Justin Amirkhani

Back in the early parts of winter 2005 I was in high school and starting to get more and more drawn into the video game subculture. I’d always played games and enjoyed them, but I had never interacted with the community that surrounds games at large. There were friends I’d play with regularly, but it was a small group that existed in between the rest of life; video games were not yet a defining element of my social and professional life.

At the time, Microsoft was preparing for the launch of the Xbox 360 and social media was beginning to take shape. After the success of the ilovebees alternate-reality game for Halo 2′s launch, the marketing folks started experimenting with something similar for the console launch. Messages were sent out to be decoded into GPS coordinates where folks could go and find invites to a hidden storefront where the system would be playable well before release.

I don’t remember exactly how I came across them, but after deciphering the messages and finding the location I forced my dad to pack my brother and I in the car and head downtown. We parked just outside the Much Music building and started looking scanning the area for clues to where the invites were hidden. While my brother and I froze our fingers looking at every sign, billboard and scrap paper at the intersection, my father — who’s much more clever than I — simply walked up to the nearest homeless man and asked him.

It turns out the legless beggar sitting outside the convenience store on the north-east corner didn’t have too many places to go and had watched the whole thing unfold as the Microsoft folk came, hid their tickets and people came looking. None of the dozen or so people he saw looking all over the place had thought to ask him, which once again goes to show how much smarter my dad is than the average bear. He pointed out exactly where we should go and he was spot on. We gave him a little something for his trouble and headed on our merry way.

The invite got me into the storefront, where they had tournaments playing Perfect Dark Zero. While I’ll never be the best at a game once it’s released, I have an incredible knack for picking up mechanics very quickly which has always given me an advantage when I’m facing people in a new game. With the scoreboard dominated, I won some swag and an invite to the official launch party which would be the gateway drug to my current professional career.

You can look at life and blame a million things for any one outcome if you want to go back far enough, but it’s surprising how many times my personal history has been punctuated with odd anecdotes. Sure, there were plenty of other factors involved in how that story ended, but it’s perplexing and a little humbling to think that without that legless homeless man I might not be the video game journalist I am today.