Friday Conversation: What’s Your Greatest Video Game Triumph?

We’re finally into the fall video game season; Snake is creeping through the grass, Tony Hawk will ride again, Destiny players have finally received a game that fixes all the issues they’ve complained about, and there’s even more good stuff on the way. To celebrate, we’ve asked the Uproxx crew to share a few stories of gaming triumph. And be sure to let us know yours in the comments!

Jameson Brown

It’s a close race between Super Mario Bros. for SNES and Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but Zelda wins. That game is still amazing in the fact that its open world layout was beautiful and engaging. That being said, it took forever to beat. I think I played it constantly for almost two months (hours per day) and was beyond excited when I beat it. I mean, I felt genuine relief when that game was over. Today, I have actually fired it back up and am back on that great mission of saving Hyrule again.

Spencer Lund

This guy, we’ll call him Spenser, used to occasionally play NFL Blitz with his friends in high school, a long time ago. The year is not important, but it was before that weird Y2K scare. Anyways, he found a play in the first iteration of NFL Blitz whereby you could throw a pass back to the quarterback after hitting a receiver, thereby faking out the entire rampaging line. It was the Bo Jackson in Tecmo of NFL Blitz, and no one could do it as adroitly as this idiot Spenser.

One night, Spenser got very drunk with some friends off a sh*tty bottle of whiskey while playing the game with one of his friends at their house. This friend’s father stopped in and tried his hand at playing. Spenser easily won the game because of this dumb blip in the game, and then vomited all over the couch and the father.

Robo Panda

Perhaps my proudest moment came from a free copy of RollerCoaster Tycoon received by trading in UPCs off boxes of Pizza Rolls, because I’m a baller. I set to work making a very special theme park. When guests arrived, they could get on either a roller coaster or a haunted house ride. Either way, upon exiting, they were on a footpath which didn’t connect to the exit. There they would only find a series of dozens of hedge mazes, no bathrooms, no janitors, and 42 dancing tiger mascots. (Still not sure why I didn’t choose dancing pandas instead, but it was a different time, I suppose.)

The hedge mazes would all double back or lead to another dead-end footpath surrounded by hedge maze entrances and exits, and — of course — 42 tiger mascots dancing in the accumulated feces of hundreds of trapped guests. If a guest chose the right combination of mazes, they would reach a footpath with a bathroom and a tunnel leading back to the exit.

Finally, a guest made it back to the entrance. I was about to see the ticker for number of guests in the park go down for the first time. Then that asshole got on the roller coaster.

Dan Seitz

I beat the hoverbike level in Battletoads. It took months of practice, memorizing every last aspect of that course, learning the various dirtbag tricks that level pulls, but I could get through it flawlessly after a certain point. I’ve never felt like more of a gaming god than in that moment.

Steve Bramucci

The year was… somewhere in that ’88 to ’90 range. My mom had very strict rules about how often I could play video games, but she was leaving the house. My buddy Joey and I shot baskets in the driveway until she drove off, maybe a few minutes longer, but the original NES sitting in my kitchen nook sang to us. We were on a quest to beat Mike Tyson in Punch Out. Well, not me. I was stuck on the second Bald Bull. But Joey, he was in the Mr. Sandman range. He was a contender.

We had about an hour to play and went back and forth a few times — cold pizza, granola bars, and fake boxing. Then Joey went on a tear. Got past Sandman. Beat Super Macho Man in one try. For the first time, we saw Tyson — smiling, sneering, dancing — and looked at one another like, “We are so f*cked.”

Joey lasted about a minute with the champ. I haven’t played a single video game in 15 years, but I’ve never forgotten how electric that moment felt. How nerve-wracking and important and real it seemed.

Got a moment of gaming victory? Drop it below!

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