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Those Were the Days is a new weekly article in which Gamervision employees share video game-related memories. If you’ve got a story of your own to share, please do so! We love hearing from the community.

Over the last seven years, I have moved in and out of various residences eight times. I’ve lived in seven different places, including the dorm room in which I spent my freshman year of college. Most of that time was spent living in various neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and one of those years, from the summer of 2006 till 2007, I lived in a lovely little house in the Italian market section of the city with my best friend, and we spent obscene amounts of time playing Halo.



When we moved in, I was a year out of college and had been living alone in a tiny studio apartment since graduation. One of my biggest problems with living alone, I soon realized, was having no one around all the time to play video games with, or even talk with about them. When I beat Kingdom Hearts II or got a crapload of new NES games for free, there was no one around to celebrate with except my cat, who was a little underwhelmed. I had faced a similar problem in college: though my roommate was one of my best friends, she couldn’t have cared less about video games. That didn’t stop me from rambling on endlessly about the Final Fantasy series or how excited I was when a new Grand Theft Auto game came out, but it just wasn’t the same as living with someone who actually was a gamer.

Therefore, it was really refreshing for me to have a roommate who actually took an interest in the industry I was such a big fan of. Mel wasn’t a hardcore gamer, but she knew enough. Like me, she could really appreciate old-school masterpieces, and between her SNES and my NES, we’d spend hours on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade Game, Super Mario World, Maniac Mansion (yes, she loves Maniac Mansion just as much as I do), and anything else worth playing. She was also a huge Zelda fan and enjoyed the early hours of Twilight Princess along with me, as well as convincing me to download Toe Jam & Earl on the Virtual Console, which quickly became a household obsession.

One of my most-missed gaming memories, though, was the nightly Halo sessions we had in that house when we first moved in. I was really late to the party with Halo (and the Xbox in general), and at this point the 360 had already been out for almost a year, but that didn’t matter to us; we were more than happy with my almost-obsolete Xbox and some extra controllers. I had played a good deal of Halo with some of my guy friends the year before, but that was nothing compared to the way we played.



It’s not like I was a Halo prodigy or anything, but I started to get good enough to beat the people I played with on a regular basis. Once Mel and I moved in together, we made everyone who came into our house play Halo, no questions asked. It was just what we did. All of our guests had to play, whether or not they were gamers, or had even held a controller before. We turned more than one of our friends into Halo fiends that first summer. No matter what we did during the day, pretty much every single night ended in Halo. There were plenty of times I was kept up late, saying “just one more match, just one more match” for hours. We tried venturing into unfamiliar territory with Halo 2, but neither of us cared for it even a little bit. After one night of the sequel, we went right back to the original game, and that’s where we stayed.

She liked to hide out with the sniper rifle and pick everyone off one by one. I didn’t have that kind of patience. I was good to go with the assault rifle, and even though I loved running and gunning my enemies down, there was absolutely nothing more satisfying than smacking someone in the face with the butt of my gun and taking him or her out in a single hit. We didn’t mess around too much with the different gameplay modes, although we would venture outside of the standard Slayer every once in awhile. King of the Hill was actually my favorite, and something I was surprisingly good at.



Eventually we stopped playing so constantly, and went our separate ways (as roommates, not as friends). We both moved out of the house when she left Philadelphia for a short time, and I have not played the original Halo since. In fact, when Halo 3 came out last year, I really never got into it like I had the first game. I think the reason I never tried playing over Xbox Live was because I knew I would never enjoy playing with strangers as much as playing with close friends and having them right there in the room with me. Our Halo personas, beefcake and DOOMjo, still reside on the hard drive of my last-gen Xbox, and I hope that someday, I can take it back out of the box for some sweet FPS action—assuming I’ve got my favorite Halo player with me, of course.

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