Frequently Asked Questions

“Born in 1999, why do you write like someone from the ’80s?” This gets asked the most. The truth is simple: I caught everything at the end of its lifecycle. Growing up in a small county with slow information flow, when I finally got to play Famicom, people in big cities had long moved on. When I first entered an arcade, the PS2 had been out for years. So this isn’t “I was always on the cutting edge.” It’s how a child in a small place in the late ’90s slowly caught up through outdated things. That’s the real rhythm for many players from smaller towns.

2. Is any of this made up? To be honest: the stories are real, but not all of them happened to me personally. “Blowing into cartridges,” “Water Level 8,” “the noodle bowl” — these were passed down by word of mouth across our generation. Some happened around me, some I heard from friends or online — but they resonated so deeply that I wrote them in. So this isn’t my autobiography. It’s a group portrait of my generation of players.

3. Why is online gaming barely mentioned? Fair question. Honestly, it’s not that I look down on online gaming — I just played very little of it. I was strictly supervised as a child and rarely went to internet cafes. By the time I had free access to a computer, Steam was already here. My main path was always single-player, console, handheld. Online games — Legend of Mir, Fantasy Westward Journey — belong to another world, huge and brilliant. But I’m not qualified to write that story. To write it would disrespect the people who actually grew up in internet cafes. So I’ll stick to the path I know. Let someone better qualified write the online gaming chronicle.