In the early 2000’s, my older brother’s phone kiosk career was brought to an abrupt halt when he decided to take his talents for repairing Nokia N-Gages to the big leagues and attend university on an Electrical Engineering scholarship. While devastating to see him leave home, he would be leaving me with the keys to the kingdom. “The kingdom” was a chestnut wooden drawer, simple, forgettable. He’d chosen it for that reason. Inside sat his sprawling collection of T-M rated PlayStation 1 games that our pops prohibited him from taking to school, thinking he would squander his opportunity by “playing that damn ‘Fighting Fantasy’ the whole time.”
However, the allure of his gaming collection was quickly eclipsed once he returned for Christmas Break with the same military steamer chest our father had purchased for him to transport his toiletries and expensive FUBU Jerseys across the country. This time those same items had now become packing peanuts for a more valuable treasure, gaming computer components. There he sat on our shared floor, eyeing these cryptic elements of metal and silicon. In response, I’d ask if he needed help before being waved off, telling me that I could play anything from his drawer as long as I left him alone to focus. That answer soiled the magic of his collection, because I knew whatever he was doing with those parts would eventually be cooler than anything I had ever seen.
Then one day it appeared. Arriving in a box the size of a mini-fridge with the sales pitch “Perfect Symmetry“ inscribed across its cardboard cradle, held the mortal shell which the parts would occupy.
In a manner akin to proficient obstetricians removing a trembling father-to-be, I was displaced from the room while the machine was delivered by the hands of its sole creator. The hallway became an operating theater. My brother loomed over its stark shadow as it ROARED into life and captured me in its RGB glow.
I was in love.
Formative as the experience was, I couldn’t comprehend why the assembly mattered. In the following days, friends and associates of my brother traveled to bask in the glow of the machine. They arrived bearing compliments and covetous critiques concerning its opulence. Finally it clicked, as he launched Crysis, just to watch their eyes bulge and send his ego into a full fent fold. This machine was simply an analog for himself. This wasn’t about video games. This was about power. Power that one’s machine could produce. Power that only those in the ‘know‘ could afford. Power that you could impose dominance over others, and by association I felt deserving of that power too! We shared every console before this machine arrived; surely I’d be given the opportunity. With patience this kingdom would be inherited, just like that chestnut drawer.
However, my brother made it clear that a PC was different. A console was a toy to be shared, but a PC’s meaning was held in its name: “PERSONAL.” This PC belonged only to him, because he created it from his will alone. The hours of research, the dollars spent, all to watch as prestigious developers’ pixel-perfect ambitions were thrown upon his altar of chrome and silicon to be slaughtered like sacrificial lambs. I had not paid the price, and therefore I could not enter the sanctum. The rules from there on were simple: “Do not touch what you cannot afford, broke boi.”
Flash forward a couple years later, and my parents gifted me a simple COMPAQ, on the grounds I’d only use it for school-related projects. No more than a week later, I had disassembled it, mimicking the movements of my brother years prior. My ego deluded me into thinking that if I could reassemble the machine, then it would be mine. I would have built it, and therefore it was of my own flesh. When I inevitably broke it, I begged my brother to come home and help me rebuild before our parents found out. He returned home that same week. This time I remained in the room, following the surgeon’s every move, soaking in the knowledge and converting it to skill. With a snap of the case, he finished the Compaq and issued me a warning:
“Stop trying so hard to be like me.”
I disassembled it again a week later and got it running with zero issues. The screen flashed alive, but there was no roar. No thunder. No RGB glow that captured me the way his machine had. I had followed the ritual step for step and somehow felt further away from my goal than when I began. There was nothing “PERSONAL“ about it.
The culture surrounding PC Gaming had always weirded me out. It bred barbarous elitism into every faculty of its being. From insults disguised as advertisements to power fantasy component packaging, the culture personified disgruntled nerds ego-tripping. In a space where gaming was perceived by the general public as a hobby reserved for basement dwellers and piss pamper babies, PC Gamers envisioned themselves as blood sport prize fighters, because the underlying idea of their hobby was power.
Not that Nintendo Now You’re Playing with Power™ bullshit, but real neanderthal chest pounding power! These PCs were capable of rendering life-like simulations of cybernetic conspiracy mysteries, alien research facility murder, and pixelated boobies all while shotgunning demons back into hell. The general public didn’t envy these adventures, so PC culture sold you on the mantra of freedom. Freedom to be or do anything you wanted on a platform that was yours, IF you had the power, and anyone asking you why you needed it wasn’t worthy of joining the club.
Sadly, the summer my friends put me on to World of Warcraft, I learned exactly the limitations of my computer’s power.
The machine coulda handled training grounds filled with boars, but put more than four players on the screen, and my FPS dropped into a slideshow. One night my guild summoned me into a capital city and the whole screen turned into a smeared wall of banners, mounts, and screen names. Every time a group ran past me, the game died. CRASHED TO DESKTOP. My character sat trapped in that city for three days, crashing on login, until I figured out a solution. If I signed on at three in the morning when the servers thinned out, I could walk myself outta the city to my freedom.
I returned online only to discover I had been kicked from the guild. My system had been a burden to them for far too long. I left WoW that same summer.
The exclusion rapidly evolved into pessimism. Personally, it was fucking pathetic that anyone could be arrogant about a dumbass metal box that played Counter-Strike better. But the feeling doubled down when the term “PC Master Race“ hit the scene. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (who still sits in my pantheon of gaming writers I wanna be when I grow up) coined the term as a joke mocking the elitism occurring in the PC gaming scene at the time while reviewing the PC-exclusive masterpiece “The Witcher.”
Like moths to a god damn flame, PC gamers dog-piled into a frenzy, crowning themselves with a title finally fit for their power-hungry prize-fighting personalities. They re-framed the insult as glorious ascension. Their dogma could single-handedly illuminate your eyes to smoother frames per second and anoint you with the knowledge that gaming this free was the only gaming worth doing. But it wasn’t freedom; it was justification for their membership-like mentality, and that would never fit with who I was.
So I let it go. All of it. The freedom, the power, the whole glorious ascension. Because if that’s what freedom looked like, a bunch of grown men in a LAN party deciding who was worthy of a hobby, then I’d rather be a stupid peasant having fun.
When I laid my computer aspirations to rest, I copped the 7th generation of consoles. These home consoles were nothing like their predecessors; they housed the games everybody needed to play, with the features that were once walled off from users outside of PCs. Finally, console gaming was IN and PC gaming was OUT! A generational line blurred with the only differences being the graphical fidelity, which nobody was giving a fuck about. My outlook on gaming culture shifted from care to convenience, finding anyone who combed trivial tech spec details lame as fuck. I was too busy playing classics and experiencing multiplayer shooters with my homies. Who cared if the grass swayed realistically on my brother’s gaming PC. I was living it up with what mattered most: the games, which blinded me to the digital ecosystem quicksand I was unknowingly wading into.
First came the online subscription model. Microsoft demanded a price on top of your broadband bill to 1v1 anyone in Modern Warfare, with Sony following up hastily with their own monthly fee. If you wanted to play online, you were paying a tax on your own console. I paid. Everyone paid. It was normal. Then came the day-one patches. You’d walk out of the store with a Blu-ray in your hands, only to arrive home to a 40GB download. The physical disc was a placeholder. The real game lived somewhere in Sony’s walled server, and when that server went down, theoretically, so could your library. But that could never happen. Nobody could take a game away from you.
Then came the Delistings. Kojima and Del Toro’s P.T. got pulled from the PlayStation Store forever. If you hadn’t downloaded it before the takedown, you’d never play it. Being a Kojima shill, I had it installed, and every day I didn’t boot it up was a day I prayed Sony wouldn’t reach through my console and rip it back. I started to feel less and less like this console was mine. But I ignored all of it, and I kept playing. My friends, the games, the ritual of owning a console was all worth it, because it just felt normal, which is exactly why I missed the exit when it appeared.
Late into my college years, my homie was moving out of his place after a particularly messy fight with his deadbeat roommate. He offered me the roommate’s gaming PC for “free” as revenge for skipping out on rent to finance it, and hiding it away in their basement so as not to draw attention to where his money was really going. He said, “You’re probably the only motherfucker who would know what to do with it, you always talkin’ bout computers anyway, I got a PS4, I don’t need that shit, and his bitch ass don’t either.” Solemnly, I stared at this machine and knew what it must have meant to that guy. Even though I never liked him either, that machine was crafted PERSONALLY for his dipshit deadbeat dick-head ass, and not me. I declined and, with a heavy heart, parroted the same sentiment back to him, “Nah, I’m good. I got a PS4 bro. I don’t need that shit either.”
I carried that sentiment up til the day lightning struck my crib and, in turn, killed my PS4. With no console, for the first time in my life, and no access to my favorite hobby, I gave up, and I started scraping together cash.
It was finally my time to make things PERSONAL.
I hadn’t looked at the PC space in a decade, and if I was going to build something to escape the console ecosystem, I needed to learn their old tongue. So I braced myself and body-slammed my YouTube algorithm into tech reviews. Airflow optimization, thermal comparisons, manufacturer interviews, Computex coverage, GPU FURMARK testing, and overclocking techniques all became my life’s work until nothing was foreign. To my surprise, there was no one there to converse with me.
Somewhere in that decade, the 7th gen consoles cracked the market wide open, sending Triple A titles straight into the hands of peasants first and leaving PC Gamers to accept being served second. It shook the old elitism gods outta their RGB towers and abracadabra’ed them into disenfranchised veterans mucking around gas station parking lots trading war stories for Bawls energy drinks. There was no sanctum left to talk my way into. I had learned a dead language to enter a kingdom that had already fallen.
At any moment, I could drop the knowledge of “my dream build” on a Micro Center employee’s head while watching my wife, who came in only for screen wipes, eye roll SO HARD you’d think she’d gone catatonic. Finally, every part arrived, and that old surgical precision I committed to skill back in my early teens sent me into a whirlwind of determination. I spent two nights crawling across my basement floor assembling the machine that I’d soon go on to name “Tachikoma” after removing a spiderling that found its way into the machine right before I completed the build.
At the slightest touch of its power button, Tachikoma ROARED into life at speeds that wiped the memory of witnessing my brother’s first startup. I couldn’t believe it; it was here, and it was all mine. The machine defaulted everything to ULTRA graphical settings, macerated load screens, and overclocked with ease. Yet, I needed more lambs for the altar; I finally had the POWER, so I demanded nothing less than prestige and performance. Unfortunately, within a month, there were no more benchmarks to complete, no more games to test. I thought, this couldn’t be it, right? A machine engineered to spit in the face of pixel perfection, and my reward for this personal instrument of pride was a feeling of emptiness?
Then it hit me. All this time I was using the console ecosystem issues as an excuse for something deeper. Tachikoma was PERSONAL the way a mirror is personal. It was ME down to its specialized thermal paste. A reflection of my pride, designed to settle a vendetta with my younger self for being kept out of a hobby I wanted to belong in. Somehow I had lost the plot of building a system to escape an ecosystem so fuckin’ hard, only to realize I had been running from my hurt ego for years, and when I finally stopped to catch my breath, those words came to find me.
“Stop trying so hard to be like me.”
It took almost fifteen years of static, but my brain finally tuned into the signal. My brother wasn't protecting his ego. He was warning me not to let mine fall into the machine.
The following week I phoned up my brother in an effort to reckon with a year-long spiral into arrogance. Between reminiscing and mocking 2000s PC gaming culture, he dropped another gem of wisdom that felt like a sucker punch.
“The first PC you build is for everybody else. The next one is what you really want.”
This one didn’t need time to settle in. Rather than building MY next PC, I would use everything I learned to help others build the machine they needed to leave consoles behind.
When my cousin and my homies came to me convinced they couldn’t build PCs because the top-tier graphics cards were $5K, I laughed because the old PC gods’ siren songs had fooled a new generation. Yes, the ‘RAM-Apocalypse’ and ‘SSD-Doomsdays’ have hit the market harder than the GPU bitcoin era, but the options are still endless. I told them that most of the guys claiming a 5090 ain’t got one, and the ones who do are about seventy-two hours from a house fire.
I taught them how to track parts and how not to get robbed on price. What frame times actually mean versus what a YouTube thumbnail tells you they mean. That air cooling is fine, that liquid cooling is fine, that nobody’s checking. What to do when it doesn’t post and the panic sets in. How to dual boot Linux, because a machine that only answers to Windows isn’t an escape, it’s a nicer cell. That your build doesn’t need the flamboyance, as long as it doesn’t burst into flames. Then I spoke blasphemy and told them it’s fine to buy a pre-built and customize from there; it’s all just software and buttons. That’s it. That’s the whole secret the culture spent thirty years dressing up in chrome and dialect. Everything in that box can be repaired, replaced, or altered, ON YOUR TIME SCHEDULE.
When their machines roared to life, I watched their faces catch that same RGB glow that got me in a hallway years ago. These machines were intentional, not representations of ego or luxury, but crafted by them, for them alone.
Watching them move through the space now, I can finally see it: ascension was always the trap. The whole elitism will always be a couple of dudes standing in a doorway to a building with multiple entrances, but the second you put your hands on any of the parts, that’s your door. No matter how you enter, one thing is clear:
Once you’re in, never forget you were once outside, so keep those doors open.
Thank you for allowing me to come clean to you all, and yes, I will help you build your next PC if you let me. Love all y’all. Stay Silly. - BPM++ (Yes, That’s two pluses)
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