What's Your Story: El Despertando

 Intro and captions by Ilmari

Stop the press, a new commenter is on town! Judging by the name, El Despertando is probably an Andalusian or perhaps Mexican, so bring out your piñatas for celebration.

We don't have a photo of El Despertando, but this might be what he looked like as a child

My home country is...

Germany. Yes, I'm posting under a Spanish name, but I'm actually not from a Spanish-speaking country at all.... El despertando was a nickname I received when I spent some time in Argentina after I graduated from university. It's a long story and frankly not all that interesting (for those you know Spanish: yeah, I basically was "the guy who woke other people up". A stupid joke amongst students who generally liked to sleep in...). I had a travel blog back then (now long defunct) that I hosted on blogspot, and when the site wanted me to choose a nickname this was the most concurrent one, so it got stuck with my Google account. Never bothered to change it.

We better return that Piñata 

My age is...

42. Yes, I know the answer to life, the universe and everything. No, I haven't figured out the question. 

The first adventure game I played was...

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, on the Commodore C64. When I was in elementary school, my cousin introduced me to this game and it's weird humour one day. I was immediately intrigued - up to this point I had never played a game that had much of an actual story or plot (it helped that this game was actually fully translated into German). I played it with a friend, and we were completely amazed that we could do things like fry a goldfish with a lamp or kill a two-handed squirrel with a golf club ... As kids we definitely weren't used to seeing these things in the other games we had. We were fascinated and also quite amused by that, but couldn't quite figure out the puzzles (and, as those who've finished the game might have noticed, that whole "karma" thing...) Needless to say we never really got anywhere with this game (we got stuck around the time we could go to Tibet - go figure). But I enjoyed the idea of stories in a game from then on out and started looking for other games like that. I completed many other games before I would return to my original experience; I think I was about 20 when I finally went back and eventually finished Zak McKracken.

It is a lot to chew on

My favourite adventure game is...

That's a tough one. Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis will always hold a special place in my heart for being the first point & click adventure I managed to solve completely on my own without hints or help from someone else. I love the Gabriel Knight games for their stories (even the third), though the first was definitely the best. If I look at more recent adventure games, I would definitely recommend Unavowed to everyone, easily the best one to come out in the last ten years or so. But the game I've played the most, the one I keep returning to and complete it every once in a while, is Monkey Island 2. I guess that makes it my favorite as well.

Who could not love this?

When I'm not playing games I like to...

I love tabletop RPGs, especially with a horror touch - my favorite settings are Deadlands and Call of Cthulhu. When I was in my early 20s I even managed to get a Pen & Paper RPG published that a few friends of mine and I had created - a very minor affair, I think it sold about 1000 copies, but we were quite proud of that achievement. 

My wife and I are also avid LARPers, with a penchant for 19th century and early-20th-century settings (basically everything between 1800 and 1920, more or less) - I like the fashion of the era and the massive, drastic social and geopolitical shifts that went on in that period, beginning with the Napoleonic era and ending with WW1 and the tumultuous decade after (the 1930s and WW 2 on the other hand... That era's too uncomfortable for me).

Befitting that, I'm also a bit of a Western fan, even to the point where I'm running a modest podcast focussing on tall tales, myths and legends from the Old and Wild West (in German, naturally).

I like my games in (a box, digital format)...

I used to be all about boxed games. However, I had to get rid of most of my original boxed Amiga and PC games over the years. Some received unfortunate water damage in storage while I was abroad in Argentina, others got lost or damaged when I moved to another city. I still have a pretty large Sega Mega Drive collection, but since I've become a father three years ago I've toyed more and more with the idea of getting rid of (most of) that as well, since I'll soon need more space for other things. I've lost many games due to improper storage or handling (and a few even through theft, unfortunately) over time. I used to love the feel of having a box, especially one with nice extras like maps and stuff, decorating my game room... But, in the end, digital formats are just so much more convenient and save me the pain of my aforementioned losses.

The thing I miss about old games is...

The intensity and closeness you had playing them. When I was a kid or teenager, I didn't have access to that many games. I couldn't afford that many - we played what we got for birthdays and holidays, or swapped games with friends at school. Mostly that meant that when you had a game, you stuck with it, and even if it was hard - or in a completely foreign language - you kept on playing it until you had it figured out and managed to complete it, and the success was all the more satisfying. I like to believe that I vastly improved my English skills playing Sierra adventures during my high school days.

The best thing about modern gaming is...

Worlds have gotten bigger and more imaginative, and games have in general become much more accessible in my experience. Some of the old games could be frustratingly obtuse to figure out, even if you had a manual. 

The one TV show I never miss is...

Doctor Who. I actually had already watched quite a bit of the old series (thanks to "archives" available through the internet), but once I started watching "New Who" during the Tenth Doctor era, I was legitimately hooked.

Together with my wife I also like to watch the odd period drama, mostly for the costumes. Downton Abbey was a particular guilty pleasure of mine... Too bad that one has concluded (though who knows, maybe there'll be a third movie at some point).

Other than that, since the birth of my son I've fallen a bit behind on things, but I'll definitely need to catch up on Yellowstone and finally get started with 1883.

If I could see any band live it would be...

It used to be Faith No More. I had thought I would never get to see them, seeing as they had split up for almost twenty years, but then a few years back (shortly before the pandemic) I went to a festival, and there they were, back together - they hadn't even been announced, but where added in short notice as "special guests". That was quite the pleasant surprise.

In the realm of fantasy, I'm a bit sad that I'll never get to see The Ramones in concert, what with almost all key members having passed away now. I discovered them for myself during their last year before disbanding, and couldn't attend their farewell tour. I wouldn't exactly call them a "good" band, but their music touched a nerve and meant a lot to me during my teenage years. 

My favourite movie is...

This is a tough one. I don't really have a favorite movie above all, and what genres and styles I prefer tend to vary wildly depending on my mood. I used to believe "The Blues Brothers" was a timeless classic that I'd love forever, but I've re-watched it recently and found a few things to be... a bit problematic from a modern perspective. 

Also, I have quite varied tastes. Movies that definitely rank amongst "personal favorites" that I could watch repeatedly are Grave of the Fireflies, Das Boot, Life of Brian, The Thing, Army of Darkness, The Lion King (original animated version), Back to the Future, Leon - The Professional or the Godfather, part II. If I absolutely HAD to narrow it down to a single movie though - then it's probably The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I love everything about this movie, from the setting, the characters, the plot, the cinematography to the soundtrack.

One interesting thing about me is...

 I used to have my own Amateur Theatre group during my time at university. That is, I founded the group,  and directed and produced plays. Amongst our productions were stage versions of Trey Parkers "Cannibal! The Musical" and Terry Pratchett's "Guards! Guards!". At one point we even tried to somehow get a production of "The Secret of Monkey Island" together - a YouTube video of a Highschool production had recently made the rounds, and we desperately wanted to take a shot at that ourselves. We even went so far and got in touch with the guy who had created that stage version, but we never managed to get through to someone at LucasArts to grant us the rights to perform the play. We didn't dare doing it without their approval, so we eventually abandoned that plan. One of our troupe stuck with that idea and managed to get a production together many years later, in another city and with a different team entirely (and without my involvement save for a cover letter I wrote for him so he could supply credentials for having experience in stageplay productions - still, I'm a bit proud he managed to pull this off eventually). 

Also worth mentioning is that I was a professional video game reviewer for a published magazine for about a year. The publisher I was working at at the time launched a short-lived revival of an old magazine that was popular when I was growing up, and I got to work with some of the same editors whose articles I was reading back in the day. It was a  wild ride (basically I had to do all the work for the video game magazine on top of all my already existing duties, which was quite stressful) - still, I enjoyed the heck out of it. Sadly it wasn't meant to last.