Funny childhood stories from Chinese gamers

Chinese gaming site 17173 does a lot of nostalgia-related cultural features, and most of them aren’t worth your time unless you are yourself a Chinese gamer who grew up in the same era as most of the site’s readers. But yesterday the site ran a collection of childhood gaming stories from Chinese gamers that’s pretty funny, and I’ve picked three of these stories that I think gamers everywhere can probably relate to.

What follows are (loose) translations of those three stories.

The unbeatable boss

Back when I was playing Xuan-Yuan Sword, I ran into a boss I just couldn’t beat, no matter what I did. I would just die immediately, black screen, and so I’d reload the game and try again, but I still couldn’t beat him. There was nothing I could do.

So I went into the game itself and game myself more experience and more gold, so much experience and gold that the numbers were too long to be displayed on the screen in-game! But dammit, I still couldn’t beat him!

However, because I had so much gold he couldn’t beat me either, and we were locked in a struggle for several hours before I gave up, let myself die, black screen…and then my character came back to life automatically. It turned out my character’s defeat was a plot point, and the boss was invincible.

How a fire got me in trouble for gaming

In high school I often skipped the self-study class, and instead went to the internet cafe to play. One night at around nine I left the cafe and was preparing to head home with a clear conscience, pretending I had been at class. A building near the internet cafe was on fire, though, and the firefighters had come to put it out.

The local TV news station, which never had any actual news to talk about, also came to do a live broadcast…and dumbass me didn’t pay attention to where the cameras were. The result? The next day, I was broadcast on the local TV news. And my mom was in the habit of watching the local news every day….you know what happened next…

In trouble with the teacher

In junior high, I remember secretly heading with some classmates to the local arcade to play Cadillacs and Dinosaurs during some time off. But some other students told on us, and our teacher came to the arcade. We didn’t know it, but our teacher, who was a thirty-year old man, was standing behind us watching us as we played.

We were doing quite poorly, and when the teacher put his hand on my shoulder I turned around and very nearly wet myself. But instead of yelling at us, he commanded: “Get out of the way! Give me a coin and let me play.” He got all the way to the final boss, and although he didn’t beat it, he definitely blew our minds.

If you can read Chinese, there are more stories like this on 17173. Several of them have to do with another “theme” that gamers may remember from their youths: trying to figure out how to make the characters in the game naked.