I was 15 years old when I first started thinking about trying out something new when it came to video games. I had always been the kid secretly playing pokemon in class. I didn’t plan to be that kid but it was in my genes; my father was born 2 years after Pong had been released. While he was still a child, his father bought an Atari for him on his birthday. Later on, that had led to him buying me a Playstation 2 on my 11th birthday.

It really didn’t occur to me that my collection of games was very…”limited” until a close friend introduced me to a new world. At the time I had finished the campaign for all of the Call of Duty games that were available.I was bored with everything because I had nothing to really do since I beat almost all of my games, so I looked up some games online. Warframe started to become the only thing I saw whenever I would scroll down. I became intrigued with this since I’ve never heard of it before so I called a friend about it. Once I asked him, “What is Warframe, dude?” he just sank into silence and then hung up on me. I was surprised, usually I’m the one that would hang up out of nowhere. While I was being befuddled he texted me a link and sent me the message of “You better watch it to the end or I’m blocking your number.”

So like the good child I was, I opened the link and watched the video. The moment I finished watching that video I just sat on my bed stunned. I was broken from my trance because my phone had rung. I looked at the screen and it said my friends name so I answered as quickly as possible and yelled, “JESUS H. CHRIST!! What was that video you sent me?!” I could hear laughter on the other side. He responded with, “That, my friend, is Warframe.” I was just speechless; how could something that's Free-to-play be so smooth and full of action?

Later on that day I installed Warframe mainly because I couldn’t believe what my friend had showed me. The game finished installing so I started it up. The login screen was of a character called Excalibur. It was pretty smooth so I thought they just put a gif as the loading screen, then they smoothed out the shading on Excalibur and added a shadow for dramatic effect. The loading screen had finally vanished and the game started.

The first five hours of me playing the game was absolutely hilarious now that I look back at it. I had tried so many things to just stay alive in missions and that caused me to forget about the objective. My friend asked me if he wanted to team up for a mission because he had wanted to show me the ropes around the game. I agreed just because I was practically having trouble just trying to jump. Once we both loaded into the mission I noticed his character looked so beautiful. The coloring was very bright, the shadow effect was surprisingly matching his bright colors somehow and his weapons were matching his main armor color set. I was so amazed by just the colors so I asked him if I could do that to my own character one day. He just laughed and then said, “Yeah, anyone can do FashionFrame.”

I spent the next week just coloring my characters. I hadn’t even really done any missions because all I did was color and show off my fashion to my friends.

One day my friend had finally gotten tired of me just getting fashioning my characters so he dragged me on to a special mission called a Sortie. The mission required a team of players to assassinate an enemy called Vey Hek. I had heard rumors of a Vey Hek through the chatting channels. He was a man that had a BIG machine body, four weird mantis like arms and a small head. I didn’t believe the rumors because nothing can be described as that ugly but oh how I was wrong.

My team and I had spent over 2 hours just trying to get to Vey Hek. There were enemies in every direction so we couldn’t really do anything. At that moment I remembered a technique called “Turtling” since I learned it from a game I beat before; the technique was called Turtling because the player (the turtle) would have to take all the damage from all of the enemies (getting hit on the shell). I presented the idea to my teammates and they all agreed but none of them wanted to be the turtle. In the end of our discussion we voted the only healer in our group to become the turtle. That was a decision I regret to this very day.

After we made it past all of the enemies with the only casualty on our side was the healer. We finally saw traces of Vay Hek but out of nowhere the ground in the game started to shake. I never knew what people meant when they said Vey Hek had a BIG machine body but at that moment I learned my greatest fear is big, fat robot people. My team had scurried about trying to hide from Vay Hek.

My team had scrambled to all different kinds of placed while I was the only one face to face with Vey Hek. I had never felt so afraid in my life so I reacted based off of instinct. I ran against a wall.

I didn’t really know why but Vey Hek decided that I’d be a tasty lunch so he started to run after me. I start to go mach 5 while running towards this because I do not want to fight this humongous beast. I finally impact against the wall and Vey Hek finally was close enough to take me out.Then out of nowhere, my screen went white.. I don’t know what happened but my screen just started to shake and turn white. After 5 or 6 minutes the brightness finally died down and that’s when I saw it. There was Mission Complete at the top of my screen.

That’s when it hit me. I had made the boss hit a “Invisible Wall”. A Invisible Wall” is the barrier between playable areas and locked areas and if you try to go past them forcibly then whoever/whatever touched it will die. I never knew that being a coward would help me in such a situation. Usually, whenever I played a game I’d try and make the boss hit an invisible wall but I never expected my knowledge of old video games would help me in something completely new.

Throughout the special mission, I had used skills I thought I would never use again but nothing truly changes. I learned that everything you've ever learnt will come back and help you in some type of way.