What’s a Game That You Heard About As a Kid, But Didn’t Play Until Later?

[DoubleCakes]

I can’t think of any great examples off the top of my head. Most of the time it’s a sequel game in a franchise that I’m already familiar with. It took me a loooooong time before I finally played Metal Gear Solid 1 though. I had gone through a number of games in the franchise before getting to that one, including the MSX games. I heard about MGS in my teens though.

If I try to think earlier, I was aware of Mario 64 for a long time and even after I got an N64 I avoided it because I heard it was bad. Didn’t ask why, I just heard it was bad and avoided it until probably 2006ish before I finally gave it a shot. I’ve never gotten terribly far in that game but I still think it was decent.

[SiberianReality]

Growing up in the third world, I’d say a good chunk of PC gaming and damn near all of console gaming. Barring some notable exceptions.

First I’d just like to clarify the situation. There actually were decent amounts of PC games, but really it was whatever the dudes selling CDs at the market had that week. Consoles had a presence in a big way with the PS2 but apart from that not much. There was a chipping scene for the 360 but by that point the economy moved in such a way that even piracy was near unaffordable. In any case my household was too poor to afford any non essential big purchases, so I never had anything other than my PC. That’s not to say that I didn’t have any experience with consoles! Whenever I could get together with friends indoors, we would bust out the PS2s some of them had and play some FIFA/PES and whatever fighting game was available (mostly Mortal Kombat and some DBZ fighting games).

To actually answer the topic question, there have been many games that fulfill the criteria but the big thing for me was the entire Halo series. I’d played Halo: Combat Evolved a chunk of years after it came out and completely fell in love with it. I replayed it many times and was very excited to dig up whatever bits and pieces of info I could about The Chief, The Covenant, The Flood, and also potential sequels. I was pretty disappointed when I found out that 2 was a console exclusive, and yes I was one of the people who upgraded to Vista when 2 was announced as a port.

You can imagine it was pretty depressing when the OS turned out to be complete arse and the port itself somehow even more so. Neverhteless I kept on reading wikis and watching machinimas until eventually my interest just petered out and I’d resigned that I’d only get to play them some time in the far future. Maybe.

Fast forward through quite a while, and last year my partner gets me a refurbished 360 for my birthday. As soon as I realised what this meant I picked up whatever games I could find with Halo in the title along some other console games I was hoping to play. I ended up getting Halo 3 and ODST. Sadly the box for 3 only had a bonus collector’s edition disc and I couldn’t return it due to the wonderful magic of retail. However I did get to play and absolutely loved loved loved ODST.

I haven’t been able to buy anything more due to being completely broke, but if my economy improves I’ll look into continuing my quest for Halo games. One of my small dreams has been to get an Xbone with the MCC and finally get to play these games that I’ve been looking at since I was a kid.

[JohnGreenArt]

I wish I could think of a more interesting example, because I know there are plenty of games I didn’t play until way later, but the first one I can think of is Super Mario Bros.

I’m in my 40’s, so I was the right age for SMB when it came out, but after the Atari 2600 my family moved onto computers, specifically the Commodore 64. And while the C64 did get a lot of ports of arcade games, the closest thing it got to Super Mario Bros. that I played was a game called The Great Giana Sisters in 1987. But it wasn’t just that game but specifically a version of it that someone hacked to make the sprites match SMB. The original The Great Giana Sisters was already so close to SMB that Nintendo almost sued (I believe the threat of a lawsuit from Nintendo made the producers stop distributing the game to stores.) But copy protection was a joke back then, so it was easy to get games from friends or BBSs, and even modded versions like I mentioned. I can’t recall if any of the music was altered, but the game levels were already pretty close to SMB.

None of my close friends had a Nintendo either, and though I played SMBWorld once on a friend’s SNES, and got myself a Nintendo 64 in college and played Super Mario 64, it wasn’t until about 2003 that I finally played the original SMB on an NES. A girlfriend had one hooked up at her family’s cabin. That cabin was something they’d only be at like one week out of the year, and it seemed perpetually stuck in the '80s (or '70s in regard to the shag carpet). She could play that game with her eyes closed, but I barely managed to get through a few levels.

The game obviously holds up, it’s one of the all-time greats, but I didn’t grow up with it and didn’t have the nostalgia factor, so playing it 18 years after it came out didn’t blow my mind or anything. I also finally got to play Duck Hunt, but that wore thin much faster.

I think what makes this game not the greatest example is just that, even without playing a game like SMB, it was EVERYWHERE and sort of never went away. I never actually played it, but I still knew how to get to some warp zones, what enemies did what, where power-ups were, that the princess was in another castle. Of course, some of that knowledge comes from playing other Mario games, but there was a lot that was specific to the original that I just knew or expected.

If I can just remember some of them, there’s got to be a game that’s more obscure that I played years after the fact that still had some surprises to it.

[Skronk]

One game I romanticized because of word of mouth was the Marvel Super Heroes fighting game on PS1. I think my cousin had talked about it once and I don’t know if it was all my imagination or he embellished some aspects but I somehow got the idea the stages were ridiculously detailed and interactive.

I thought that as Spider-Man you’d be able to wall crawl all around the level whenever you wanted (which was probably Vega’s fault). I’d heard about a space station level too so in my mind you’d be able to knock people out of the window to finish the match or damage the station enough that the whole thing would plummet to earth leaving you with a sudden death time limit to finish your fight.

I built it up so much in my head that by the time I finally got a chance to play it around the PS2 era I couldn’t have been more disappointed. On top of that I also sucked at fighting games so couldn’t even pull off the normal specials so my fights looked extra dull. I think this is why I’ve never been happy with the Marvel vs Capcom games I’ve tried, Smash Bros was more the game I was looking for.

[Colin_Fredericks]

Lots of other kids in my town had a Nintendo. I didn’t. This was at the time when Dragon Warrior was HUGE in my school, so literally everyone on the playground was talking about it. One of my friends had the strategy guide (I think it came with Nintendo Power?) and I poured over it endlessly. I probably knew the game as well as anyone there, despite never having sat down in front of it. I didn’t actually get to play it until years later, on an emulator, when sadly it hadn’t aged very well.

Things were different for Ultima 6. I saw hints about it in Dragon Magazine. I saw ads and reviews in Compute. All that was when I was in grade school. In high school I saw a copy for $10 in the bargain bin at WalMart and played the hell out of it. It was 100% everything I had been hoping it was and more. I’d still play it right now if I had time.