This is the first a part of a series I'll be doing on games played during my childhood.

I always had a fascination with two things when I was a little girl; bugs, and other girls.

When I was in elementary school, one of my best friends was an African American kid named Chris. Chris, like me, loved bugs, especially spiders. He would often bring over bugs encased in glass to my house to show them off, and his bedroom was filled - wall to wall - with glass jars housing various spiders. Chris was a cool kid, and I sincerely appreciated our similar love for insects. To this day, I refuse to kill a spider, and despite owning two dogs that I love deeply, my lifelong dream pet is a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. What can I say? As someone who's spent a lifetime being considered offputting by others, I suppose I just have a soft spot for other species that also constantly get considered a "pest".

When I was growing up, we visited the LA area often, and one of the reasons was to visit a long time family friend of my stepfathers. She had an adopted African American daughter who I became close to, and we often spent most of our time together playing games on her mothers work computer. Being that both her mother and my stepfather were big Mac people, we were most familiar with a computer title by the name of Bugdom. We would sit at her mothers work computer in her home office and just play Bugdom for hours. It's not even so much that Bugdom was a good game worthy of being played for hours at a time, it was more that it was something we could do together, because, believer it or not, about 6 years later this girl would become my first serious girlfriend.

Bugdom is a very simple game. Released in 1999 and published by Pangea Software, and follows - what they claim is a Rollie Pollie - as they try and take down an army of fire ants and its tyrannical ruler and free the ladybugs who've been imprisoned inside cages spun with spider web. It's a fairly standard game; visit area, find key, free ladybugs, unlock new area with found key, rinse and repeat.

But since it had fairly colorful visuals and boasted a cute soundtrack, it was absolutely appropriate for the younger crowd like us. Plus, I got to engage in the two things I liked the most. Playing a video game about bugs with a girl I liked. And that's what video games have meant to me more than anything else...a way to experience something I like with people I like. Since then I've played a lot of co-op campaigns with my best friend Matt, played a lot of backseat driver games with my longtime girlfriend that I live with and discussed video games with many people online. For a few years, I even got paid to write a column about gaming. For a life so strictly monitored and ruled over, gaming was a gateway to freedom, much like fighting against a tyrannical ant king, I too was searching for something to free me from this unholy kingdom of dirt I'd found myself choking in.

Bugdom is not a good game. I want that made clear. It doesn't hold up by todays standards (unsurprisingly) and really in hindsight it wasn't very good then. In fact, had I not experienced it the way that I did, with the person I did, I likely wouldn't have any fond memories of it whatsoever. Bugdom is an example of a rather poor piece of antiquated technology that only garners enjoyment through rose tinted glasses because of the way I partook of it. Had I simply played it by myself, in a room in the dark, I'd likely not feel a smidgeon of nostalgia for it. But because I played it with a cute girl that I'd wind up dating later on, I have a weird spot in my heart for this garish cornucopia of pixels.

I wonder these days how many games I played in my past I actually enjoyed because they were good, or because they were enjoyable due to the way I experienced them. My best friend and I in high school played the hell out of Turok Evolution - another game that, really, isn't very good - and because we did this together and had such a great time doing it, I remember the game being better than it truly was or is. Game reviewing benefits from the mindset you were in when you played it, which is why you can go back to something years later and hate the same game you once loved. It's not so much that the game degrades as it is that you've degraded, in a sense. And I know this to be true because it's happened time and time again. I can give you a list of games I played with other people that, because I played them with these people, I used to think were good games.

Don't get me wrong. Bugdom isn't terrible. It's just a very standard, very mediocre game geared towards elementary school kids in the early 2000s, and like many of the games I played in my early childhood - Math Munchers Deluxe, Oregon Trail 2 or Nanosaur (all of which I'll be covering in this series) - it is remembered not because of its quality but because of its circumstances. Bugdom was like me. It was loud and bright and weird, and, like me, it was all about setting free things of beauty, which I eventually did when that girl and I wound up dating and I - rather inadvertently - helped her fix her relationship with her physically abusive mother.

About 2 years after playing Bugdom together, I saw her again when my grandparents were murdered. After the funeral, I was sitting in her mothers laundry room listening to my portable CD player when she came in and joined me. We shared my headphones for a bit, and sat in silence. Finally she had to leave but before she went, she kissed me. This was my first kiss.

She recently got married.

I still like bugs.

Our lives may have gone in very different directions, but for a short difficult period of time - when I really needed someone the most - we had eachother, and we had Bugdom, and I'm grateful for that every single day of my life.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like knowing I recently published a graphic novel here, I have a semi autobiographical book here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.