My story is going to be different from the lot of you. I had no NES, I had no arcades.
This is a confession - I may not be as hardcore or retro as the rest of you. I have never taped music from awesome Final Fantasy scenes, nor have I imagined lyrics to Zelda flute tunes. I have however, learned english by obsessively playing a videogame.

I hail from a rather conservative family. Daddy worked, mommy cooked, I played.
I played with LEGO, mind you. Around this time (when I was about 6, in 1994) I had never even heard of videogames. Growing up in a rural dutch village is like growing up in a different world entirely. I did not miss videogames, because I did not know they existed. I made up my own games, mostly.

I do not recall much from my early youth, but I remember this:
One day, the boy next door came to me with a wonderful contraption his dad had scored. It was an IBM notebook (atleast, I think it was IBM) and we immediately started fiddling around with it. He showed me how to manouvre through the memory and I was truly fascinated. Within no time I picked up all the commands I needed to know. I had mastered the system with complex commands such as "cd C:\" and "dir". Little did I know, this was the simplest challenge yet.

I was just about to lose interest when my companion tactfully revealed a floppy disc to me. There it was; the first game I have ever played. It was... it was... I don't know what exactly it was. An adventure game, that is what it was. There were graphical representations of the landscape, and you constantly had to type in where to move, what to examine and what objects to use. All in english. Yikes.
Ordinarily I would not have learned english until I was 12. Suffice it to say that this was a rather difficult game for me. Moving around the map was my first discovery, after spending a couple hours trying countless commands at the starting position. Soon therafter, I picked up words like "Open", "Üse" and "Examine", which I used in combination with practially every english word I knew.

I distinctly remember standing infront of a fence, typing in "Open Door" a hundred times over. I remember it so clearly, because I got stuck for a long, long time at that point in the game. I was stuck until I finally discovered the word "Gate". Then I entered a cave, and got stuck again. Mind you, that this is only 3 minutes into the game. I've never gotten further than that, even though I have spend many many hours of my childhood behind that incredibly old notebook.

I had a great time though.

The following year I became aware of the existence of the Playstation, which my parents lovingly purchased for me when it came out (presumably to stop me from nagging their ears off)

Ever since then, I have looked everywhere for that graphic adventure game. Never found it. I reckon it was very obscure. My descriptions may be hardly helpful, but if you have any idea what game this might maybe possibly be, do tell. It was a monochrome game, I should add.

PS: No neighbors were harmed during the creation of this childhood. The dad from the boy next door was a nice man and had no problem with me playing games with his machine, on his attic. No sexual innuendo intended.