When I was much younger, probably around 1996-1998, my relationship with video games was much more superficial. They were nothing more than toys to me. I distinctly remember replaying the intro level of Goldeneye over and over because I thought it was fun and didn’t really care about playing any of the other levels. That’s what I did with video games for the most part. I’d play Tekken 3 and just play through exhibitions over and over as well, never bothering to do the story.
It wasn’t until I played Metal Gear Solid that this changed. When I played Metal Gear Solid, it quite literally changed how I thought about games. It had a story and characters that I was interested in. It was weird and I didn’t know how to take it. In fact I had an incredibly hard time actually playing the game since my typical MO would be to play it until it got hard and then stop.
With Metal Gear Solid though, the story was pulling me through. It was a summer vacation to a local state park that I remember beating it. I brought a portable TV and my Playstation and during the nights I sat there and played through it in it’s entirety. I even remember having my mom help me do the torture sequence because I couldn’t tap the buttons fast enough.
It’s cliche and sounds kind of lame, but Metal Gear Solid made me like video games and crystallized them as hobby for me.
I still remember, Christmas Day 2001, getting an Atomic Purple Gameboy Color with a copy of Pokemon Gold, and having my mind blown. Before this, I had terrible fundutainment games on my parent’s pc, and I promise y’all that Pokemon was way more fun.
For me honestly it was discovering machinima and watching Red Vs. Blue & Freeman’s Mind. I thought that was such a unique idea and that the fact that it was so easy to do in Halo made me obsess over the franchise as a kid despite not having a console to play it on until maybe 3 years later when I had already moved onto other games. I thought the lore of Halo was incredibly interesting and my computer teacher at the time noticed my interest in games, introduced me to Enemy Territory & gave me a beginners guide to game design textbook right before I moved away. I never got into making games & machinima is no longer that exciting to me but I still get the same feeling of excitement that I did when I first found RvB.
I remember my older sister coming home from elementary school with the sticker of a funny little man on her bike. “Who’s that?” I asked her excitedly, his pure joy and energy becoming infectious. I had to know who this guy was! Did he have a mushroom in his hand?
“That’s Mario.” My sister stated, sounding almost embarrassed for me.
That Christmas we got a NES and the rest is history.
There have been key games that deepened my love and appreciation for the form or brought me back to the fold after an extended absence. But that first encounter planted a seed of intrigue and excitement so deep I still remember it though it was over thirty years ago. I suppose it could be argued to be more of a story about branding and iconography than gameplay but… hopefully the sentiment is translatable.
This is going to be the hundredth time I’ve mentioned it here, but Kingdom Hearts. It was one of the first games I owned for my PS2, and for a little kid who loved Disney movies, the game was pure magic. It’s still one of my favorite rpgs, hands down.
I’m not sure if I played Street Fighter 2 or Crash N’ Burn (3DO) first but either way I was drawn in by the colorful characters of all different backgrounds. Also, the ability to play as a girl character and beat my brothers.
My first loves were Gameboy games (at the age of 6 I think), Knight’s Quest, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and Super Mario Land. Until I got my own Gameboy I would sneak into the bathroom at night and sit in the floor for hours playing my brother’s. So many long nights and great memories of tiny me sneaking to get some water from the kitchen then sneaking back into the bathroom and sitting on the bathmat and just playing!!! My first gaming experiences before that were Joust and some other basic games on our Atari 2600, but the games really took hold with my Gameboy. Simpler times and such good memories!
@Steakeater I’m so on that level!!! My Atari games were Megamania, Joust and Midnight Magic though. Never got ahold of Pitfall or Breakout til I was putting quarters into a little bar arcade cabinet (with breakout at least). Super solid entries and completely understandable reasons to fall in love with gaming.
@onlywonderboy I’d almost forgotten about Commander Keen! I played that multiple of those, Dune 2, and the Duke Nukem games myself. All good memories!
I got this gem for Christmas in 2001 with a see through Gameboy Advance and played it to death. It really taught me to appreciate design economy, and how games can do so much with so little.
When my brother moved away to college, I got his old Dell computer, and loaded on it were dozens of SNES and Genesis ROMs. I didn’t know anything about these games though, so I just picked them based off their titles. One title stood out in particular. Just the words seemed so interesting and different. This game consumed me. It had such a distinct style, and I loved how different all of the time periods felt. This game was so formative and iconic for me that it’s my personal gold standard for excellence.
The Jak and Sly Cooper games were some of my first loves as a kid. The world building in the Jak games in particular was really weird and interesting. Probably made the concept of ancient technologies something I’d look for in other media for years to come. Also they just controlled superbly.
I grew up playing MYST with my mom (she encouraged me to write everything down in a notebook and do all the puzzles myself) and that was that. In the years after I got a Gameboy and Pokemon Red, Super Mario Bros Deluxe, and Oracle of Seasons, but those days in front of the PC trying to transcribe the ding, sproing, twang, and beep properly really were the start.
Super Robin Hood on the Spectrum. I distinctly recall my parents going to bed, and once their bedroom light went off I would quietly get out of bed and load the game up. In my mind I completed it at 3am one night but in reality, as I would have been 7 or 8, it was more likely 10pm or something. But either way I was very pleased with myself, but realised I couldn’t tell my parents or sister about it until the morning. And then lie about when I was actually playing it:
The environments in Jak were fantastic for an action-platformer–I remember always feeling like it was a weirder, cooler version of the GTA worlds of that era. I spent a ton of time just hanging out in Haven City and Spargus, fighting the Crimson Guard or trying to beat my hoverboard scores, and just killing the never-ending spawns of marauder vehicles in the wasteland, in Jak 2 and 3. Man, those games are so good. As I write this I’m just remembering the zoomer racing and the hoverboard skate park. There was so much to do in those games even aside from the really compelling narrative (or at least, I remember it being compelling at the time).
