Everything I’ve been writing recently has been really heavy and emotional and I need to work on something a bit lighter. Somehow though I’ve managed to pick something that still leans into the dark, gothic, and dour. Alas, what can one do? No matter, it’s nice to not write about the complicated things. In no particular order these are what come to mind when I think of my top five favorite games ever. I’ll add a bit of justification, gushing, and some criticism where necessary.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
My fascination with SotN started watching my older cousins play through it at their home, and eventually I was allowed to borrow it and play for myself. It quickly became one of my favorites. No game before had combined all of it’s elements so smoothly for me. The music is nigh perfect, the UI is spectacular, SFX are spot on, and the graphics sell the whole gothic package with gameplay that rewards exploration and experimentation. It is truly a masterpiece in my eyes. I’ve probably completed it over a dozen times across multiple platforms, and is first on my list of things I wish I could experience for the first time again. It’s biggest downfalls are that it’s incomplete and can be way too easy without self-imposed restrictions.
Dark Souls
I once described this as 3-Dimensional Symphony of the Night, and I stand by that. While tonally there’s a huge difference, the gameplay expectations are actually pretty similar. Explore, fight, experiment, and improve. It has one of the most interesting game worlds I’ve visited and easily one of my favorite combat systems. While the music is understated and more ambient, nothing compares to hearing the Fire Link Shrine theme, or struggling through a difficult section and hearing the burst of flame from an ignited bonfire. Whether remastered or not very little compares to Dark Souls 1, not 2, 3, Elden Ring, Sekiro, or Bloodborne. I’d include Demon’s Souls but I haven’t played enough to comment.
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
While I could’ve put KotOR 1 on this list, the gameplay opportunities and writing make this a better replay for me. Character builds are a lot more loose allowing for some weird but satisfying approaches to breaking the game in your favor. Not to mention the characters’ and their writing is just some of the best, with nuances according to player choices. One could probably write a book on Kreia’s philosophy alone.
Vampire – the Masquerade: Bloodlines
No other game has made me feel like I was in a different world more than VtMB. From the music and ambience to all the different characters you interact with and the different places you can go. Not to mention that the first time I finished a play through of this I was in the LA area. It certainly has it’s weakpoints particularly it’s lack of polish and bugginess but when I want to live in a dreary rain-soaked slice of southern California replete with Vampires, Ghosts, and Werewolves only one thing satisfies.
The Elder Scroll V: Skyrim
I considered cutting my list to just four entries or putting something else here entirely like Fallout: New Vegas but Skyrim, despite it’s action-focused-not-as-much-of-an-RPG slant, does something no other game does. Like VtMB, Skyrim takes me to another world but unlike VtMB this one isn’t gloomy and gothic, but fantastical and fun. There’s a broad palette in Skyrim including gloom but the idea of living in a fantasy world of sword & sorcery has never been so fully realized as it has in Skyrim. Like all games it has it’s issues but what it does right, it does so more than anything else.
If you walk into my house, it won’t be long before you notice the giant “shrine” of video games and paraphernalia. Comprised of several bookshelves (now just one) full within and without, even an uninterested observer could recognize the time and money on display. Not to reduce my collection to monetary value but only to explain what maybe a next thought would be: “That’s a lot of time and money for games.” or “So much effort for just children’s’ toys.”
In reality this isn’t too far from truth though it overlooks any deeper purpose at present. Such a collection has seeds in childish wishes but in mature hands can become more than just a sea of escapist nostalgia. Nostalgia’s historical meaning of “homesickness” reveals its painful implication that the pure feelings of that “home” in your memory no longer exists. That memory which tugs at the mind and heart is an idolized representation of some other time or place which exists exclusively in your mind. Philosophical drivel aside the importance is that the shrine is not to video games, but to my video games. Many people have played Super Mario 64 but we all will have our own unique experiences with it. Each one a catalogue of memories and feelings hidden behind the star-emblazoned door. So my copy of SM64 may not be the exact physical copy I grew up with but going back into the game I remember playing in my brother’s room on a diminutive CRT which fit on a milk crate. He had a suspended bunk bed and had the TV under it making for a rather cave-like setting. I couldn’t tell you the color of the wall, how it smelled, how I felt that day or what my brother looked like then, but I remember talking to him about SM64. I remember watching him do everything I couldn’t and then trying later. I remember seeing him progress through the game and show me places I’d never make it to on my own. All these memories and more exist in my head but in my collection, they can have a tangible totem.
There’re not only the totems which take something’s place there’s also the true relics like my 5th anniversary collection of Devil May Cry’s first trilogy. There’s nothing intrinsically interesting about it, however it’s the exact collection I bought as the first rated M game I could legally buy. A certain freeing action that was one of many on my road to free expression as a legal adult. It too also has other memories like how a friend, and I took turns beating the games over two days completing them once for DMC one (my first playthrough), then twice for two, and four times for three (because it’s so good). Ok so memories, totems, relics, nostalgia, and it all blends into a quasi-religious appreciation of yesterdays. For some. I don’t idolize the games in that way. What I see is a fulfilled childhood achieved partly through these specific material means. Where I was able to develop this nostalgia because the games I played were in vogue. Those who come after me won’t have the same context when playing them, but I can infuse my shrine with the ability to hopefully help set the contextualizing mood I had when I played them. It is here in this idea the true purpose starts to come into focus. The preserved packaging and manuals helping someone who isn’t me see something they didn’t have, in what I did have. To others some feeling, and information is meant to be given. So, a shrine this is not but rather a museum. A container for my nostalgia to take on a crystallized form and express itself to no one in particular.
Perhaps I was just in the right frame of mind, but I was reflecting on how over-exposed I allow myself to be to those things I enjoy. For as long I can remember I’d played video games nearly every day usually much more than I should have. This also extends to film, TV or music. While games require participation to function these others do not so I could always fill my time with them even if it’s little more than ambient noise. Thus, over years this became less a conscious choice and more a habit. Having, over the years, indulged in alcohol and seen what happens when over-indulged it made sense to ‘quit’ playing games, watching movies, or listening to music just as I might quit drinking alcohol. By the time I had decided to do this several days had gone by being busy with my daughter, maybe making the choice easier. With my wife out of town for work I became a solo dad and couldn’t afford to indulge. When she came back I could but realized I shouldn’t. That was at the beginning of December and while I now decompress at the end of the day with some TV and listen to music during my morning exercise, I still haven’t played video games.
It’s funny for me to think that this may be the first time I’ve spent so long away from gaming since I was maybe a child. Even in my roughest college semesters putting in 80-hour weeks I found time to play then, but now I don’t. This isn’t going to be an indictment of gaming but an examination of ‘breaking the habit’ of playing and what it’s like, for me.
First and foremost, I’d like to point out my mental and emotional stability is obviously not as stable as one would like but I do try to do better. That said I’d been playing games consistently since I was young, began smoking weed in high school, and began drinking in college. For all that time it might be said I was distracting and self-medicating myself and after a week or two without it my head felt like a room full of people shouting over each other. Once that started the first few days were the worst. My attention was constantly jumping, and I had trouble remembering what I was doing. Breathing exercises, journaling, and keeping a to-do list helped in the beginning (and still does) but after a while instead of maybe 30 voices it was down to three. Then two. Now it’s usually just a single line of thought with occasional interjection. I’ll try to avoid any armchair psychology or speculation but here are my thoughts.
I’m finally growing up. After an extended adolescence through my late 20’s I’ve finally had the self-control and will to try and be an adult…. all the time, as opposed to just when things need to be done. I have a schedule for when I exercise, when and what I eat, and never sit down to rest if there’s ‘easy’ labor to be done around the house. ‘Easy’ labor being started laundry, folding it, running the dishwasher, picking up clothes and other things out of place, etc. Basically, anything that takes less than five minutes of effort. Instead of playing games when I have ‘free’ time it’s now spent reading, writing, and preparing to change jobs. This has revived my passion for stories and writing in general. I did try to write two trashy young adult novels as a middle schooler but gave up because they were dumb and trashy. Now I have a full ten-chapter book planned with world building, character arcs, and historical research in effect. Already I’ve got the first chapter written with editing left to do. While it’s hard to focus sometimes journaling and lists keep me on-track. Not to say I’d left all this labor to my wife previously but now it’s a seamless single-person process to do it all and have it always done every day. I think what this really means is that these addictions I had were crutches I relied on when I needed to face the world but instead found a way to shield myself from it, in them.
At best this may be self-aggrandizing or at worst a self-indictment but by sharing I hope others can turn a critical eye to habits in their life and how those habits affect them both daily and over time. (If a certain Linkin Park song comes to mind while reading, yeah that’s intentional).
This past October my family came to visit and see my newborn daughter who was about three months at the time. While we did spend a lot of time around Zelda, my daughter, they needed some time outside of the house. My wife and I were, and still are, quite house bound as we navigate the difficulties of everyday life with a new little person to care for. Only just recently have we started going out to eat, something my wife really enjoys. In fact, the first time we took the baby to a restaurant was when we met my family at a local Mediterranean spot. All this to say is they needed to do their own things while here as we were/are boring.
My obvious game collection in the living room held a part of family history though, that being the Splinter Cell series on the Original Xbox. What makes this so important is that my father who’s avidly a non-gamer of any kind (board games, card games, etc…) seemed to gravitate to it and beat the first three in a couple of days each. For such a thing to happen, was for my young mind, something to boast. To this day these games are heralded as classic stealth games, requiring patience, awareness, and effective planning. If you don’t have any familiarity with stealth games, they often provide several approaches, violent vs. non-violent, seen vs. unseen. The hardest way to beat them is usually what’s called a ‘ghost’ run where you proceed all the way with zero enemy casualties and always unseen. My father beat all three almost entirely as a ‘ghost’. Not because the game asked him to but because that’s how he wanted to play the game. I don’t think I’d be able to do that personally even with years of gaming experience, and yet he comes in and does because that’s what was fun to him. Obviously, this made a strong impression when I was younger, so when I started collecting, I made sure they made it into my collection. I did so not only because of their status as stealth classics but because they were artifacts symbolizing a shared appreciation with my father.
Long segue aside while here he eventually decided to pop the first one in. Even though my setup to play original Xbox games on a modern HDTV hadn’t yet been tested I got it up and running with him five feet away from the screen due to short controller chord lengths. He knew he wasn’t going to beat it, but he wanted to experience it again. The game, Splinter Cell, is still impressive visually but shows its age in the more stilted control schemes of yore. Him being able to pop it in and experience that nostalgia is one of the reasons I have a collection. It’s a window into my past, his past, and gaming’s past. It’s certainly not a cornerstone of our relationship but to be able to bond over it then and now is a magical thing. This is what games have always been about for me. Experiencing something with others, sharing in that experience, and holding onto those memories formed through it. He played for maybe 90 minutes before he had his fill and that’s ok, it felt gratifying to me. As though my collection was finally fulfilling its purpose of sharing those memories.
At the onset of the month, I found some gameplay footage of the eponymous video game. Intrigued I did a little digging and eventually decided to play. About 10 in-game hours later I was done, and I have thoughts.
There’s great effort put into setting up the mystery of what’s going on and it is alluring but there’s never a satisfying answer, only supposition. A great tower appears in the jungle and you, a “modern” military man, find it with a guide’s help. The tower holds a spear believed to grant wishes and immeasurable power. Venturing inside the stone shrine otherworldly creatures and sights lay before you. With your torch sputtering, little ammo, and the way out sealed behind, you must go forward. Using conversations with other characters, the game builds this meta-narrative that by choosing to play the game you are just like the soldier who has chosen to find the spear. Despite whatever difficulties you face your willingness to struggle and beat the game is the same as the soldier’s search for the spear. In essence to stop playing before finishing would be dooming your player character to the fate of the many other human adventurers you pass.
Building from the idea that the player’s intentions mirror their characters, the idea that guns are present takes even greater effect. Sure, shooting spectral monsters, knights in armor, and giant bugs with guns is fun but narratively you are the invading force. All the places you visit are living biomes with their own lifecycles and inhabitants and by playing you are choosing to murder your way through them. It’s mentioned that you don’t have to struggle so much to achieve your desire, the spear, but for the player with the freely available guns and ammunition the difficulty is not so severe. Intentional or not this makes me feel like there’s even more meta-narrative implying that advanced enough technology can trivialize certain obstacles so much we don’t recognize the damage caused. There’s even magic in this game but guns are so effective there’s no need to even use it. However, that’s the extent of the narrative from what I can tell. There wasn’t enough information to make any other interesting connections. Edit: Upon reflection, when you “finish” the game you don’t get the spear and you just start over from the beginning, I can only interpret this to mean you never had any real agency and the spear/game is the one in control all the while.
As a game it echoes that time when games held so much mystery by including hidden passageways and secrets and there not being much information available even online. It rewards exploration and risk-taking while also punishing it when not done carefully. In one of the later areas, I had to draw a physical map to keep track of everything and I enjoyed it more so.
Honestly you could even forgo using guns and rely on magic, clubs, katanas, bows, and more. There’s much to do and much to do it with. Combat is slow but deliberate. Swinging a melee weapon requires energy which will be depending on the weapon’s weight. For example, a knife might be swung 3-4 times before you must wait, while a big club only gets one. Missing a swing exposes you and turning to face your foes takes time. This isn’t a game where you can whip the camera around freely, in fact having a gun out renders you slower overall. Understanding your space, time to swing, time to recover, etc is how you “git gud”. Or just use the AR-15.
Visually, I have no problem saying this is one of the best looking PS2 games. The art direction goes a long way into selling you the world of the game. Enemies have cohesive visual schemes in their visually distinct worlds, with each world encompassing a, usually, familiar theme. Armor, weapons, and other character gear have unique in-world renders that dynamically affect your character’s “paper doll”. Also there is the technical point that the game allows for 16:9 rendering which is great on modern displays.
Instead of music the soundscape is almost entirely diegetic. You’ll hear wind blowing through canyons, plants gurgling, enemies shrieking, splashes of water, earth crushing under-foot. All kinds of noises but no music aside from music cues when segueing between areas.
As a fan of the Souls games, playing through this was like walking through the connective tissue from King’s Field to Demon Souls and eventually Dark Souls. The sound effects, weapon variety, damage types, statistics, character-based sub-plots and more all strongly resonate within the later titles. It really feels like playing a first-person prototype for Dark Souls 1 on the PS2 that they added guns to. I hope that’s not taking too much away from the game’s own identity which is distinct enough with its alien geometry and coloring.
I remember a casual afternoon at my parents’ house when some of the family had come over to visit. They’ve got enough yard space for the kids to play and my mom enjoys entertaining family and friends. Some family were talking with one of my older cousins and someone had asked “What do you want to do for job?” or something like that. I was in middle school at the time so he was probably in high school . His response was “to make video games” and as he went on about his answer, a lightbulb that I didn’t even know existed popped into existence and lit up at the same time. My cousin is still talking but I’m only half-listening as a line of thought crawls through my brain. I didn’t know you could do that or rather I’d never thought about it. I was aware of game developer’s, Blizzard was a favorite then, but had never considered it from the level of the individual. So right then and there I’d decided I’d do the same. Starting in high school and on through College that was the plan. This was how I got into software development and eventually picked Computer Science as my college major. My sophomore year I heard about a local group called Hoosier Games. I joined them and was shown how little I knew about anything. Somehow I was able to find an Internship for the summer at a local Software and game devolopment studio called Plow Digital / Plow Games located in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. It was there I was given a crash course in Unity3D and spent the next few months cranking out digital game guides (I worked on the Street Figther IV guide), mobile games, custom interactive experiences, and probably more.
The experience at Plow was really big for me. I worked with a lot of cool, creative people who were unanimously both cordial and driven. They moved into a new office space shortly after I left and I haven’t kept up with them but they still seem to be doing pretty well. My experience there put me back at Hoosier Games but this time leading a small team of seven people to make Katabasis. This was everybody’s first game, and my first time leading a team. While it was never a perfect process I still remember the time fondly and wish the best for the team. We had myself and another who voluteered to code, an artist, and two musicians, while everybody helped with design. Most of the team persisted for a year but after two it became a solo act. Early on it took a while for the identity of the gameplay to come through but our artist had a very distinct style that worked great for the game. Our composers also put together some really interesting tracks. In fact just yesterday I was looking into custom vinyl presses of the game’s soundtrack as this year is it’s fifth anniversary.
The following summer I was able to get a job interning on Marvel’s Video Game Production team. I mainly helped the senior Producers with whatever project, so I bounced around to different games and ended up doing lots of QA and testing when possible. Not everything that came to our desk was a game build sometimes it’s concept art or in-game art, design documents, pitches, and more. Being an organizational nut I organized the spare office space and cleaned up the shared digital documentation. The latter was an extended effort to catalogue Marvel character’s first appearances and confirm other similar historical questions. While there I worked on a variety of projects like the yet-to-be released Spiderman for PS4 and some others. It was a great team but I never belonged, way too friendly and social. The position itself is also too people focused for me, but it did give me some managerial insight.
I would go on to continue on some other solo projects but had largely disconnected from Hoosier Games in my waning time as a college student. This was mostly due to some fortune in acquiring a position under one of the professors doing freelance game development. This position lasted about a year until it transitioned into Water Works, an educational game being developed through the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. This was a web-based game and thus a bit of a departure from my usual work. Not only that I was picking up what was left as someone else’s passion project. This was where the majority of my game development time went until I left college.
After moving out to California’s Bay Area to be closer to a couple of different studios I started interviewing around, trying to connect on LinkedIn, and doing contract work. I met some really nice people in the area who gave me some great advice but I eventually gave up and started pursuing my Plan B, Software Engineer. A silver lining I suppose.
Perhaps most kids who grew up enjoying games like I did also dreamed they would one day own as many games as they wanted. The proverbial “Kid in the Candy Shop” being able to walk away with everything. Well I certainly did and everytime I felt I had to sell off older games for newer ones that idea was given more fuel. Learning about emulation was a revelation and provided an accessible gateway but it’s alway felt off, not properly scratching that itch. Don’t get me wrong I think emulation is and will be a cornerstone of game preservation, but the disconnect from the physical process makes it feel hollow to me. I missed sliding a cart in, clicking an on switch and gripping a distinctive controller in my hands. Even just picking out what to play, the little game in your head to decide. There’s a ritual to it that adds to the experience, but for me even the feel of the controller is important. Playing Sega Genesis games requires the Genesis controller with it’s big, clicky buttons that make arcady games oh-so satisfying. Or even as simple as Super Mario Bros. on NES with buttons locations helping inform the gameplay. Nowadays it’s easy to get 3rd-party controllers for PC to imitate older controller designs which is also great. With just a decent PC you could emulate almost everything but more recent generation consoles while using faithful controllers. For me, clicking through an emulator menu just can’t replace grabbing something off of a shelf and physically turning on a system.
With my first full-time job I had finally achieved I decided to try and satisfy that childhood dream of owning any game I wanted. It all started when I had my recurring urge to play my favorite GBA games. Instead of emulating like I had since high school I bought a GBA SP and a few games. Then it dawned on me I could do more. I moved onto the N64, then a PS2, and more. I started keeping track of what I wanted in a spreadsheet as the possibilities opened up. Then the spreadsheet kept track of everything I had as the collection grew. After some more research you realize there’s better ways to get faithful HDMI signals with upscalers like the Framemeister. You can also use different types of cables for better signals. Signal switches can make using multiple consoles easier. If you have friends who’ll play you’ll want multiple controllers for the different consoles. But what about cleaning, maintaining and moving your collection. Discs and cartridges each require different cleaning solutions. Disc based consoles have internal or external memory units while cartridge games often have in-cart memory that requires replacing batteries on the board. Older consoles die, newer consoles fail. Discs will face rot. You want to move? How do you package and safely move all of it? Where does all of this go in your home after? You’ll need shelves, boxes, labels, or something. It’s expensive. It’s never ending. What was once a glorious childhood dream is now a burden that makes you question your adulthood.
Collecting quickly became a game unto itself. Finding recommendations to look out for, finding random picks wherever I may roam, the “it’s my birthday, so it’s ok if I buy a Model 1 Genesis in box”. Completing my list and adding new items to the shelf became more gratifying sometimes than some games. Same with upgrades to my media center. I’d update some things to improve accessibilty, flow, or usability but never access or use them. So not only do I have a bunch of fragile, non-liquid assets taking up a large amount of physical space, I felt guilty for not playing what I had, continuing to buy more, and not playing them.
Not mine, way too many 360 games.
Over time I’ve come to terms with my relationship with my collection. Even if I don’t engage with it as much as I think I should that doesn’t mean I won’t or can’t. In fact the point is that I do have them for whenever I may want to play them, not to play them all right now. Sometimes you have to be in the right mood for a particular experience or take a chance to experience a new one. In the end the boundaries and expectations are yours to control, you just have to be honest with yourself and wise enough to know when you’ve gone too far. It’s your collection, you decide. For me, just because I don’t play Super Nintendo every day doesn’t mean I should sell off my copy of Tetris Attack.
The year I finished high school I went on to college at Indiana University. By chance I ran into half a dozen friends/acquaintances at one of the Welcome Week events held by the university. I started out in the dorms and one of my friends whom I hadn’t seen in a few years stayed in the same dorm just in a different part of the building. My first semester roommate was a fraternity pledge, so we didn’t see each other much and eventually he moved out to be replaced someone who’d recently come from China for University. He would ask me questions about life in America, Americanisms, etc… for hours every night. Not that I minded, the building to this day is still without any form of AC so most nights were too hot to find sleep.
I had brought my Xbox 360 with me to university and aside from my laptop would be my primary source of games throughout my time in university. My freshman year was 2011 and that September I walked to the nearest Best Buy to get a copy of the newly released Dark Souls. The trip took a little more than an hour, but it was worth it. With combat not too dissimilar to Monster Hunter, an open world gated by skill, knowledge, and locked doors it quickly became one of my favorite games. It felt like the 3D Castlevania Konami had been trying to create since Symphony of the Night re-wrote the series. Just as I had tackled MH with a friend, I kept up with a friend from my hometown of Indy to share notes on DS. Being so early in its release there wasn’t much information online yet either, so it took months until we started to see the game’s bigger picture. There was another pretty important day in 2011, a Pocky Day during a year ending in ’11. Truly a momentous occasion to be remembered forever. The small number of people who bothered to play Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim might remember it also came out on 11-11-2011. All joking aside I had played ESIII as a youth and then ESIV as a high schooler, so I was pretty excited for another sequel. Skyrim would be the only game I’ve attended a midnight opening for, though I was a good kid and waited ’til after class the next day to indulge. Truly a landmark year for gaming, dragons, and dragons in games.
Eventually I’d room with a good friend my sophomore year. He wasn’t much of a gamer but pretty quickly he chugged through Mass Effect two and then even beating the third before I could. Later Street Fighter X Tekken came out and we sunk hours into it. Despite the hate it gets, SFxT did have some fun concepts. Personally, we enjoyed running through the campaign with tag-in co-op and other co-op modes. Then later that year I got myself Borderlands 2 for my birthday. Funnily enough he and have birthdays a week apart so I’m sure we spent the week staying as high as possible and playing as much as possible. Borderlands 2 is in my mind one of the last great couch co-op games released for consoles, since then the industry has moved more to online exclusive co-op.
Starting my junior year of college, I’d be living in an apartment for the first time, and I’d have to find a job to pay for it. My friend had also left for family reasons, so I’d have to find new people to share expenses with. For the job I got work as an undergraduate Teacher’s Assistant for what was essentially CompSci-101. Given the large number of students I was one of a dozen or so UA (Undergrad Assts.) while there were several graduate TA’s to help the Professor. The job involved grading homework and tests, holding office hours, and running labs on Fridays. I enjoyed it, and though I was “teaching” people only a couple years younger than me it was a good experience. The pay was just enough for me to sub-lease a room off-campus. Living off of my labor was as difficult as it was liberating. I had regular income but expenses as well. At some point during this year I was invited to an old friend’s baby shower party in another city. He and I wrestled together in high school and I hadn’t talked to him much since. There we ended getting caught up trying to play through Dark Souls II, which had just released. Given my limited budget I had told myself to wait on purchasing it, but the taste of it lingered after I went back to my home in Bloomington. It must’ve been shortly after that the semester ended. With about a week left on the lease and no classes or work, I bought DSII. This time though I went digital and downloaded it. So, for the following week I stayed holed up alone in my apartment grinding through Dark Souls II. I remember it being rather glorious.
That year and apartment would be significant in another way since I would go on to date and then marry one of my roommates. We lived with each other for about two years until she graduated and moved west to California. That same year my friend had returned from helping his family in California, so he and I went on to share an apartment. Nearly all the furniture there was secondhand/free, our kitchen had little more than ramen and potatoes usually and we both just kept our mattresses on the floor. For us though it was a paradise. No annoying roommates, we could smoke as much as we wanted, music was always playing, there was decent affordable BBQ within walking distance, and people were always stopping by to chill. It was one long relaxed party with breaks for classes and work.
Later I had stopped caring much about my degree as much and focused more on making games both through my day job and as a hobby. After I worked as a teacher’s assistant for two years I was able to work for a professor developing various games. At the same time I had been attending a local campus game dev group and had worked on several projects through them. This became my focus, even taking a break from school to focus on game development more. Finally, I’d move out to California to try and break into the game industry while finishing my degree remotely. I was able to finish my degree but after a few months of sporadic contract employment and no long-term possibilities I gave up. As a backup plan, instead of trying to program games I could just become a mainstream software engineer. Despite having planned for game making as a career since I was a young boy, my ultimate choice was an intentional Plan B. I didn’t get to spend my career making games but that’s ok.
In an ongoing effort to tie some things up, I purchased a few easier to acquire items from Estarland. Some games are just rounding out my library; the loose Spyro game is meant to join a case and manual though. Given how easy it is to get loose disc games, I grabbed a CD folio to keep them. Normally I prefer complete games but my tastes have evolved. Hopefully these loose discs I hope to re-unite with a case, but that endeavor requires time and money.
I also wanted to add the few PC box games I care about to my shelf. A few sellers on Mercari helped me find the four pictured. First was Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines which is probably in my top fives games of all time. Inspired by a youtuber I found recently I also wanted to get the first Harry Potter game on PC. My parents had bought me this when I was a kid and a few months ago I played again out of curiosity. Age of Mythology was one of the first games I personally bought on PC and I still prefer it to Age of Empires.
At the end of part one I had left with the idea that the Gameboy Advance was the ultimate system for me as a young child, and while that’s true it’s also an era nearing its end. Once I had started middle school, I went to a different school than basically all the people I grew up with, so for my entire first year of middle school I didn’t really have many friends. Even on the school’s wrestling team I was the only 6th grader. The transition however left me very busy between school and wrestling. What little time I did have to myself I spent playing games as I had before, though by this time I had become more involved in playing PC games such as Warcraft III. In fact, I’d venture a guess that, even almost two decades later WC3, is still one of my most played games. It comes with a built-in tool that allow users to create their own content and so the WC3 servers were always bustling with new types of games or variations of older ones, making it endlessly playable. This was back when DOTA was new, and the terms ‘pwn’ or ‘own’ were just making it into online vernacular. I was getting older, my tastes were maturing, and my environments were changing.
Around this time my father, due to a fortunate turn at work could afford to buy a gaming console. Originally, he went to get a PS2 as he knew I wanted one but was talked into the just-released original Xbox by the Wal-Mart sales associate. While initially disappointed, as all I knew about the Xbox was some game called Halo a cousin really liked, I gave it a fair shot. The Xbox was my first “mature” gaming console . While older 16-bit games could be mature in nature like say Mortal Kombat it was less often they were thematically mature like Halo or Knights of the Old Republic. I went from playing Banjo-Kazooie on Saturday mornings to grinding through KotOR and Jet Set Radio Future. From family tournaments of Goldeneye to those of Halo. The original Xbox was a new frontier with a much vaster breadth and depth of content. My brother being much older was also aware of this other new thing called Xbox Live, an internet service that could allow people play games with each other remotely. We were able to convince our dad to run an ethernet cable from our modem box to the family room where the TV and Xbox were and after the purchase of some Xbox Live 6-month subscription cards my brother and I were ready to take Halo online. It was at this time when I came up with the name Ooglykraken, combining my love of mythology and an off-hand quote from DragonBall Z’s then running Majin Buu saga.
As I write this what I find most interesting in this reflection is how much I grew up alongside many of the technologies and ideas that are ubiquitous today. When they were new, I was still young enough to soak it up like a sponge no questions asked. Those who are younger would grow up with many of these things after they’d become commonplace. While those who are older will recognize they too went through formative experiences alongside tech growth that others then grew up with, unaware of it’ s own journey into ubiquity.
Moving into 7th grade was strange as everything in my life changed. That year I made friends with many people I call friend today, including one who would later be my college roommate of several years and then my best-man at my wedding. It’s during these times that a lot of people become more socially independent, making their own identities. So just as it was a time of abundant social development it also facilitated the kind of “school-yard” sharing. Word of mouth was still quite powerful for school kids despite the growing abundance of information online. It was through my new friends I found games like Devil May Cry, bands like Slipknot, and a broader exposure to anime. My brother had become independent around this time, so he moved out to his own apartment. This was the first time I’d had my own bedroom since I was a little kid and the freedom that came with it probably helped spur the growth of my atypical tastes, atypical relative to my family.
By the time I was in high school I had steady work landscaping and my age provided more personal freedom, so I was able to independently explore my own interests. Things such as being able to have my own TV, something rightfully prevented by my parents knowing I’d hole up in my room like a goblin emerging only to nab bits of food and then scurry back to my cave of a room. The light of a TV being the only signs something is living there. As far as gaming related changes, I traded in my GBA SP for a PSP. I was aware of the PSP but initially wrote it off. Then a friend of my brother’s gave me the whole spiel about modding, homebrew, and custom software. This was a whole new frontier. Emulation? Homebrew? Modding? All these unknown concepts revealed and demystified. First this meant I started learning how to emulate on the family PC, but also this convinced me of the PSP’s worth. I’ve never enjoyed selling games and consoles to get new ones but one website which made it more palatable was Estarland, an online storefront for games of all eras. After an appraisal of my collection from them I had just enough to get started with a PSP. I mailed in my old collection and anxiously awaited to be credited. Fast forward and I had a PSP and just like the GBA before it, it was immediately integral to my free time. Not only could the PSP play games, but it could store music, play movies, and more. Then it was quite novel but only a precursor of things to come. Now I did eventually try to mod my PSP but not ‘til later as at that time it was a risky procedure with the chance to brick the device or at the very least destroy the battery. So, I had to wait until I could afford a spare battery. My first try didn’t work, and I couldn’t keep on buying hardware for repeated attempts. Despite this, the little device made a lasting impact. There was a period of a few weeks after one of my friends got a PSP and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite that we put several hundred hours into the game. I don’t have that original PSP or anything else, but I remember my final hour total on the game to be somewhere around 600. What a waste of time, right? Maybe, but thinking back it’s all fond memories. In the end MH would be quite pivotal in refining my tastes and understanding of games.
Finally late in high school I was able to save up enough to buy an Xbox 360 which was just a solid evolution on the original Xbox. Thinking back, it’s funny thinking about how socially integral video games had started to become by that time with the popularity of games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. High school became this time where if I wasn’t in wrestling practice or at school, I was at one or another friend’s house playing Borderlands, League of Legends, or fighting games like Street Fighter 4 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3. This was the explosion of multiplayer console games especially those of the online variety. My friends and I still tended to play in-person, however.
This period for me is one of my most nostalgic, being this combination of freedom and a lack of responsibility outside of school and wrestling. It wasn’t uncommon for me to spend almost my entire weekend at one friend or another’s. The whole time a heady slurry of weed, video games, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, movies, and music. All my friends were within two miles walking so I could head over whenever I wanted to. In seven years, I went from innocent youth to a young person yearning for independence. I recognize to some degree my desire to play games as freely as I wanted (my parents had restrictions on time spent) helped foment a desire to live on my own. This is also what drove me to spend so much time at friends’ houses where such impositions didn’t exist for me. This is just one way my relationship with gaming affected the way I interacted with family, friends, and my responsibilities. The implication isn’t that games helped raise me either but rather they’ve had indelible impacts of varying magnitude on me. This exercise is meant to tease those impacts out and examine them, with special consideration for nostalgia and other long-term effects.
ooglykraken 