Since the beginning of time, a dynamic has existed among siblings playing video games. Whether they were in an arcade, had their noses pressed to an old cathode-ray tube TV screen or found themselves huddled over the glowing rectangle of a smartphone, the older sibling has always, always , hogged that shit. Perhaps not all older siblings were guilty of this: the bogarting of quarters, that unbreakable grip on a greasy Super Nintendo controller, the claim that the phone is theirs and they don't have to let you play, you idiot . But my older brother James certainly did. For hours I'd sit in the basement of our childhood home, forced to watch as he and his friend Nathan mashed buttons on the PlayStation controller. Tomb Raider , Gex , 1080° Snowboarding --all games I initially witnessed more than played. Only when the two went outside to smoke the cigarettes that my brother would steal from our mother would I get my opportunity. As we moved into the late '90s, James and Nathan, now in high school and in search of an identity to call their own, found a new hobby, something to cling to while floating through the cruel, confusing morass of their teenage years: skateboarding.

Almost immediately, the width of their pant legs ballooned, swallowing their skinny pale legs. The summer afternoons that once took place in the basement were now spent rolling around the driveway, chain wallets glinting in the sun, narrated by a new language I had no grasp of: ollies, kickflips, backside tailslides. It was all Latin to me. To most younger siblings, your older sibling's interests are highly contagious. So, it wasn't long before I put down the PlayStation controller--which, in a revelation, I'd begun to have almost unfettered access to--and began to go outside to watch Nathan and my brother try to calculate the taxing physics behind the ollie. At first, I didn't get it. All they did was fall, pant legs parachuting but not lessening the impact of their pimpled teenage skin on the concrete. I tried riding their skateboards in a few wobbly attempts but was eventually told to get your own, dumbass .

Soon, I was back inside, proceeding to get lost in a universe of different video games, from the childlike benevolence of Croc to the murderous vampire lore of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain . It was bliss. However, just a short few weeks later, Nathan and my brother returned to the basement. Smelling now of cigarettes and weed, they promptly evicted me from the PlayStation and popped in a new game. The startup screen commenced. Suddenly, a gravity-defying skateboarder appeared, somehow riding upside down in a large wooden loop that looked like the Hot Wheels track I had packed away in the closet. As I struggled to understand what was happening, a name assembled itself from a tangle of silver shards on the screen in front of me: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater .