Ars goes back to school: The video games that threatened our college GPA

Enlarge / A photographer's approximation of what LAN party life was like for Ars Technica staffers in the CRT monitor era. (credit: Getty Images)

With Labor Day out of the way, school is afoot here for most high school and college kids in the States-and that, of course, means procrastination by way of gaming. Ars Technica's staff knows a thing or two about putting off important work by using video or board games as an excuse (let alone the times we make work out of our favorite games), so we used the latest school year as an excuse to recall our favorite risking-our-GPA memories.

Our staff runs a pretty wide gamut of ages and gaming proclivities, so this list includes a nice variety, but it's incomplete without your contributions. Enjoy our stories for inspiration, then take to the comments and let us know how you juggled your favorite gaming addictions between classes.

My job ate my homework

I managed to turn video gaming into a job at a young age, as I wrote for a daily newspaper's gaming column through much of my high school and college career. The game that got closest to wrecking my high school GPA was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which arrived at my home a few weeks before its retail launch. A tight review-draft deadline for the holiday's biggest game left me scrambling to juggle entry-level calculus, a high school newspaper editorship, and a proper rumination on Link's open-world, time-travel journey from boyhood to manhood. (Way to drop a classic before a bunch of pre-Thanksgiving tests and papers, Miyamoto-san.)

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