HOUSTON, TX - In a long-winded rant over the weekend, local man Lee Carter grumpily told his kids about the good old days when he had to play his own video games instead of watching other people play them on the internet.
The rant was triggered as one of his sons excitedly opened up YouTube to see DanTDM's latest Minecraft video.
"You know, son," Carter said, shaking his fist, "in my day, we played our own video games. We didn't have Dave DTM or Catty Stamp to play them for us. We played Super Mario Bros. 3 over and over again because we only had one hand-me-down NES with, like, three games."
Carter also told his son about how he couldn't just google the solution to a level. "Do you know how we found out about the Warp Whistle in World 1-3? We crouched on every block in the entire game until we figured out you could fall behind the background and run to the end of the level. We didn't have no 'game guides' or 'walkthroughs' or these newfangled 'let's plays.' We fought each other to be the first player and then tried to beat ridiculously hard games for thousands of hours, and we liked it."
The man also said he and his friends would figure out cheat codes via trial and error, or else you'd scribble down cheat codes from a magazine at the store and bring the scraps of paper home to try them only to find out they don't work. "I tell you what boy, when we were trying to beat Ghosts 'n Goblins, we didn't have no sissy Creative Mode we could switch on. We played it til our fingers bled, the way God intended."
When his son pointed out how maybe those old games were just badly designed, Carter launched into a whole new rant about how those were "the good old days of game design" and how modern games are terrible.
At publishing time, the man was still ranting about how he beat Super Mario World "uphill in the snow both ways" long after his kids had moved into another room to watch DanTDM in peace.