As far back as I can remember, I always had access to video games. I have photos of me holding an NES controller on Xmas morning in 1989. We also had an Atari 2600 with a box full of games— that I only dragged out when I was extremely bored with whatever NES games I had. My mom worked for some kind of bank or lending company in the 80s, and she had an MS-DOS computer that she may have used for work then. I am not actually 100% sure. I know this computer moved with us when we left Southern California and moved to the middle of the desert, 30 minutes south of Maricopa, AZ, in 1990.

Our family came to the desert, and our new home was three miles down a dirt road off a two-lane paved road and a few miles off a two-lane highway, which was 15 miles away from the nearest town. There was a school, a convenience store, a gas station, and even a municipal airport. The town may not have been called “Lizard Breath,” but it could have been. This remote location where I lived meant I wasn’t walking to any parks or going anywhere nearby to play. Video games were my primary form of entertainment, and I was okay with this. I’d stick to my NES games, and we’d randomly get new ones from who knows where, or we’d get a rental from a store if we went into town. Sometimes, I’d just have to be bored.

One day, I started exploring the house in one of these hazy boredom states and found the computer. This was a computer that would boot right into MS-DOS, and along with this computer, I found a few boxed games and a Rolodex-style storage bin filled with 5¼-inch floppy disks, many of which were games. I’d learn how to put the disks in, search for the .exe files, and play things like “Harley-Davidson: The Road to Sturgis,” “Zork,” and more.

I’d meet my best friend a couple of years later, and much like my home, there was always something new to discover when our boredom reached new lows. We would find another computer and some early music production software. After more digging, we found even more games like “Ys: The Vanished Omens” and one that stood out because of its B-movie cover, It Came From the Desert.

What were our parents doing in the early 90s? I never saw them play video games. I never saw them sitting in front of these computers. Where did these games come from? Some kind of trade? A yard sale buy? I have talked to my friends over the years, but we have no idea. I don’t know if I am alone here, but I never really learned how these games showed up, but I am glad they did. Finding them helped us discover new genres or at least genres we wouldn’t have ever been exposed to at that age, and eventually, these types of experiences would be things we’d hunt down again and again. We were lucky to have the chance to get our hands on them then.

When we first put in It Came From The Desert, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. Our NES, SNES, and Genesis games taught us that shooters and platforming were the typical stock experience, so I could imagine blasting away at some giant ants based on the cover. Instead, we were greeted with a message from the main character, a geologist temporarily living in a small town investigating a meteoroid that fell out of the sky on the outskirts of town.

It was an adventure game that had us make choices and work against the in-game clock. It felt like one of my “Choose Your Own Adventure” books that I was obsessed with at that age. We weren’t immediately thrown into action, but we had to glean clues to figure out where to go next, acting as a detective of sorts to the game's main story. There were odd characters and strange events, and the real surprise was that all these moments were broken up with mini-games of all different types. There was a first-person game of chicken against some rebel teens. There was a knife fight against that same crew. If you traveled to the local airfield, you could play a top-down flight sim to gather intel, explore the town, and more. If you are on the right path, a giant ant may interrupt and attack in a first-person fight where you defend yourself with a gun.

I mentioned the in-game clock before, but this concept was new for us as younger kids. You wouldn’t immediately know if your choice to investigate a local farm or drive to the quarry outside of town was right or wrong. Each choice took time, and you needed to solve the central story within 15 days. Failing to succeed at some of these events risked injury, and a bad enough injury could land you at the local hospital.

This is where I would find the most significant challenge. First, choosing to wait to heal up would cause you to lose the most of your limited time to figure out the town's ant problem. The doctors and nurses didn’t believe your story, and they ordered you to stay in bed. The problem is that you don’t have time to waste, so you do only what you can: Escape the hospital. You needed to avoid orderlies, sneak to the first floor, and make it out of the front door to succeed. If you were caught, it was back to your room, where you would have to wait and lose the most precious resource in the game. It wasn’t easy, but when I finally did it for the first time after dozens of tries, I remember breaking out in an ad-libbed song, “I escaped the hospital!” This must have been an infectious song because my friends and I still bring it up over 30 years later.

The game was non-linear in its design. You could take multiple paths and find different people to meet to help uncover the details of the game's mystery. This meant we could try new things, go to new places, and experience something different each time. This is something we had never experienced before. As I grew older, I discovered more adventure and RPG games— which became my genre of choice. Threads of what I love today can be found here. We would see the end of the game and make it through the ant's tunnels in the southwest area of the map with a flamethrower in hand. We found what came from the desert, living in our version of that game, and it's an experience I can never forget.