I turned 40 earlier this month. As I approached and surpassed this milestone, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my life. The 30s were a great decade for me. I fell in love, got married, bought a house and had kids. Whatever the 40s have in store for me, the last 10 years will be hard to beat.
Reflecting on other periods of life, it was interesting how my teen years influenced me as a gamerl. The years were marked a dual love of video games and sports, and sitcom-level of ineptitude with the opposite sex. It was when I discovered a passion for performing, especially with a captive audience.
As a gamer it’s when I took a stand in a console war – SEGA GENESIS FOR LIFE – and started my passion for PlayStation. It felt like it took a lifetime to bring home my first console. I saved my allowance for ages and scraped together every odd dollar I could get my hands on for the Sega. I was torn between the (correct) console and a Super Nintendo, but after comparing every packaged bundle on the market I determined the best bang for my buck was the Genesis at Sam’s Club. It came with two games and two controllers.
At the time, I lived about five miles out of town. None of my friends had a Genesis. The Internet didn’t exist. My parents didn’t believe in renting games, so the only way I could play new games was to bike to the rental place in town. And then bike back the next day to return it. My collection grew after several birthdays and holidays, but I got real familiar with the two pack-in games, Sonic the Hedgehog and Evander Holyfield’s Real Deal Boxing.
I loved my Genesis. To this day I maintain that I made the right call on my console purchase. It’s true that I missed out on some iconic titles and missed some crucial video game history with Mario, Zelda and Metroid. Perhaps my personality is colored by the fact that I had to make due with Sonic, Road Rash II, Tecmo Super Bowl and NHL 95. I found my little slice of happiness somewhere just outside of mainstream video games and that’s why Breath of the Wild sucks. Your weapons never broke in Road Rash. And there were a pair of sick WWF wrestling games.
In my late teens, the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast all released. By this time my family had moved into town and I had started working. I had money to burn and the rental place was right down the road. As a gamer I had never had so many options.
I couldn’t afford to purchase any of the new systems outright, but I also couldn’t avoid iconic titles Goldeneye and Resident Evil. I started renting consoles. For something like $10 or $20 a weekend, you could get a system and a couple games. All you needed was your own memory cards.
After badgering my parents for years they finally broke down and bought me a console when I turned 18. The Sony PlayStation was the only hardware I’ve owned that I didn’t pay for myself. There were three games that defined the platform for me: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics and Madden NFL.
The Franchise Mode was introduced in Madden NFL 99 and it blended my dual passions of sports and video games perfectly. There was a magic to taking control of a terrible team and trying to avoid getting fired long enough to deliver them to prominence. It was an addictive formula and within a few years every major sports franchise followed suit.
In my late teens, Madden was my favorite franchise and my biggest gaming timesink. I remember my biggest heartbreak – Jake Plummer breaking multiple tackles en route to a 53-yard game winning touchdown scramble in the NFC Championship game. Eventually, I decided to move on from sports games in general to focus on games with a focused narrative. Somehow, Madden has soldiered on without me and remains one of the most popular, and lucrative, franchises in gaming.
The first game I remember falling in love with a narrative is Final Fantasy VII. It was also the first RPG I can recall where you can switch out characters. Being a Sega kid and having never played another entry in the series, this might have been my first true JRPG. Since then I’ve dabbled with every mainline entry in the series and have seen the credits roll on I, VII, IX and XIII. The franchise is alive and well today with a new mainline entry due out next year.
While most people rate Final Fantasy VII as the best entry in the series, Final Fantasy Tactics is my all-time favorite game. The art style is my favorite of any game. The struggle of the main protagonist trying to reconcile the actions of his best friend, the class struggle and flawless integration of the FF job system make this a game I could play every day. Forever.
While there hasn’t been a new Final Fantasy Tactics in over a decade, the tactical RPG genre is alive and well. Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Disgea 5 are two amazing options on Switch, meaning you can play them wherever you go. Teen Tom would have loved having Tactics on the go, maybe he would have actually gone to class in college. Maybe.
I also dabbled with computer games throughout this era. I fell in love with Warcraft II the first time I saw it. I played a ton of the Shareware version of Doom. I enjoyed the RTS genre, particularly Age of Empires II and Starcraft. As much as I enjoyed those games and the first two Diablo Games, my late teens were dominated by an obsession with Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, or MMORPGs.
Ultima Online was a fascinating game. Not only did you have to pay for it, you also needed an Internet connection and a monthly subscription fee. That was a steep entry point – not everyone even had Internet in their homes at that point – but the reward was priceless. UO let you be whoever you wanted to be, and it turns out a lot of people wanted to be jerks.
It was the first game I played with a skill-based progression system. The more you used skills, the better they got and the easier it got to do things. If you wanted to steal things from other players, you could attempt to open their pack and see what they had (snoop skill) or you could just use your steal skill and try to grab something at random. The higher your snoop and/or steal skill, the better the odds you would succeed without being noticed. If the other player noticed you attempting to steal your goods, they could call the guards if you were in town. You would be killed instantly and they could retrieve their goods off your corpse.
You could also attack other players. It wasn’t a threat within city limits, the victim could call the guards for immediate, lethal, intervention. In the wilds or in dungeons, players were left to fend for themselves. Any player that killed a certain number of players in a certain timeframe would appear red on everyone’s screen.
One of my goals was to build a character to hunt reds, but unfortunately my lack of general skill and my inability to max out a character’s stats kept me from being the hero I envisioned. I was just more meat for the reds to flamestrike in the dungeon.
The MMO landscape is still very much alive. Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft are both amazing games I’ve spent considerable time with. Both are still incredibly popular and still charge a monthly subscription.
Many others in the genre, including Guild Wars 2, Star Wars the Old Republic and The Lord of the Rings Online have a free-to-play model where you pay to unlock cosmetics and other features. MMOs are a ton of fun, but there is nothing on the current landscape that lets you be as bad as you want to be like UO. Amazingly, the game is still running today.
Video games have remained a constant throughout my life. Early in my career, I had to make a console decision each generation and stick with it – hence my long hours with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4. As a gamer, one of the best things about establishing myself in my career was being able to afford both new consoles at launch. There are still things I look at with puppy dog eyes – like the Oculus Quest 2 – but for the most part I can balance my hobby with my everyday life.
I’ll close my column this month with a question – what game do you hold most dear from your teen years? How has it held up? I’d love to hear your thoughts via email or twitter.
Until next month – stay inside!
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