nerds like us spent our weekend nights inside games.
When we were young, after school or work, we weren’t just “playing” ..we were living in arcades, battling for high scores, dissecting strategies. Every year brought new massive cabinets and motion-based machines, and that raw excitement was irreplaceable.
Unlike the normies, gamers like us were grinding gold and coins long before crypto and digital wallets became trendy buzzwords.
Back in the early internet days of the 1990s, farming items, gold, and platinum in Diablo, Ultima Online, and EverQuest was busier than our actual day jobs.
And the first moment the world truly connected through online games? That was unreal.
On Ultima Online’s official launch day, players were introducing themselves by country, saying things like:
“My grandfather and yours fought in WWII — and now we’re playing together. How insane is that?”
That was the first time the world genuinely felt connected. The virtual world outshined real nightlife districts by a mile.
This was the narrowband era. Servers were fragile, and just putting an image on your homepage could get you treated like a criminal. Early Ultima Online? One step could take minutes. No exaggeration.
We weren’t using undersea fiber from Japan to North America. Japanese players literally signed contracts with American AT&T providers and dialed by phone line all the way to Lake Superior servers. The lag was borderline unbelievable but no problem at all because fun.
Going out to real-world parties? Not even remotely an option.
When EverQuest hit its peak, anyone who invited you out on a Friday or Saturday night was friendship-ending. If you had time for nightlife, you clearly weren’t camping rare named spawns.
Why go drinking when you could go dragon hunting?
And yes.... the excitement was bladder-bursting level. We literally couldn’t leave to use the bathroom.
Then PC performance went insane. Overclocking, benchmarking, higher resolutions.. nonstop.
Then came story-driven shooter campaigns like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, plus multiplayer games that simply never ended once you started.
At some point, our lives even turned into nightly virtual bank robberies.
Gamers were absurdly busy. There was zero time for old men’s social gatherings, elite banquets, or brain-dead club parties.
The truth? Video games completely surpassed real-world entertainment.
When my wife first came to my place, she was horrified and asked:
“Why is there an arcade table cabinet in your living room? Does it cost 100 yen per play?”
“Why is the next room filled with towers of empty boxes, CDs, and DVDs?”
“Why are there so many screens and PCs ,,,, are you trading stocks?”
“Why are hoses filled with green liquid running from all these PCs to giant metal towers on the balcony?”
“Why are arcade controllers everywhere?”
“Why are PC parts literally covering the walls?”
Because at night I was being a blacksmith, a cute elf, a soldier, a bank robber, and a world saver —
then going to work to make games, talking games, “researching” games by playing them, rushing home, and staying busy landing headshots.
How long do you think it took before that finally made sense to her?
I’ve lived a life that was insanely busy! and incredibly fulfilling.
I’m proud. I’ve experienced every kind of place, moment, and community in the game world... and traveled the real world too, talking about games with people everywhere.
It’s been an overwhelmingly fun life.
There was no time wasted in decay. Every second was converted into XP, coins, or skills.
And yes,,, even within the same game industry, there are plenty of people who have never written a line of code, drawn a single pixel, composed a bar of music, or written a line of specs.... yet somehow stay busy burning entertainment budgets with outsourcing vendors and license holders.
They still love saying “when we made this game,” dropping the word "made", while bragging about nightlife war stories like that’s an achievement.
For the record, those fake “industry guys or producers” (and there are a lot of them) live in a completely different world from us.
