Robb Grimm was born in a poor rural state that southerners consider the north, northerners consider the south, and everyone basically agrees is crap.

After a boring and very low-income early life in the sticks, young Robb’s family moved on up to a small suburban neighborhood whose green, tended lawns and neat fence lines distracted the casual observer from the dysfunctional social hierarchy hidden beneath.

If towns could smile, this one didn't. Instead, it hissed at you through needle teeth and observed you with wide, baleful eyes.

Robb was ill-prepared for the veritable minefield of unspoken rules and invisible class divisions he encountered in his new town and immediately trampled on each of them, not understanding what he had done to alienate every group of kids he met.

He had always assumed other kids were just your friends automatically, and getting to know them was only a temporary detour on the road to becoming total buds.

He was never told there were some kids you weren't allowed to talk to because you were either born too rich, or too poor, or because you sounded too funny when you talked.

The rich kids hated the poor kids, the poor kids hated the rich kids, but all kids could agree that Robb Grimm was weird and sucked.

"There's something wrong with all of these fuckers," Robb announced to himself one day as he walked home after one particularly annoying ass busting. He was pleased to suspect he may not be the problem, and also to be trying out an important new Cuss Word.

His assumption wouldn't survive the first year at his new school, but his command over swear words would only grow.

His obsession with Game Tapes began in the early 1980s, when he got his first Atari system and discovered the power of digital worlds like Ms. Pac-Man and Maze Craze. The universe he'd always had trouble grasping had at last birthed a thing he intuitively understood.

As the decade dragged itself toward the 1990s and their fluffy, colorful sweaters for men, he graduated to increasingly sophisticated game systems like ColecoVision and Sega Master System. In 1987 he received the Nintendo Entertainment System, the pinnacle of at-home video gaming technology.

He really liked that one a lot.

Thanks to the high-tech wizardry of these advanced new Tapes, young Robb was at last introduced to a world where the rules were clear, logical thinking was rewarded, punishments were avoidable, and tormentors could be whipped in the face until they exploded.

"Now I understand the allure of strength and dominion over others," young Robb felt more than thought as he watched Castlevania collapse after destroying a resurrected Dracula.

Fortunately, Robb was prescient and reasonably good-natured enough to recognize such feelings were best left trapped inside his brain, and the whippings of bad guys' asses best left to 8-bit Transylvanias.

All of that said, please enjoy your time here as Robb slowly builds his unique “retro game reviews as personal memoirs" body of work, an exciting new proposal in the world of creative nonfiction delivery.

In the famous words of Frankenstein's Monster's coroner, "We will examine every secret nook and cranny of this strange young man and discover where he went so incredibly wrong."

-Robb