Years of Play
1991, Sonic the Hedgehog – Years before I was born, in a house I’ve never been to, my father was resting his back on doctor’s orders. He’d been in a motorbike accident, and rest was the treatment at the time. In his damaged state, a work colleague offered him something to alleviate the boredom, a games console, the Sega Mega Drive. He was enamoured, spent an entire week speeding through green hills and labyrinths, all the while effectively paralysed. It was the beginning of a fascination, and one that would last for decades.
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2001, SSX Tricky – Me and my brother were like any other toddler, in that we were clumsy and didn’t have much control over our limbs. It was good, then, that the first game we played was a snowboarding game where, by nature, you constantly move downhill towards the finish line. That didn’t mean we got to the end without crashing into anything – as we both blundered and stumbled our way to the finish line – but it’s how we started.
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2005, Shadow of the Colossus – Improving was a slow and steady process, one that wouldn’t show any true progress until I was a teenager, though that didn’t stop me from finding a favourite. In the living room of my old home was where I played, and this game I played the most. The wide plains to explore, the colossal enemies to defeat, the isolation of the character in the open world – I was enamoured, to the point that I’ve now completed the game more times than I can count.
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2007, BioShock – My earliest memories of this game came from watching my father play, and it terrifying me; the main enemies, these large, lumbering creatures, drilled into my memory by the loud thud of their footsteps as they approached. This was the last new game we got in our old house, as I went through the similarly terrifying experience of moving to a new house, complete with changing school, leaving friends behind, the full set. At least I still had a comfort zone in the games I played.
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2012, Devil May Cry: HD Collection – It was around this point I started getting noticeably good, completing a myriad of games, even though my father had stopped playing by this point. I was in my element, no more so than in the character a genre, of which the Devil May Cry series was a part of, as the button inputs combined to form complex combos; even if I felt I didn’t have much control in my life, I had something to turn to when I needed it.
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2016, DOOM – My first job was about as much fun as could be expected, washing dishes at a mildly fancy restaurant just outside my village. It was always busy, and stressful as a result, as the year rapidly passed because I always worried about the next shift. It was lucky, then, that outside of the job I could unwind by fighting demons in a burning hellscape – well, maybe not the most relaxing activity, but it was a decent way to vent frustration at a time when I had an abundance of it.
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2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 – It’s not the first time I’ve moved away from the place I knew as home, but by now it doesn’t faze me as much. The same entertainment medium that I’ve enjoyed my whole life still gives the escapism it always has, even in a game based around cowboys and the wild west can provide comfort and elicit emotions that no other media can, be it sadness, joy, or excitement. Maybe that’s why, after 17 years of play, I still feel comfort regardless of whether it’s a new game or one of the first I played.