Tom Johnson was a teenaged congressional intern in the summer of 2007 when he was sitting in the Mankato office of U.S. Rep. Tim Walz. The newly elected congressman, Johnson recalled, walked in carrying a box that held a gray-and-orange video game system, with two controllers.

“He was like, ‘Hey, if you guys are interested in this, you can use it, otherwise I’m just going to give it away,’” Johnson recalled.

Inside the disc drive, Johnson found the Dreamcast’s signature game, “Crazy Taxi.” He brought the console home and played it with his college roommate Alex Gaterud, who had the future Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate as his 11th-grade geography teacher at Mankato West High School.

“It seemed like he was a lot closer to us culturally than a lot of our teachers were, so it wouldn’t surprise me that he did some gaming,” Gaterud said.

Now thrust into the national spotlight as Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ running mate, Walz’s past is resurfacing in manners both positive and negative. That includes his time as a video gamer. One former player told the New York Times that Walz once told a group of athletes that he had become so obsessed with playing the Dreamcast that his wife took it away.

The Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Intriguingly, Walz didn’t play a popular console like the Sony PlayStation 2 or the Nintendo 64. The Dreamcast was a financial flop in its time but would later develop cult cachet among gamers for its library of quirky titles like “Crazy Taxi,” the roller-skating graffiti game “Jet Set Radio” and the “Sonic Adventure” series.

So what happened to Walz’s Dreamcast?

Johnson passed it on to Gaterud, who in 2012 sold it on Craigslist to Plymouth resident Bryn Tanner for $25 — far below the $199 original retail price. The listing noted that it previously belonged to a congressman.

Soon after Harris picked Walz as her running mate, Tanner made a TikTok video where he took selfies with the Dreamcast. He volunteered to return it to Walz, adding that the system “still runs like a Dream ... cast.”

“KamalaHQ, if the governor wants to relive some precious memories, tell him my door is always open,” said Tanner, who’s 33.

Tanner told the Minnesota Star Tribune that it’s now a running joke with his friends that he only wants Harris to win so that he can say he owns the vice president’s video game system.

“Not that that was the only reason. It definitely was one, though,” Tanner said.

Tanner said he sees parallels between the obscure Dreamcast and Walz’s sudden rise from relative obscurity to the national political stage.

“I think that really grounds him,” said Tanner, who is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Albino Squirrel Productions. “I think it’s sort of the specificity of it that really gets me. The fact that it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, my wife took away my video game,’ because that could be anything. It was the Dreamcast. It was this kind of underrated flash in the pan.”

Tanner showed off the Dreamcast at Minnesota’s gaming convention 2D Con last weekend after his theater company performed his original Super Mario Bros. parody musical titled, “It’s-a-Me: A Mario Musical.”

Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA, posted on X that he finds it sad that Walz may have been playing the Dreamcast obsessively as an adult.

“Tim Walz was so addicted to the Sega Dreamcast that his wife had to unplug it and hide it away,” Kirk wrote. “This is reported as a fun, relatable story, but doesn’t anybody else find a 35-year-old man getting that addicted to video games a little sad? Or, dare I say it, weird?”

Tanner groaned about the critique, saying, “Who cares what you do in your downtime.”

Johnson and Gaterud said they never spoke to Walz about video games. But as he began his campaign for the U.S. House, Walz developed support from a group of West Mankato gamers who referred to themselves as the Nerd Herd. The group held video game parties, built computers, and were interested in politics as high-schoolers. Photos provided by Johnson show several members of the Nerd Herd walking in a parade with Walz.

As video games have achieved dominance in popular culture, U.S. presidents have done some gaming. Barack Obama once played “Super Smash Bros.” with a young man to fulfill a Make-A-Wish request. George W. Bush was given a Nintendo DS for his 60th birthday, along with a game called “Brain Age.” Never reported is whether he played it.

“It’s not just this idea anymore of, ‘Oh, it’s like the arcade, and the kids play it,” Johnson said. “I think it’s interesting to see presidents or former presidents start to play it.”