I was born in the mid-90s. I remember that winters were cold, autumn was windy, spring was exciting, and summers were a blessing. My parents knew everything, and whatever they said was true. My grandmothers were like extra mothers, but with the great advantage that they let me eat more sweets.
This is the story I think I tell myself to explain who I am and where I come from.
When I was little, I loved playing in my room. I spent hours playing in silence, imagining adventures with my dinosaurs, Action Man, Pokemon, and any other figure, building structures and fighting robots with off-brand Lego bricks. My favorites: Casper's mansion and the Micro Machines truck (cool 😎). I loved Scalextric, and I was always trying to build circuits different from the one you were supposed to build, even if I had to force the pieces to get what I wanted. I built towers with boxes and chairs to give my races verticality (and more excitement).
I have been very lucky in this life, and I am eternally grateful for the childhood I was allowed to enjoy. But among all those toys there was one specific category that had a special place in my heart.
One of my best friends was celebrating his birthday. I think we must have been 5 or 6. The title of best friend was very important at that age, although I usually admired practically all my friends for one of their unique qualities: the way they spoke, the fact that they always got 10/10 in math, or how good they were at football.
During that birthday party I saw something that fascinated me: around a giant tube TV were my classmates, with a PlayStation on the floor and Crash Bandicoot on the screen. I did not know what I was seeing, but I really remember, with intensity, the orange and green colors on the screen. I wanted to play, although I was embarrassed. The birthday boy was playing and he seemed very good, so obviously I would be terrible and embarrass myself in front of everyone. I don't know why I have always had this perception of myself, even as a child, as if I were trying to stop people from discovering that maybe I did not deserve to be there. I think that way of thinking is what has limited me and made me self-sabotage many, many times, and also what, at certain moments in my life, has made me work beyond what I knew others were willing to work, to push myself toward my goals.
Back to Crash Bandicoot. I remember very well what fascinated me: "There is a world behind that screen, full of colors and surprising creatures, and I want to investigate it and discover every one of its secrets". That game was not exactly an exploration game, but I experienced it that way, and from then on that would become a recurring pattern in my life: the search for universes waiting to be discovered and solved, full of mysteries and surprises waiting in every corner.
When it was time to leave the birthday party, I burst into tears. My mother was very surprised. I was an extremely well-behaved child, I had a lot of respect for my parents, I never talked back to them, never contradicted them, and it would never even have crossed my mind to cry in public or make a scene. Never. But I did not want to leave yet. I still had so many questions about that world inside the screen.
But my first console was not a PlayStation. It was the Game Boy Color, and among many other games there was one that was causing a sensation in the schoolyard and fascinated me every time I saw someone play it:
I saw them playing Pokemon Red or Blue, but I did not know that. I only knew that this really was an immense world to explore and discover, full of fantastic and mysterious creatures, and very cool ones! That, together with the Pokemon cartoons on Telecinco, captivated me.
I remember that what I wanted was to explore the world of Pokemon, to see what was on the next route, in the next town: a cave, with rivers and lakes; a forest, with legendary Pokemon that travel through time; an ocean, and an island beyond it, etc. And I, who must have been about 6, always ended up "stuck", unable to progress in the game, because I tried to avoid all the battles (dodging the gaze of the other trainers), which limited my progress because many times the game required you to have a gym badge (and I did not know that), or because my Pokemon were not at a high enough level to defeat some trainer who was impossible to avoid. So my play sessions usually consisted of walking around the same places, exploring every corner, and every now and then starting a new game when I felt like trying a different starter Pokemon.
I suppose that as I grew and my brain developed, I eventually understood what the game was about and what I had to do, and I managed to progress. I remember it as if it were right now: the first time I beat the Johto League, defeating Lance, and how, thinking the game had ended there, I discovered that the game had one final gift for me: now I could go to Kanto, a new world as large as the one I had just played, to explore and discover. That emotion, surprise, and joy, thinking you have finished a game you love and realizing that actually you are only halfway through and there is much more to discover, is one of the most special and unique feelings in video games. Looking for a comparison, it would be like reading a book you love and, after reading the last page, the book suddenly doubled in size out of nowhere, revealing a hidden truth that had been there the whole time and that you simply had not seen because you were missing a piece of knowledge that had not yet been revealed to you.
Some time later I saw an ad on TV that captivated me, and it would end up becoming my second video game:
In this game I got stuck again, constantly, and this time right at the beginning. You start the game in a closed area, with a camp of nomads. All you have to do is talk to all of them and then to the one dancing on the stump. Too complicated for my 6-year-old self. Also, I did not know how to save the game. I was stuck on this screen for months:
The good thing about getting stuck like that while playing video games is that when you discovered how to continue, it literally felt as if now you had a completely new game, and a new area of the world had opened before you to explore and investigate. Oracle of Seasons had an immense world, so most of the time what I did was wander through its world without the faintest idea of what I had to do next. Incredible!
I was always fascinated by everything that had to do with screens. As soon as I had the chance, I did not hesitate to sign up for the after-school computer class, where for 30 minutes a very patient man taught you how to use Windows, Word, and Excel. Then for the rest of the class you could play educational games, like the Pipo games, or a very strange one I loved about an E.T.-type alien and his spaceship. Although this very patient man also brought more entertaining games in his briefcase, like Tarzan.
The best thing about that computer room was that the computers had internet access. To me the internet felt like something very strange and intriguing. You could type anything into the Google search box and it would come out. But what could I search for? The limit was my ability to ask questions. For now: minijuegos.com
I wanted to be able to play all those internet games from home, but at home there was no internet. I had hinted to my parents that this internet thing was very good: there were games, films, and music (to download one song meant leaving the computer on for a week with eMule running). Although my parents never really liked the internet thing, I think because they were able to see the risk it could have for a child my age, and how unknown it was to them. In fact, after about a year my father would get internet for the little office he had at home, and I was the one explaining many of the things to him: how the operating system worked, its applications, and what the internet was like. I also explained eMule to him and we started downloading a film. I don't remember which one it was, but what I do remember is that once it finished downloading and we went to play it, what appeared was a very muscular naked man in a set shaped like clouds (like Olympus of the gods) and some very funny letters. I did not know what it was. My father very quickly closed everything and said: well, that's it, these are grown-up things, it hasn't worked properly. I did not really understand what had just happened or what I had seen, but not long after, for whatever reason, we were going to stop having internet at home. The experiment had been a failure. I felt I had very bad luck and very strict parents (all my friends had internet!), and writing this I realize that what I actually had was a lot of luck to have parents so cautious and aware of where they could protect me and where they could not.
But I wanted internet. I loved minijuegos.com, and my friends were starting to use Messenger to talk to each other from home without calling on the phone, and that seemed very fun. One day in computer class I had an idea: What if I take the school's computer internet home on a USB stick? (literally the Internet Explorer shortcut). Inside me something said: "it is not going to work, if it were that easy nobody would pay for internet". Even so, the relationship between effort and reward was too asymmetric: it was worth trying! Obviously, when I copied the Internet Explorer shortcut to the desktop of my home computer, it did not work, and I felt something inside me say: "that was to be expected, your intuition was correct, still: good try".
Later, one Christmas, I got the Wii (or the Revolution, as they called it in the rumors I had been reading for months in Nintendo Accion magazine). At that time it was a direct competitor to the PS2/3, which were the main consoles my classmates had, but I was a Nintendo fanboy at heart, and despite its problems, for me the Wii will always be the console I enjoyed the most and had the best time with. Not to mention WiiWare, which was a place full of fantastic indies. Although the reality is that you always had to settle for cut-down versions of other games that played much better on PS3.
Some of my friends had a modification on their PS2 where they would insert a white disc, lift the console lid, and play pirated games. That was madness. You went from 2 games a year (Christmas and birthday) to every game you could get and play.
First: it seemed magical to me that something like that could work. How had they managed to trick the console into playing more games? They had improved it! My friends said they took it to a man who put a chip in it. "What madness. How much knowledge must a person have to know what chip to create and then put it into the console so that, thanks to that, it works? And why do you have to put in a white disc?"
I don't know at what point I thought: "Something like that must exist for the Wii too, an equivalent process so I can play all the games I see in Nintendo Accion and cannot afford". At home we still did not have internet, but there were locutorios, places where for a modest price you had access to a computer with a good internet connection (which I would use on other occasions to play Habbo Hotel, watch Naruto episodes, and download GBA ROMs that I could play on an emulator on my PC without internet). I started investigating and discovered that in fact there was a way to "hack" the Wii, without any chip, completely free. You only needed Twilight Princess, an SD card, and to follow the steps in the tutorial. Luckily, I had everything.
After several attempts (and many trips back and forth to the locutorio), where I ran into errors I did not understand because I had not followed or prepared properly everything in the tutorial (which I carried printed on paper), I managed it, and I ended up achieving the goal of the process: installing the Homebrew Channel, an application inside the Wii's operating system that allowed you to run "homebrew": applications made by people at home, without the approval or signature from Nintendo that the Wii required for an application to run on it:
Inside the Homebrew Channel you could run applications to launch the "backup copies" of your games, and it also had applications where you could see, in a very cool way, which game you wanted to play:
Playing games was great, although I also began to discover an online community where people shared information about advances happening in this world of "hacking": specific applications, changing your Wii theme, or media players. I cannot think of a better representation of those years than listening to my favorite bands on the Wii MP3 player: Pendulum, Simple Plan, Green Day, Linkin Park.
The name of that community/forum was Scenebeta: a forum where we users talked about our things, questions, or discoveries related to the world of homebrew. There was also a hierarchy of users inside the forum:
admin: Administrator of one of the forum sections: PC, NDS, PSP, Wii, PS3, iOS, or Android.editor: The users who created the news posts and tutorials you saw on the front page.coder: Users who had demonstrated their programming skills by creating and sharing their own homebrew in the community.
I admired the people who were editor. They seemed to have a lot of knowledge and they made very cool news posts and software presentations. I wanted to be an editor. I was going to be an editor. And I achieved it. The trick was to go to English or French pages equivalent to Scenebeta, translate news about new software, then bring that knowledge to the Spanish-speaking community of the forum in a normal forum post (not as a front-page news item), and after doing a few of them correctly and behaving impeccably on the forum, you would be offered the chance to become an editor, which gave you permissions to publish news on the front page and access to the private forums where you could discuss and review together the news/tutorials you were preparing to publish.
I made many friends on that forum. Together we learned to program, to translate, and to write. I even ended up meeting some of them in person.
Another thing we liked doing was creating our own avatars imitating the style of the avatars made by the forum's official designer. I spent hours learning Photoshop and designing avatars for us and for other forum users who commissioned us with the ideas they had for their avatars.
During that time, I don't know if before or after the Wii hack (those years and memories are a bit mixed up in my head), I also immersed myself in Scenebeta's Nintendo DS community, where it was much easier to run homebrew and games. You only needed a flashcard. These are the ones I ended up having:
I loved the DS: both its game catalog and its homebrew community.
At Scenebeta there was an annual homebrew contest where users presented their own projects, and voting was organized by category: games or applications. It was a big event. There were prizes and everything! That was where I decided I would make my own game, learn to program in C++, and submit my game to the contest no matter what. That was when I began studying the basic concepts of programming and using PAlib.
Programming was something fascinating (and very strange!): concepts I had never heard before, problems that stayed spinning in my head for hours and whose solution I would discover while I was showering. I remember very well what I thought when I internalized what programming was: "I can create anything. Within the limits of the computer I can create anything I manage to imagine. This must be exactly, on a smaller scale, what God must feel when interacting with the universe". Once again, the limit was only my ability to ask the right questions. Finding the answers was only a matter of time and stubbornness.
During that summer I learned to program, and I managed to submit my video game to the contest. It was an extremely simple game, and I did not even come close to the top positions, but still I was proud of my effort and of what I had achieved. Time passed and I ended up being one of the founders of Scenebeta's PS3 section, where I contributed my own original tutorials on modifying the console's operating system (hacked by the great geohot).
I remember very clearly the moment when the English and French websites I had used so many times as sources for homebrew news and tutorials were now the ones translating my tutorials and creating news posts about my Nintendo DS video game. Something like that gives you a strange, beautiful mix of feelings: happiness, tears, and the sense that you have actually become someone, and it tells you inside: "you started there, and now you have come far: well done".
To be precise, I have skipped an important part: How could I have been so involved in Scenebeta if supposedly there was no internet at home? Well, the thing is that right after installing the Homebrew Channel on the Wii I asked myself: "What if there is some way to 'hack' WiFis? I don't have internet, but surely some neighbor has WiFi. What if there is some way to get their password? Surely not, it seems too magical, and I promise I won't do anything or bother them downloading things during the day, I only want it to browse the internet 😝". It was time to make trips to the locutorio again, with USB sticks, blank DVDs, and piles of printed pages.
I discovered that yes, there were in fact ways to get the neighbors' WiFi passwords. Apparently I had two options:
- Certain applications were able to identify a router's default password based on its SSID. It only worked for certain models, and only if the neighbor had not changed the default password.
- Routers using WEP, the first WiFi security protocol, whose password you could eventually unlock after capturing packets and waiting with a lot of patience for hours.
I ended up installing Kali Linux on my old laptop (the one on which I played Minecraft at a scraped-together 20 FPS with the render distance at minimum). I would write down on paper the errors I found during the process at home, then at the locutorio I would print forum pages with possible solutions and commands to run. Over time, I ended up knowing much more about networks than I should have. When I was lucky, I could download at the dizzying speed of 400Kbps. With luck, I could download a Wii game in 2-3 days (I think I broke my promise to be a passive user of the network).
Something else that happened during that time is that I began earning my first little bits of money by installing the Homebrew Channel in some houses around town. The son of one of my mother's colleagues had a Wii. My mother told her that I could go to her house to "pirate it" for her. The woman was delighted and invited me over for an afternoon snack. I brought my old laptop and left everything ready for them to play. The kid was happy, I had eaten, and I had had a lot of fun freeing the console from its yoke. Before I left, the woman gave me 20 euros as a reward. "Wait a moment... I have eaten, I have had a great time freeing one more Wii, I have played Mario Kart with this kid, and his mother is giving me 20 euros?" Years later I would have exactly this same realization in my first job, when I got hired as a permanent employee at the company where I was doing my internship. I tried to make sure they did not realize I would have been willing to work there for free. It seemed incredible to me that they paid me for doing what, to me, felt like "playing".
Word spread around town and I repeated this same process a few more times. Depending on the generosity of the neighbor, I would earn between 20 and 50 euros. This new source of income (beyond the 10-15 euros of weekly allowance) allowed me two things:
- To buy an antenna with which to increase my WiFi clairvoyance.
- To learn that the most important part for playing video games on a computer is the graphics card, and that the best one in terms of power/price at the time seemed to be the Radeon 270x. With that, I managed to give new life to my father's old office tower and turn it into a full-on gaming machine for playing CoD, LoL, and Minecraft online at 40 FPS without the whole thing looking like a cataract simulator.
A very important part of my childhood and adolescence, which I have completely skipped over, is reading fiction novels.
It all began after going to the town cinema to watch Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (a cinema that is now closed, because my group of friends ended up being the only ones visiting it during its final days).
The thing is, I loved the Harry Potter film. I wanted to be Harry Potter. I WAS like Harry Potter! I was sure, sure that when I turned 12 the letter to go to Hogwarts would arrive, and besides, my birthday was also in July. It was clear the chances were low, but I would keep hoping until the summer of my 12th birthday had passed, and even a couple of years after that too, just in case they had missed me the first year and the letter arrived late. I did not mind being a couple of years behind and having to go with the younger kids. No problem.
The thing is that one day, when I was about 8, my mother said to me: Would you like to read the Harry Potter books? I remember saying: "But that book is all letters, right? It has no drawings". I did not see myself as capable of carrying out such a feat. However, I said to my mother: "Yes, okay". And normally in my house we did not give presents for saint's days, but from then on saint's days became one more excuse to get a book.
Looking for the book covers, I have just seen that Memorias de Idhun has an animated series on Netflix. I am sure it is teenage to the bone (just like the book was), but I think I need to watch it.
These books, especially the Harry Potter ones, would be books I reread again and again, and consumed in a matter of days, not out of anxiety, but out of curiosity to discover their worlds and get to know their characters.
Today I see how many of the basic elements that make up my being have been there all my life. Writing this, I realize more or less the DNA of what it means to be me. I can see how I have spent years trying to remove my rough edges and make myself fit into society, being less me and more what is expected of me. Over the years I have been telling child Gerard, "no, not now, we can't, we have to sacrifice this" in order to keep moving forward in life. And how, precisely now, what I need in order to keep moving forward is to look back and find all those truths that make me who I am, and bring them back to the foreground so they can have the role they deserve:
- Exploring worlds and getting lost in them has always fascinated me. It would be interesting one day to be the one creating those worlds, so that other people can get lost in them.
- Learning how things really work behind the scenes, out of innate curiosity and wonder at the world and its people.
All of this implies a constant search for truth. Truth is what actually happened. And in the universe, only one chain of events actually happened. No human being can know absolute truth because our perception is limited, but in the attempt to get as close as possible to that truth, that is how you live while making your world a slightly better place every day.