I am a nerd, and no one of reasonable intelligence could convincingly dispute my claim on that title.
I’m a nerd of diverse interests, too, but at the core of it all, you’ll find video games, music, books, and technology. I can directly trace my nerdiness back through those categories, too.
Both my current passions as an adult and my entire professional career follow the same path through my past, and one of the first steps a very young me took involved the original Xbox and the first album I personally owned.
Now, as the sun sets on Microsoft’s first 50 years as a company, I wanted to take a look back and reminisce. Maybe I’ll discover I was far from the only one to tread a similar road to nerdom.
Humble beginnings with the original Xbox and a handful of games
I wasn’t raised in resplendent wealth, and we certainly didn’t have a lot of toys lying around growing up, but at some point we did acquire an original Xbox and accrued a miniscule collection of games for it.
I shudder to think how many countless hours I poured into those games. Days spent playing the Halo 2 campaign over and over, for example, and battling against my family members across every multiplayer map until their secrets permanently burned themselves into my memory.
I’d need more than one hand to count the number of times I completed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, creating new characters to tackle every playstyle I could imagine, both evil and good.
My two little sisters and I spent endless amounts of time in Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, designing dozens of custom maps and creating stories and characters to fill those maps (I never did finish that game’s campaign).
No, I’m not sure why our modest Xbox games library contained so many sequels, but we contented ourselves with what we had and used our young imaginations to stretch even the smallest games into hours of fun.
My identity as a “gamer” and my strongest memories associated with our humble Xbox came after my tenth birthday, however. My father gifted me my first album, Van Halen’s ‘1984,’ while we were playing classic games in an arcade also called “1984” (he thought this was very clever, as he turned ten in 1984).
At this point, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 had already released, but my family didn’t join that generation until after the release of the Xbox 360 Slim in 2010. In the interim, I amassed scores of new memories by taking advantage of one of the original Xbox’s unique features: the ability to rip music off CDs and replace in-game soundtracks.
More Tony Hawk’s, a lot of Super Bowl victories in NFL Madden ’06, and more adventures all played to the tune of Van Halen. To this day, I can’t hear a single track off the ‘1984’ album without incredibly strong feelings of nostalgia.
Over time, I added more albums to the collection from Rush and Megadeth, taking my growing collection and our original Xbox with me through elementary and middle school. I also had a PlayStation 2, which I also used frequently, but I always found myself returning to the original Xbox over and over.
Of course, that was just the beginning.
My evolution as a nerd through Xbox, Windows phone, and books
Around the same time I remember properly falling in love with Xbox, I also fell in love with reading. I can’t even remember where I got my copy, but I read Terry Brooks’ ‘Sword of Shannara’ in third grade, and since then have read hundreds of books.
Our Xbox 360 Slim also introduced me to a brand-new world of games, including Minecraft, and we spent a lot of time as a family playing Mario Kart, Super Mario Bros., and Wii Sports on the original Wii.
The final piece of the puzzle came when I received my very first proper smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 520. It was absolutely a budget device, but it kickstarted my love of technology.
After that, I spent my evenings after school reading reviews, editorials, and news from a variety of sites on Windows and Windows phone, Xbox, PlayStation, Android, iOS, and more. Yes, that includes being an avid reader of Windows Central years before I joined the team.
My nerdom had already been cemented, but my first full-time job allowed me to expand on my interests by joining the Xbox One generation (in 2016 with the Xbox One S), and I had continued to stick with Windows phone through the Nokia Lumia 830 and then finally the Microsoft Lumia 950 and 950 XL.
At this point, I could find reasons to nerd out over just about anything related to technology, immersing myself in every emerging category I discovered until my curiosity had been satisfied (or it became a new long-term obsession).
The final stage of my evolution before starting my career with Windows Central was going all-in on the development of Windows 10, joining the Windows Insider program with the entry-level Surface Pro 4 I spent months saving up for.
A couple of years later, and I’d be using that Surface Pro 4 to write my very first articles for Windows Central. That was over five years ago.
Now I’m here, celebrating Microsoft’s 50-year anniversary
Over the years, I’ve gone from playing the few games I could on a console I forced to survive well past its time, to obsessing over every aspect of tech from a distance, to writing a mere three articles a month on a single game, to now making a full-time career out of tech and gaming journalism.
It’s fitting that I’m making that career as a part of Windows Central, as my journey here started with the original Xbox and, oddly enough, the album that became the soundtrack to hours of gaming on it.
I cover a lot more than just Minecraft now, of course. Microsoft has been around for a staggering five decades at this point, and in that time, it has become a dominating force in personal computing, gaming, the cloud, web browsing, productivity tools, and more (just not smartphones, ugh).
I’m writing about it all, and I don’t plan to slow down any time soon. I’ll take my Xbox Series X, my endless rotation of new PC hardware, and my mountain of accessories into the next 50 years of Microsoft. It’s my duty as a nerd.
