I've been playing games about as long as I've been alive. My first console was the PSone—not the PS1, the big grey one, but the tiny off-white one. I used it to play many Disney PS1 games and then my mom sold off both. (Hm. I have money now.) I was then sat with a hand-me-down PS2 from my brother and proceeded to be between one and many steps behind the new, hip thing for the rest of my life.
While games have gone in and out of my diet, they've always been a big influence on me and my creative streak. Let's talk too much about all those games that influenced me as far back as I can remember up to when I turned 18. Accuracy may be iffy, but let's not let that get in the way of fuzzy memories, yeah?
2003: Monsters Inc: Scream Team (PS1)
Let's start with those Disney games. I had a couple; Atlantis was pretty good. You could switch characters, the sound effects were satisfying, there were cool sub shooting levels, not bad at all. Lilo and Stitch, I barely remember, and seeing footage of it on YouTube, it just looks like a Crash Bandicoot clone (and I'm not much of a fan of the real Crash Bandicoot...). Buzz Lightyear, I remember liking, but when I tried to replay it, it was unplayable! I guess I was more tolerant of slippery controls at 4-5 years old...
Really, it was the Monsters Inc. game you want to play again, if you ever played it the first time. The whole gist is that it's a training ground for Mike and Sulley before they start scaring kids in the real world, taking you through city courses, desert courses, and arctic courses. Literal toy trains and Lego men try to kick you in the shins. Robot kids are your targets to prey on, and their screams are actually pretty spicy. Trampolines and slide sections help to break up the monotony. It's an incredibly short game, 12 stages, so it'll take an afternoon at best even for full completion.
Something's always stuck out at me about the level design for this game. Each course has one or two levels with some surprisingly memorable vibe or platforming bits in it. I absolutely adore the Marketplace level, a multi-layered, compact Asian marketplace with water hazards and a sewer bit. Such a good vibe to it, and the compactness is something I appreciate as an occasional level designer myself. Other memorable areas include the Tomb level, which takes place in the dusty, glowing desert at night, and the Hot Springs level, a big purple cave with lots of hot water geysers.
While I lost the PSone I played this on, I did hold onto the controller that came with it. It wasn't that much different from the DualShock 2, but something about how soft the buttons and the rubber on the thumbsticks were made me much prefer it to our other controllers. Funnily enough, I'd use it to beat some more grown-up games later on, namely Ratchet and Clank, before it finally gave up in my teens (likely from me playing Guitar Hero on it). A great run for a controller that started out mostly playing Disney games.
2004: Madden NFL 2003 (PS2)
I'll be honest with you, I don't find real-world football particularly enthralling. I live in America, though, so you bet I grew up around it. My mom's a Ravens fan; my dad signed me up for flag football a few years in a row (I'm amazed I performed at all, given my utter disinterest in playing). It's still on in our house every Sunday, and I mostly ignore it.
Football games? Different story. My older brother would get a new Madden game every year, and eventually, they'd end up forgotten and I'd snag them. At a crisp five years old, I couldn't care about the full fat games, but I sure played the crap out of the Mini Camp mini-games and made a few custom teams and stadiums, all the while enjoying those stellar soundtracks of pop rock, wimp metal, and rap that I've since made my own rips of.
My classic go-to Madden game when I want to play one (which tends to be around autumn—tis the season) is 2003, the first one to have Mini Camp, Madden Cards, and the aforementioned soundtrack. Everything from the UI to the players have this chunkiness I'm especially fond of, and getting to hear OK Go and Seether and Nappy Roots while I'm setting up a game is fantastic. The box is beaten to shit—I somehow managed to rip out the spine of the paper underlay and mangle the plastic on top—but the game plays great still.
The Madden games are definitely not my favorite classic sports games. I've got arcade brain, so if I'm really in the mood to watch polygonal dudes take each other out over a ball, I'm more likely to play NFL Blitz or NFL Street 2 or one of those types of games. Why would I care about penalties and injuries in a video game? I just want to throw long passes and run fast.
That said, Madden is still an option I'm warm for when the outdoors start getting cold.
2005: Namco Museum (PS2)
I was way into arcades as a little kid. Never been in a proper one, but I still park myself behind any cabinets I find in the wild! I had a book—sadly left behind at a summer camp—all about building your own arcade machine from wood, computers, and spare controller parts, and dammit if I don't still want to do that now. As a real young'un, I even built a pretend arcade cabinet out of cardboard, a magnetic drawing board, and imagination. (Or was that a computer? Probably both.)
I'm fairly certain I have our ancient copy of Namco Museum to thank for all that excitement. This was the first place I played Pac-Man and his missus, Galaga, and Dig Dug, among others. These are all still big favorites of mine, even Galaxian and Pole Position, which used to bore me to death and now I appreciate them both a lot better.
A lot of my excitement for golden age arcade games centered around Pac-Man. We used to have it all: 80s Pac merch, mugs, TV trays, plushies, DVDs of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon made from Limewire rips, you name it. I used to bug one of my teachers all the time to make me origami Pac-Men because she could (you could make hers go chomp chomp!). My first username online even was pacguy19—I think I used to find that embarrassing, but now it's just kinda charming.
Namco Museum set me up for a long life of playing games already way old by the time I came around. I still have my original disc, and it's actually my go-to PS2 stress test game because it's so worn; if a laser can read it, it has to have some life left in it. There's better options to play all these games now—the ones on this disc are recreations, not emulations, for one thing—but this is still the disc I reach for if I randomly want to play Namco games.
2006: Dynomite! (PC)
More and more as I got older (like 6-8 years old...) I was left alone to wander the Internet on the family computer, and later my own computer. I sure sent loads of random YouTube private messages and emails to strangers and made my way onto DeviantART to see things I probably shouldn't have, but I also spent lots of time on Flash game sites, mostly Miniclip. (While Miniclip and Flash are no more, Flashpoint has everything I remember playing archived and working fully.)
It was probably on Yahoo! Games or something instead, but I remember finding the Java versions of all the PopCap games and getting especially addicted to a little game called Dynomite!. It's just Snood or Puzzle Bobble, but it's got claymation dinosaurs armed with dynamite and spotted eggs instead! I don't remember if it's related, but I remember having a dinosaur phase as a little kid, building sites on Freewebs about them and the like. We'll say it's not a coincidence; either way, I just found it fun.
When I rediscovered the deluxe Dynomite! on Steam in 2019, I fell back in love with it. It looked cleaner, it had more voice clips, and more modes! I spent so much time trying to cut time off my time trial, and I eventually managed to clear the Easy difficulty in under five minutes. Probably not impressive, but felt speedy to me! (Nowadays, when I want to play a match-three shooter, I have a cracked Dynomite! Deluxe that runs without Steam, and I usually play it under Windows XP for extra authenticity.)
Still, seeing the Java version of Dynomite! is adorable. It's dithered to hell in a tiny window, and the only voice clips are of Inchy (the little bespectacled dweeb that keeps track of all your scores) listing off all your dinosaur-related combos with increasing excitement—"Triassic combo!" "Jurassic combo!" "Cretaceous combo!" "dynomite combo!!!"—but that's how I played it back in the day! And little did I know the trip through PC gaming history it'd take me as an adult with an appreciation for that stuff...
2007: Guitar Hero II (PS2)
I spent a lot of time on early YouTube. I was always searching for gaming stuff, pretty much exclusively the retro gaming stuff I was getting into then. Consider the import, then, that a new game involving a guitar and colored circles captured my undying obsession. They called it Guitar Hero, and videos of people getting high scores and putting in custom songs started to flood YouTube. I watched all the videos I could. In between using my Mega-Bloks to build heavy, chunky guitar-shaped things I'd try to flip around in the air and smash on the ground like the people in the game did, I nagged my folks into getting me the game and the controller for Christmas.
I'll never forget the day, 2007. Finding the first game, then the brand-new third game, then Rocks the 80s under the tree, all loose, but with no guitar—and then they told me where to find the bundle. Guitar Hero II and that awesome cherry red Gibson SG controller, packed in a big box together, and it was mine. I was set for life.
Of course I went to Expert as soon as I could, that's what all the cool people played on! Sure, I couldn't pass much harder than "Message in a Bottle", but dammit, I was having the time of my life. I'd stand in front of my TV, guitar strapped around my shoulder, and play until my folks complained. (Granted, occasionally that complaining led to the actual police being called, but let's talk about happier things!) In time, the bundle box fell to pieces from being lugged from house to house and the cord snapped off the guitar from constant use, but neither could kill the metal.
The passion was reignited when I turned 14. Guitar Hero had long fallen from the public eye and I didn't (still don't) own a replacement guitar, but I trucked along with the normal DualShock and got really good at it, good enough to pull off some fast solos and finish the campaigns for each of the games I got that Christmas. I also realized I actually had the ability to mod the game now—something I sadly couldn't do as a little kid lacking a modded console or, uh, an attention span. I still have a disc I spent all of 2014 building, half finished and pretty hilariously bad, but it foreshadowed marfGH in a big way.
Since then, I've worked on Guitar Hero II Deluxe doing sound and chart work, I've documented GH2's demos for TCRF, I've ripped, mixed, and assembled soundtrack boxsets for the series, and I've started much more seriously authoring for it, getting into the weeds of mixing, stage control, and writing script for new features. I still associate "Decontrol" with long bus rides and I could rave about how Guitar Hero was my introduction to so many classic bands in a household where I was more likely to hear country or Five Finger Death Punch, but these sections run long enough.
Point is, this might very well be my favorite game of all time.
2008: Retro Game Challenge (DS)
All that time on early YouTube led me to the blossoming early retrogaming community. A lot of folks were copying AVGN; Irate Gamer tends to be the one everyone mocks, but who remembers the Grumpy Gamer Bitch and her crusade against diabeetus? I gravitated more towards the laidback end of the community, namely Aqualung, who's still going strong to this day, and especially Classic Game Room, who sadly is not.
Naturally I had to start collecting retro consoles, and the NES was at the top of that pile. I wound up with two consoles, neither of which I have anymore: a frontloader as part of the Deluxe set with R.O.B. and the Zapper, and a maroon, top-loading Famiclone that was ironically a bit sturdier and cleaner in terms of video out than the original model. Despite my better efforts, I never got into the NES. I feel like the NES is an awkward era between the simplicity of the arcade games before and the polish of the 16-bit era. Especially anathema: platformers, especially the cheap, annoyingly unfair ones, and the NES has lots of both. (Yes, there are classics—I like Contra and Mega Man too, now settle down.)
Somehow, a Japanese indie made a bunch of fake NES games I prefer to the real thing.
Game Center CX is a Japanese retrogaming show we obviously don't get here (I'm aware there's fansubs), and Retro Game Challenge is based on it. Here's the gist: a demon version of Game Center's host Shinya Arino traps you in the 80s until you beat a variety of challenges in fake NES games, all of which have fully-illustrated manuals, cheat codes, and even glitches that get talked about in (get this) in-game magazines.
I got so lucky. My folks bought this for me on a whim, me knowing nothing about it, and it had the potential to be such shovelware junk, but it's excellent. There's a really lovely variety in the games you play; you get a Galaga-em-up called Cosmic Gate, three platformers in the Haggle Man series, a Micro Machines sorta racer called Rally King, and Guadia Quest, a full goddamn RPG with nameable characters and a battery save! indieszero did a really fantastic job making these look and feel authentic to the NES, but because they're built to 2007 game standards and not 1985 game standards, they're a lot more fair and, most importantly, a lot more fun.
It's a shame that the sequel never officially came over here, because I probably would've gobbled that up too. I do know there's a fan translation patch of it, and perhaps I'll give the sequel a shot because it appears to be everything the original was and more, branching out to other consoles like the MSX and even the Game and Watch. Again, perhaps it's snubbing your elders, but I would much rather play Cosmic Gate than the real NES Galaga, and I love Galaga.
2009: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (PS1)
I was pretty crazy about Classic Game Room back then. I could write a whole page about my past and present love for this long-gone channel. Have a sample: I once tried to rope a kid who lived across the street from us into making Game Room-style "two dudes at a table" game reviews with me. I got into it with that same kid on the bus a few months later about who was better, Classic Game Room or G4. (I still see him occasionally! He's got some pretty glorious hair now, and he still nods at me, so we're still cool.)
Classic Game Room wasn't just something I watched, they influenced what games I tried. My first experiences with so many retro games I still enjoy was through Game Room episodes; Robotron 64, Gran Turismo 2, Joust, GoldenEye, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (mirrored for the restored soundtrack), Tempest 2000—and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater! They covered the Dreamcast version, and I've never owned a Dreamcast, so the PS1 version became my go-to. I got it in a big CD wallet of games and manuals from a kid next door who was looking to get rid of them, and he saw me autistically teetering around my backyard by myself and offered them to me. Absolutely I took free PS1 games.
I've never skated in my life. The most I know about skating is it involves a skateboard. Tony Hawk's is an obsession, though. They're the perfect "arcade brain" games, exploring progressively bigger and wilder and more dynamic levels, finding lines, completing objectives, and exploiting reverts and manuals for basically infinite combos. The level design is always immaculate; they teeter just on the edge of believable, vibey enough to make you forget that most places don't actually have kickers and quarter pipes lying around. Downtown, School II, New York, Canada, Airport—they're all etched into my brain, and usually I associate them with specific songs on their excellent soundtracks too (or Marcy Playground, but that's for a different page).
RetroAchievements has only made me more obsessed with the ins and outs of each game. The first time I 100%ed the second game (had never taken the time to find all the gaps) was for RA. I went back and cleared out the third game on PS2 and PS1 (with an attempt on N64, damn impossible gaps) for RA. My eventual dive into 4 and the Underground series will probably come with set attempts. My original discs are scratched and beaten to hell, and the first game is adorably simple after doing 500k combos on the Cruise Ship so many times, but my present thirst for secret areas and gap checklists comes from a little warehouse in Woodland Hills, as skated by me in a bedroom. Hats off for that, Neversoft.
2010: Rock Band 2 (Xbox 360)
I bandied a few games for this slot, and I thought long about including a second rhythm game on this list because I felt I could get a better variety if I put in something like Sly 2 instead. Ultimately, I went with Rock Band 2 for one reason and one reason only: drums. This game taught me a whole new instrument.
Admittedly, I think I was slipping out of gaming a bit by 2010. It wasn't that it wasn't doing it for me anymore, and I don't think I ever actually stopped, but I was more into making videos (often little stop motion videos using the DSi camera) and playing around with my first iMac to really focus on vidya. Gaming, for the first time, was taking a backseat to my creative pursuits, which would happen more and more as I got older.
I'd gotten bored of plastic guitars right around the time I discovered plastic drumkits instead. For Christmas 2008, I'd gotten the "band in a box" bundle for the PS2 version of Rock Band, which came with a new guitar (nice looking but meh), a microphone (which I got more use out as a PC microphone), and a drumkit. This four-pad, one-pedal plastic monstrosity was a very abstract representation of a drumkit, and it didn't hold up to any of the wear that I put on it. I went through four kits in three years, that's how into it I was.
I credit Rock Band with not only introducing me to another slew of bands I still love to this day (the Pixies, The Hives, and Garbage, to name a few), but also teaching me drums. If you can play on Expert, you're playing a pretty literal transcription of the drum part to a song. I'd become obsessed with rhythm; on any given day, I have made up three beats in my head, and they play constantly. Anyone who's listened to my music knows how rhythm-focused it is. That all comes from dissecting and disassembling the beats that Rock Band had me play on any given song.
It only got better when I got to spend some good time playing the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band 2. The kit had a reinforced metal-plate pedal (though I still snapped that thing!) and we even had the cymbals attachment for them. Granted, they didn't stay on the legs of the kit terribly well, and there was no need to actually use them in the game yet (Rock Band 3 would bring about differentiating toms and cymbals in the Pro Drums mode), but they were still highly entertaining and helped bring the game even closer to reality. And once again, that soundtrack became my soundtrack, being how I discovered Lush and Silversun Pickups and countless other bands through them.
Sadly, after we moved, I've only gotten to play drums (real or game) a handful of times in my life, leaving something I got quite good at and still love totally unrepresented in my life. Maybe someday I'll have the space to make some noise again.
2011: Minecraft (PC)
Ah, Minecraft. My beloved.
Other kids don't come up much in my gaming stories because I was a pretty lonely kid. Occasionally, someone would come over and play Rock Band with me, but really, I was on my own. We'd recently moved from a house in the suburbs to a drafty apartment on top of a pizza place in front of a busy street, my family was getting a whole lot more dysfunctional (the move was a family split to make it worse), and I just plain wasn't too happy.
I did have one thing, though, and that was seasonal catalogs from the sadly-
Oh, the memories of that game. He had a Bukkit server with tons of cool plugins, and I became a "co-admin" of it, because we were goofy nerdy kids and that's just what ya did. I spent all my time in Creative until I started venturing more and more into the Survival world on his server, and I just could not stop playing. I collected tons of lava, forged an entire house out of obsidian, gave it a mossy cobble floor, and had an enchanting room with a glass floor above lava one floor below on the way to my mine. Eventually we lost everything to a bunch of kids doing session stealing (I think they were using Jclient? We were using Nodus, so we weren't much better), but that server was so huge to me, and it ingratiated me into my first ever friend group, even if loosely.
My obsession grew well past that server. I started playing with modpacks, Tekkit Lite being my favorite, and I've since made my own called Pinède. I started playing older versions of the game, back when you had to use the Digiex launcher to play them. Possibly the most autistically immense thing I've ever done was make a seven-part video retrospective of the game's development, with scripts and captured footage and all, Classic, Indev, Infdev, Alpha, Beta, and release up to 1.4.7, which was the newest at the time. Sadly, those videos are all long gone—how I would spread them far and wide now.
Even if I've gone on and off playing it, and even if I am completely checked out from any of the versions released in the past eight years or so (I think Mojang are keeping their one hit wonder on life support by continually changing things that don't need to be changed), golden-age Minecraft is still a happy place of pixelated opulence. I love the slight medieval fantasy flavor of it, I love the texture packs, and I'm glad Minecraft archaeology has taken off and people seek out the most ancient builds and try to find famous seeds, like that of pack.png (I built a house there). As of 2023, Somnolescent has a Minecraft server again running Pinède, and I've missed it a lot.
2012: Team Fortress 2 (PC)
It wouldn't be long after Minecraft that I'd start digging deeper into PC gaming. Any of my Macs were infinitely more powerful than my cheapo custom Celeron XP build from a family friend, and with Steam coming to Macs (I hadn't yet discovered the wonders of Boot Camp) in 2010, I was right on time to explore Valve's back catalog. Right around the time I was getting into Team Fortress 2, Hurricane Sandy hammered the east coast, so I spent a lot of time between the November cold of our powerless house and my grandma's place with oil heating waiting to start playing again. Thankfully, a week later and we had power again.
Team Fortress 2 was the first FPS I'd played on my own (Call of Duty: Black Ops on PS3 was my true first), and man, was I hooked immediately. One of my favorite little features of Team Fortress 2 was the bot play. For someone who had no interest in actually being social, bots on a local server meant I could explore Dustbowl (it was usually Dustbowl) completely in the comfort and safety of a singleplayer game. All the variety in the classes, the sound design, and the lovely looking texture work built a world that was unlike much else I'd ever played, toony yet brutal. I became a Pyro main for a bit, first a Gas Jockey Pyro before becoming a stickler for all stock weapons outside the Flare Gun.
I had to hop online sometime, though, and when I did, it was usually on idle servers. A fun little exploit in the earlier days of free-to-play Team Fortress 2 was that you didn't need to play to get your daily item drops, just connect to a server and sit on it. Idle servers were meant to facilitate this exploit, letting you log in, sit in spawn, leave the game open when you went to school, get your drops, come back, maybe deathmatch a bit, and then log out. Valve eventually patched this, and the golden age of idle servers went away. This roughly coincided with the time I stopped caring about Team Fortress 2.
I hopped classes a bit, ultimately settling on the Medic, before I gave Team Fortress 2 up entirely. I felt like people just didn't care about what the game did best, which was funnily enough teamwork. I distinctly remember being the most popular guy on a server as the Medic, literally being shouted out on mic, before folks got audibly annoyed that I was trying to share the healing, and me ollieing out altogether. I still think Team Fortress 2 is a terrific looking game, but outside of the very occasional (and not in a few years now) games of Mann vs. Machine with real-life friends, I haven't touched it in a long time. Mostly, I credit it with being my introduction to the Source Engine. Speaking of...
2013: Garry's Mod (PC)
Believe me, the rush into Valve's back catalog came quick and intense. Half-Life multiplayer, Deathmatch Classic, yes, Ricochet, and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch especially (shoutout to Loki's School of Combat for all the good times over the years!)—multiplayer became the light to my moth form. Even in singleplayer, Portal remains the single best experience Valve has ever crafted, and its sequel comes nowhere close, gels or not.
Funnily enough, they were all just side attractions for the game I'd spend hundreds of hours on. I'd had a run-in with Garry's Mod early on in life as a Weird Al fan, but I didn't realize until long after I'd been playing Garry's Mod that "G-Mod" was the same thing. (I was quick like that.) The video freaked me out anyway. All these people were weird, dirty, wide-eyed; the game felt a lot less freaky, despite being literally the same thing as in the video. It's an amusing watch now that I know where the maps and models all come from.
Garry's Mod, at its core, is just a place to screw around with models and guns from other games, and I've definitely had my fun on that level. I spent so much time with the Doom 3 weapons and the CS:S Weapons on M9K Base addons, just firing all the guns because they made satisfying noises and I'm autistic. Where Garry's Mod really shined, though, was as a debug tool for all the maps I'd started to make. May 2013 was the first time I'd ever picked up a level editor, specifically Source's Hammer editor, and Garry's Mod was the perfect place to spin my wheels toying with AI noding, texture tweaks, and shiny cubemaps in between killing NPCs mindlessly.
I might not have made any good maps on my own, but I definitely ported a few neat ones. They're still not as accurate as they can be, and I gave up after the first episode and all the deathmatch stuff, but you can still download my attempts to port all the Quake maps to Garry's Mod from my Steam Workshop page. Garry's Mod, most of all to me, represents creativity. I'd always get lost in sandbox maps made of Half-Life 2 assets, spawning in Pokémon ragdolls and posing them, spawning in 200 Combine soldiers and downing them all with heavy explosives and debug guns, and fantasizing about using any of it in a much more effortful and productive way than I ever did.
2014: Pokémon FireRed (GBA)
My newfound socialness online and around Steam got me talking to a whole new group of people going into the mid-2010s. I don't particularly want to give any of them a big place in my story because it'd harsh the mellow of this page, but in short, I was being abused. Not by everyone; I met Savannah around this time, and she was getting it rough too, but by a bunch of people really close to me. One nice thing about time, though, is it wipes out bad memories and leaves you with the good ones. I've still got fond memories of Pokémon FireRed as a result.
This is one of those games we'd had since I was a bab, and I'd made various passes at over the years, never quite completing. Seeing someone I was talking to playing through Yellow on an emulator got me thinking about it again, and with all my newfound spare time, having been effectively expelled from school a month or two prior (long story), I went at it again. I picked Squirtle. I basked in the warm, familiar pixel art and all that good remake music. I made it to Cinnabar. I made it to the Seafoam Islands. I made it to the Sevii Islands! For the first time ever, having owned this game for years, I'd seen the post-game. I had no interest before, but I did now.
Powering through FireRed sparked a love for Pokémon I didn't think I had. I always found it cute, but now, it was on my mind all the time. I had little characters in my head; my first OC, Felix (now an otter in Pinède), came to me as an Oshawott. I was looking at people's Mystery Dungeon fan-teams and wanting to make my own, despite being horribly embarrassed about the prospect. Pokémon was the first time I'd imagined a persona for myself. At first, it was a Totodile; soon it'd become mari, my trademark Flareon.
My full-throttle adoration for Pokémon ended in 2016 after I'd played myself out of the games. I've long maintained you should play one, and two if you like it, but you won't need to play three. Add to that a growing desire to make my own characters not tied to any sort of fandom, and the Pokémon characters I still enjoyed largely became normal animals and I called it a day after SoulSilver. All my FireRed Pokémon live in that save now, after I transferred them through Pal Park for the Pokédex and convenience. In 2023, now, I'm warming back up to it again, and that magical site called RetroAchievements is giving me another good reason to replay them.
2015: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC)
Growing up, one of the few things my mom was adamantly opposed to us playing was Grand Theft Auto, but by the time I had Steam, she'd stopped caring and had no way of stopping me from using my gift card money anyway. Sometime in 2014, I picked up a bundle of the 3D Universe games and IV for some outrageously low Steam sale price, played a bit of III, and...saw the opening cutscene of Vice City and IV (both have problems on PC, sue me). Partially because it felt the best to play on PC and partially because I'm a 90s kid at heart, the one I really gravitated towards was San Andreas.
I'd never played much of anything that felt like San Andreas, and I still haven't. The other GTA games spoof the made man/mobster movie, but San Andreas is all about corrupt cops in downtown L.A. and one gangbanger's attempts to clean up all the crack flooding his hometown. You've probably played it too, but if you haven't, it's one of the most intelligent and hilarious games ever written. Props to a bunch of Scots for getting pinpoint accuracy on the tone of early 90's American media and politics. Seriously, I could fill this section up about the talk radio alone, let alone the rest of the game's dialogue and plot.
I think some people found San Andreas too in-depth and too sprawling, but I love it. Just about every single radio station in the game, regardless of how much you like the genre in question, has a fantastic playlist. Even the country station. Radio X is of course my jam, being all alternative rock, but I remember listening to a ton of Playback FM (80's rap) and SF-UR (house music) too. GTA, Tony Hawk's, and Guitar Hero are the meccas of excellent licensed soundtracks, and San Andreas fucking delivers. I want that boxset.
San Andreas is one of the few games whose atmosphere and sense of scale just leaves me wistful. I love taking car rides through the San Fierro wilderness and plane rides across the Las Venturas desert. There's a spot in the game right after you're done with San Fierro where you're doing missions for a Fed who glows in the dark, and I love how sitting on his ranch and roaming the desert at sundown listening to America really does feel like sitting on the edge of the world. Rockstar can try their hardest to break their old games and remove all the cool tunes, but for those who know how, unpatched release bliss awaits.
2016: Animal Crossing: New Leaf (3DS)
On the opposite end of the maturity and intensity spectrum! The story of how I got this one makes me feel a bit guilty. I don't know if we were having severe money troubles or what, but I got this one for Christmas as part of a secret santa for poor families program that my mom took part in for a year. I feel bad knowing some little kid could've gotten something nice from it instead of my dorky 16-year-old ass, but I got a solid year and change of daily playtime out of it, so at the very least that person's money wasn't wasted.
And New Leaf really did become a routine for me! The ideal time to check in was right after school, before everyone started going to bed and the shops started to close. New Leaf had the most vibrant cast of shopkeepers and non-villager NPCs, my absolute favorites being Lyle with the Happy Home Academy (they love me there) and Sable Able (for no particular reason). Animal Crossing has the most cracked out game loop I've ever seen, incentivizing you to check in daily for months on end looking for one single piece of furniture or a specific fish to finish your bomb-ass aquarium. None of that is exclusive to New Leaf, but it really feels the most fleshed out of the classic games.
New Leaf made being social super simple. You could message (very awkwardly) between people on your 3DS friends list and invite folks you had added into your town, provided your gates were open. New Leaf seemed like the game all of my friends had, and it wasn't uncommon for me to have three folks over at once to bug my villagers and catch all my fish. Even if a lot of them left bulletin board messages encouraging me to "yiff the secretary already coward", they had the last piece of furniture I needed for that set! The choice was obvious. I guess.
In truth, New Leaf renders itself stale after the first eight months. I've long wished that there was a way to get villagers to say and feel negative things about you (oh my God, how funny would villager shittalk be?), and the NES games from Population Growing are missed as something to do when rearranging your house gets old, though Desert Island Escape and Puzzle League are great in their own right. (Caby points out that the fact that you don't get to be a cute animal person is also a crime. I heartily agree.) I've tried to pick it back up once or twice since 2016 without much luck. Still, it's super cute, and I love looking at fanart and fan villagers—same deal with Pokémon when you think about it.
2017: Quake (PC)
To be honest, by the time I got into my late teens, gaming was slipping from my schedule. I was far more interested in making stuff than I was in playing stuff. I was still heavily invested in the Source Engine (2017 was the year that I started the Valve Developer Union, after all), but I found its setup very awkward. The GoldSrc (read: Half-Life) engine was actually a bunch of new shit stapled to the QuakeWorld engine (to the point of both games' levels loading just fine in each other, albeit with graphical and entity oddities), and Source was a massively upgraded GoldSrc. Everything from entity interactions to the way textures were loaded into the world felt clunky, and Quake was everything I enjoyed in Source mapping in a far more pure form.
I'd actually owned Quake since 2014, and I was long a fan of its first episode (albeit with Alice in Chains' Dirt in the CD drive for a soundtrack since the Steam version wasn't yet patched to use the original soundtrack, and I didn't know about source ports back then), but it wasn't until 2017 that I really started to get into it. I beat the game, forming very strong opinions about the work of each level designer who worked on it (best to worst, McGee, Romero, Willits, Petersen distant last, deal with it). I found it to be a much more fun to play and vibey 3D Doom with level design that was consistently alright throughout the game! I enjoyed the expansions, especially for all their new (and as I'd learn, unused original game) textures, ooh! I even played impel. impel.
Quake really took on a new dimension for me when I dug into the Q1SP mapping scene that sprung up around places like func_msgboard, Quaddicted, and the TrenchBroom Discord. There was always some community event going on to map for, a couple of which I took part in and got a taste firsthand of how idiosyncratic the community could be. Being the raging ball of anger with a need for attention I was, I got very into the mouthing off that folks loved to do over there, and it earned me a whole lot of ire. I probably could've used some of those hours complaining about jams and Quakedads to make less mediocre levels, in hindsight.
I left that scene in 2018, and if you go looking, there's actually long rants about how infuriating and untalented I was still online in places! I took it very personally for years after, but I've since made peace with it. I'd really hoped that people would look past my spice and maybe I'd find friends and bury myself a little in this cool modding scene, but nobody really missed me afterwards (aside from NewHouse, he's a doll). It was a learning experience, what happens when the unstoppable force of a mouthy, abused 17-year-old meets the unmovable objects of opinionated old-school level designers with like industry experience and shit. I've just been working on being a happier, less argumentative, more personally fulfilled soul ever since.
Internet drama nobody remembers and introspection aside, Quake has never stopped feeling like black magic to me, and not just because of the game's subject matter. I didn't finish a damn thing, but the feeling of opening a random level editor, picking a texture set, dragging out some brushes, and watching as my blocky little world became overwrought with dramatic shadows and lava fireballs with every compile never got old. I still enjoy looking at all the screenshots and old map concepts I never quite finished from back then, and just like a bunch of the other games on this list, I've been thinking about coming back to them. The kickass shooter I'd get to play afterwards is just the gravy on top of the chunky mashed potatoes of creative actualization, really. (And now I'm hungry.)
Honorable Mentions
I've played a lot more than these, obviously, so here's a couple honorable mentions so you can get a fuller taste of my gaming habits:
- Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (Atari 2600)
- Best music on the system. Sprawls like nothing you've ever seen before. Pretty sure I played with the sprites in MS Paint as a kid.
- Tetris Max (Classic Mac OS)
- I used to sit in the computer labs at college with Mini vMac and play this one all day long. I hope the registered version surfaces someday.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PS1)
- Meme game my ass. This one goes hard. Wizard duels are fun and the castle's a vibe. More RetroAchievements fodder.
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
- Kicked off a mini-sprint of me trying to beat a ton of PS2 platformers in middle school. Love everything about this game's vibe. Also, animal people.
- Postal 2 (PC)
- Bought on a friend's recommendation for a dollar. First time I went achievement hunting, possibly! I have beaten this one on POSTAL difficulty, yes.
- Lego Rock Band (DS)
- Foreshadowed my eventual love of Amplitude! Would also eventually inspire me to make PadGH for GH2.
- Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
- Some of my best Somnol gaming memories have come from racing dcb on Wiimmfi. Best Mario Kart, no contest.