Daniel

The Game Boy and the Game Gear came first, and I played them the way most kids play things — by pressing buttons until something worked. The manuals came in the box and mostly stayed there.

That changed with the Super Nintendo. I was twelve, Nintendo Power was turning up in the post, and somewhere in there reading the manual on the way home became part of getting a new game. By the time we pulled into the driveway I usually knew what every item did. That is probably the earliest version of this website — a kid in the back seat building a mental model before the cartridge was even out of the bag.

Star Fox is the one I remember understanding rather than just playing, and Mario Paint is the one that taught me a game could be a toy you build in. Mario, in one form or another, has been on every machine I have owned since. A Game Boy Color, a Game Boy Advance, an Advance SP and a DS ran alongside the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube, so there was almost always something in a pocket as well as something under the TV.

Then Nintendo largely disappeared from my living room. I skipped the Wii U and most of the Switch generation, and there was no dramatic reason for it — life simply filled up.

Gaming came back with kids of my own, and it came back much bigger. We bought a Switch in autumn 2025 and a Switch 2 in 2026, and suddenly I was the person in the room being asked what a stat meant again. It turns out that the twelve-year-old with the manual never really went anywhere; he just needed somebody to explain things to.

I still approach games the way I approached those manuals. I want to know what everything means, and I want to understand the rulebook well enough to make my own decisions — I would rather lose a battle I understood than win one somebody else planned for me.

Dad Save Point is where I keep those answers. It is my memory, my strategy notebook, my completion aid, my play journal, a bit of family gaming history, and a reference guide — in that order.