Irene wants to play EverQuest….

I’ve been playing computer games for…<shudder> decades. The first computer game I played was probably a text adventure game I hand-typed into my Apple II from a magazine. I saved it to cassette tape…I think the game had something to do with exploring an abandoned mine, but I’m not sure. That would have been about 1979/1980 or thereabouts: my memory is a bit hazy.

I still remember calling the support line for the first Ken and Roberta Williams game I played on my Apple, maybe a year later- I’m not sure what it was called, but it had graphics and you typed in text commands, and there was a snake I couldn’t figure out how to kill. I’d been playing for hours, and it was about 2:00 am, when I flipped the zip-lock baggy over that held the documentation and noticed a phone number. I called and talked to Ken Williams…yep, at 2:00 in the morning, one of the founding fathers of computer gaming was programming away and answering his “tech support line”. I apologized for bothering him, he said something like “No problem, I was awake programming”, and then he gave me a hint…look at the rocks. I did, found a rock I could pick up, and bashed the snake. I was hooked…computer games were fantastic!

When I met my wife Irene we were both about 25 years old. We met at a stable- she was “horsey”, and so was I, although for me it was a passing thing- Irene still has a horse and, although I still love the equines, I’m not a rider any longer. I was still playing computer games when I met Irene. I’m still playing computer games today. Now and then I’ve managed to convince Irene to play on a game or two with me: Golden Axe on the console, Baldur’s Gate on the PC…just her and me, and always fun. But until fairly recently, I haven’t been able to convince her to play a massively multiplayer game. But then there was EverQuest 2…

I’ve tried to pin Irene down on why she has been playing EQ2 with me, and not other online games in the past. What has changed? She’s not sure…maybe it was the fact that she had time on her hands because of not being able to ride much lately- her hips have made it too painful to ride for a while, and more recently she’s had hip surgery which has reduced her mobility quite a bit. Or perhaps it’s because EverQuest 2 has the Kerra- cat people. And Irene is a cat person…although without the fur and claws. Or maybe she wants to have some shared time with me…although why, I’ll never know 🙂

Whatever the reason, now she comes to *me* to ask when we are playing EverQuest next. Sure, we just play as a duo, and our gaming sessions are fairly short (an hour or two at a time), but we do play, and it’s fun. I’m a lucky guy: a lot of married men who play computer games never manage to convince their wives to play alongside them. I just wish I knew how I managed to be so lucky 🙂