Once we saw this tale of a bizarre parenting experiment, we had to share it with you – it really is quite something.

Andy Baio’s son Eliot was born in 2004, and the new father had plans to perform very strange long-form experiments on his child. While these were eventually shot down by his wife, he did manage to get away with one – making his son grow through gaming’s formative years during his own. Little Eliot was started off with a Pac-Man plug and play unit on his fourth birthday, and over the next five years received the NES, SNES, N64 and PlayStation 2.

The biggest effects are that the young retro gamer grew up with an appreciation of gameplay over visuals, and also became incredibly good at games. He’s gained a real taste for brutally difficult roguelikes, interestingly. We won’t spoil it too much as it really is a good read, so click the link above to see the full story.

If you’re into the weirder side of retro gaming, you can still pick up a copy of issue 131 of Retro Gamer, in which we interviewed marathon gamers about their ability to play games for two to three days without breaks and discovered stories of third kidneys and more.