I was recently asked if I would like to submit a gaming memory to Couch Bandits’ gaming memory project, after they read my Why You Should Play Games post.

The idea of the project is to have up to 100 people share their favorite gaming memory.

This is not my favorite gaming memory, but it may be the most interesting one:

 

It was the fall of 2000, and I had just turned 10.

My parents had been separated for a few years at that point, and while I and my sister lived with our mother, we spent every Wednesday and every other weekend at our father’s place.

This was a Wednesday, and like every Wednesday for the past few months, I was waiting for my father to pick me up outside school.

 

To kill time while waiting, I had my trusty GameBoy Color, with my favorite game at that time… Pokemon (the blue version).

For a few years there, I brought it everywhere, and you could barely get me to look up sometimes.

This was one of those times.

 

As I made my way through the Kanto region, earning gym badges and crushing Team Rocket, I barely noticed how dark it was getting out in the real world.

Evenings in Norway get very dark very quickly as the calendar reaches the later months of the year, so I figured we must have just reached that point already.

So it came as quite the surprise when my father drove up to me, looking mad and worried, told me to get in the car, and informed me that my mother had called the police and reported me missing.

Turns out, I had forgotten that we were invited to a dinner at a friend of my mom’s that evening, and so my father would be picking us up on the Thursday instead.

 

When I never got home my mother got worried that something had happened to me.

She first contacted my father, who started driving around the entire city to find me.

Then she contacted the police.

 

I had been having so much fun playing Pokemon that I had not noticed that several hours had passed by!