Year 4, 1997 ~ Nightmare Ned (PC)

Nightmare Ned is a game I never meant to own. Just like all the Jungle Games, I got this one bundled in with something else, a game we'll actually talk about later. My youngest brother thought that maybe this game wasn't real, that it was part of a bad dream he'd half-remembered all these years later. But as soon as he asked me if I remembered it, I knew exactly what it was. Funnily enough, I'd just seen it recommended in a video recommending deep cut games to play on Halloween.

Nightmare Ned is, to my great surprise, a cinematic platformer. Every other game I've looked at so far has felt very definitive in my memory. I knew Aladdin was a Capcom platformer. I knew Muppet Treasure Island was a point-and-click adventure game. But I didn't know that Nightmare Ned was a cinematic platformer. Honestly, my memories of this game were probably about as fuzzy as my brother's but definitely more certain. I knew this game was real and I knew we had it. I knew it had made quite an impression on me. But somehow, I never really understood what kind of game it was. And, in all fairness, cinematic platformers really are one of the most if-you-know-you-know genres of videogames. The most famous of them are cult classics like the Oddworld franchise, or very unique and of-their-time titles like Another World or Flashback. Not to mention Prince of Persia and its sequel, games in a franchise which wouldn't reach the height of its popularity until the beloved Sands of Time, in a totally separate genre. Cinematic platformers are quite niche, but oh my god, what a uniquely interesting niche it is.

Nightmare Ned is supposed to be an easier cinematic platformer than its contemporaries but I couldn't figure it out back in the day. While I will say there's quite a bit of obvious pathing which is evident to me now, I still got stuck in certain sections, particularly the school level and the teeth section. It also has a bit of an odd control scheme on keyboard, which is all I had back then and all I could get to work today. There are separate buttons for jumping up and jumping forward, so it doesn't exactly feel like the platformers I'm used to. You never quite feel like you're going to make the jump you're trying to execute. There's also no obvious health bar, and there are only so many hits you can take before losing a life.

That being said.

This is one of the most creatively raw videogames I've ever played. The gameplay has so many interesting and unique segments without abandoning your controls for a minigame, and even that happens only once and it's great. The storytelling is some of the most satisfying I've ever seen in a children's game. The music is infectious. The visuals are amazing. This game looks like no other game. I honestly don't want to tell you too much because I want you to get this game for yourself and experience it fresh. There are story beats that made me cry, not from fear, but just from how much of an emotional gut-punch they were, how full of hope and in love with life they were. I have a particular interpretation of this game that I want to make, but I will need to save it for another entry. I'm playing the long game with this series, and there are things you're not supposed to know yet ;)

Last time I talked about how I used to have nightmares of puppets growing up. I don't think I mentioned how frequent they were. I had chronically bad nightmares and I still do. But out of every game that scared me, I can say for sure that somehow Nightmare Ned didn't give me nightmares. It scared the shit out of me, absolutely. Actually, my mom reminded me the other day about how much this game terrified me and my brothers. Mom actually hid the game somewhere we couldn't find it. I thought she hid it inside the piano bench. She thought she hid it in an old cabinet. I think what might have happened was, I found it in the piano bench because that was where I kept all my practice sheet music, and because I'm me and I have a morbid sense of curiosity, I just needed to play it again to see if it was that bad.

Now I can look at this game as being an amazing forgotten gem that deserves high praise and a critical reappraisal. But back then I guess it really scared me. But nothing in the game scared me as much as something that happened while playing it.

There's this section of the game where Ned ends up on a giant chalkboard covered in equations. You have to climb up the chalkboard using the chalk drawings as platforming objects. But for some reason the game also doesn't let you pause in this segment. There are other rooms in the game that won't let you pause, but when I was younger, this is the only room I made it to that did that. I didn't know back then that there were certain rooms that wouldn't let you pause while you were in them. I thought the game was just broken. I also couldn't figure out how to progress in the level, because I didn't understand the controls back then, and the room didn't have a two-way door. You could enter the room one way, but to get out, you had to climb all the way to the top. The pause menu lets you exit levels and also lets you quit the game. Combining all these factors, I fully believed that the game had glitched out, and that that room was just broken.

Remember, I was also the house troubleshooter. I also had a fear of what would happen when computers broke. So, when I had decided I was stuck in this room, and that the game was broken, I did the only thing I could think of: I ejected the CD-ROM.

And the game kept playing. The music didn't stop. The controls were still responding. It was as if nothing had changed. Again, I was a child, I had no idea what was going on. So, thinking that nothing had changed, I put the disc back in. And then everything broke. I saw the Disney Interactive logo pop up super-imposed on the screen in bizarre colors. I saw the install wizard flash in those same broken tones. The music had stopped, but I could still move the character for a second until the computer crashed. I saw error messages I'd never seen before. I saw the Japanese language for the first time, and it scared me, because I didn't know what shapes I was seeing. I saw words in several other languages which looked almost French, a language I did recognize, but it clearly wasn't French. And meanwhile there's me, weighing my options, trying to decide what was more scary, what I'd done to the computer, or what was going to happen to me when someone saw what I'd done.

When Ned wakes up at the end of the game, his parents are right next to his bed to catch him. They're not mad that he stayed up late while they weren't home. They weren't mad he'd eaten a bunch of junk food he shouldn't have touched. They're just worried that they left their child alone at home in a power outage because a bad storm had kept them from getting back.

I wish I could finish saying what I want to.

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1997:

Star Fox 64 (N64), The Curse of Monkey Island (PC), Mario Kart 64 (N64), Soul Blade (PS)

Year 3, 1996 ~ Muppet Treasure Island (PC)

As I'm sure anyone who plays videogames knows, sometimes games just show up in your life for no real reason. Parents and relatives will buy games for the children in their lives because they know those kids love games. That's just about the only reason I can think of as to why I even know what this game is, because I swear I played this game first before I ever even watched the movie. I had to ask my parents to get me a copy of the movie well after the fact. But I genuinely don't know why I would ask them to do that, because this game terrified me.

I have always been afraid of puppets. Growing up in Canada, we had a channel called YTV. You can think of this as the Canadian equivalent of Nickelodeon. YTV had a lot of very strange original programming involving puppets back in the 90s. The internet seemed to be awash with memes from Nanalan' not too long ago, which came from the same era. The station's mascots were called The Fuzzpaws, who originally co-hosted the Treehouse programming block for little little kids (source: Wikipedia), but were eventually spun-off into a show. Way back during their Treehouse era, there was this... I don't even know what you'd call it. It was mainly informational, an ad to tell viewers where they could send the station mail, like their post-office box. But after having the mailing address on-screen for a bit, the scene would change to a plain, light-blue backdrop. Then a puppet would walk from off-screen into the center. This puppet had a dark-blue body, a red beak, stringy yellow hair, and beady little eyes. I used to say it was a duck. The internet tells me his name is Fezz. Fezz looks right into the camera and SCREAMS. They were jump-scaring kids, and I know this was real, because my mom brought it up in a random conversation a couple years back. I was going to try to find this ad but just looking at pictures of this puppet actually makes me cry. I am nearly 30 years old, and this puppet still unsettles me like few other things can. I wanted to see if I remembered the sound of that scream accurately all these years later but I literally can't make myself do it. But I remember what I called this thing, the Da Duckie, because it looked at you and screamed "DAAAAAAAAAAA" before the camera cut. I still remember nightmares I had where this thing would come into my home just to scare me.

And I bring this up because I really don't get why my parents kept putting puppets in front of my face. I hated watching Sesame Street because the puppets scared me, especially when they would do typical Muppet chaotic slapstick and destroy something or hurt each other. All my worst nightmares involved being attacked by puppets, and that stuff was just making them worse. And yet for some reason I was also born with this bizarre morbid curiosity to dig into things which scared me. I still watched YTV even when that ad was on. Sometimes I would shut it off, but other times I would keep it on to try to figure out why it scared me (which never worked, it just scared me again).

So, we come to this game, Muppet Treasure Island for PC, a very light adventure game for children with live-action Muppets, where they LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE CAMERA AND TALK TO YOU. I cannot imagine why I ever, EVER put up with this. But the thing is it was kind of great. I was afraid at almost every turn playing this game, but the more I put in, the more I really liked it. It took me forever to figure out, but the environmental puzzles were actually exactly the right amount of difficult for me way back then. Playing it again now I could figure it all out in a heartbeat, but it also reminded me how much I really loved this game. It was gentle. It was funny. Somehow, this game, which places you in a no-fourth-wall environment where the characters directly address you, feels less antagonizing and less terrifying than watching these same puppets in their usual chaotic selves. I was actually really happy to see how much of this lived rent-free in my head, and how cozy it was to return. Years and years later, I would develop a taste for post-modern videogames like Metal Gear Solid, which directly address the relationship between players and games through fourth-wall breaking motifs, and I think it's kind of neat that I can draw lines back to this game as an influence.

But I did say that this game scared me, and I can tell you why. The little bird friend, Stevenson, named for the author of the original Treasure Island, does talk right at you in close-ups, and his eyes go kind of big, and he does get a little excited. I know my tiny child brain saw that and filed it in the same seat of horror as Fezz's jumpscares, because I would have nightmares where Stevenson would just, like, be there and squawk. But there was another reason why it scared me: I had to change the CD-ROM.

One of my other oldest fears is when technology borks up: computers making strange noises, the blue screen of death, visual snow, bugs and glitches, computers seemingly doing things without user input, and of course whenever you do something to them and get an unexpected result. Old computers did a lot of weird things if you messed up, especially if you accidentally ejected the disc with your tiny foot. And yet here was this game, which came on three CD-ROMs, asking me to eject a disc at certain moments only to put another one in. Those moments always felt so terrifying, so fraught, like I was being asked to disarm an explosive in my home. As I mentioned in my Aladdin entry, I was the household troubleshooter, which came with a weird double standard: I had to fix things, but I was also trusted not to break things, and if I broke something then I would have to get my dad to fix it. He really didn't like having to fix things I broke.

Billy Connolly, who plays Billy Bones in the movie and filmed original footage for this game, mentions "the horrors" in the first moments of the game. This is actually a reference to the original text of Treasure Island, which has a lot more rum in it. The same character in the source text drinks himself to death, begging Jim Hawkins to bring him rum after a doctor orders him off it. His hands tremble and he says "the horrors" have begun, but rum will chase them off. This character is an alcoholic who self-medicates to escape traumatic flashbacks, and the last remaining glimmer of that in this adaptation of an adaptation is a little throwaway line used to shoo away Gonzo and Rizzo. And I knew what that was, I was very sure I knew what that was, so I closed the game to start reading the book before I made anymore progress just so I could confirm it. Imagine my shock to find out that this game, which I played when I was very little, would lead me back into very timely conversations I'm having right now about trauma, mental illness, narcotic dependence, and colonialism. There is no pirate story without colonialism, but rather than go into that in my own unresearched words, I will direct you instead to this excellent video about a more contemporary pirate story, Our Flag Means Death, from the YouTube channel voice memos for the void.

I will leave you with this image, me, shaking at 29, realizing that this game is making a glib reference to a problem I face in my adult life, of being chased by horrid recollections and self-hatred into dangerous coping strategies to escape them. I'm not an alcoholic, but I've known more than a couple, and had my own issues with using it or other substances and methods to get by. Seek help if you can, when you're able, if you too find yourself among horrors and demons <3

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1996:

Super Mario 64 (N64), Crash Bandicoot (PS)

Year 2, 1995 ~ Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games (PC)

The thing is, I really didn't get that much mileage out of Game Boy models. Those were always more something that my little brothers got into. They really dug into Pokemon and Fire Emblem, and while I really do love the innovation of quite a few portable games, a lot of that was stuff I played well after the fact. My thing was PC games, but not, like, PC games that you know now. I never got into all the big Blizzard titles, or immersive sims, or adventure games, or any of the stuff you actually think of when you talk about PC gaming. I loved activity centers, interactive storybooks, board games with weird cutscenes and voiceovers, game show home editions, edutainment games, and demo discs for a million games you'll never get to play. If it let you type your name in and waste your parents' printer ink, I probably would love it.

Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games is such a very strange thing to me now because it's a game I played in pieces before ever having its complete edition. This game is actually five minigames, and many if not all of them came on their own CD-ROMs at first, often bundled with other Disney games. Chances are, if you bought, like, any other Disney game for PC, you would also get a bonus disc that had one of the five jungle games. There was also another collection from the same developer, 7th Level, themed off of The Hunchback of Notre Dame which was also split into bonus discs. While I don't quite remember which of the individual jungle games we had, the one that sticks out the most in my mind is the Jungle Pinball disc. But I knew there was a big version. I remember the ad. But we never actually got the full game disc until many years later when they started packing it in with cereal boxes.

I really hate to say "kids today" but, kids today get QR codes on their boxes. Back in the early 2000s we got videogames bundled in on CD-ROMs, and later we even got some crappy old movies on DVD. You weren't gonna get Starcraft with your Corn Pops but you would get things like family board games, Humongous Entertainment adventure games (I legitimately got a copy of the Pajama Sam game where he collects cereal box tops in a box of cereal; if that's not a perfect example of form matching content I will eat my Bachelor of Arts diploma), and even the complete Jungle Games. These games were all quite old by the time they were being packed-in with cereal but I loved playing them.

And Timon and Pumbaa's collection is nothing to sneeze at either. Like, no, I'm probably never going to play this again after trying it out for the first time in 20 years. The minigames are just Timon and Pumbaa-branded versions of actual arcade era classics. As I mentioned earlier, there's a pinball game and it sure is pinball. This is easily my first memory of playing pinball on a computer and I'm not gonna lie, booting it up all these years later, it was the game I played the most because it is a perfectly fine and fun pinball game. But no shit, there's also a Puyo Puyo clone in this collection, "Bug Drop." There's also a vertical shooter, "Burper," a Frogger-esque game called "Hippo Hop," and a single-screen shooter called "Slingshooter." They call the main menu the Jungle Arcade and yeah, it really is kind of an arcade essentials pack. And I think that's kind of neat! It's low-key incredible to look at this game so many years later and realize that it was sort of priming me to explore so many classic genres in one accessible package. I mean the controls are awful but on the whole it's a really solid package.

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1995:

Earthbound (SNES), Donkey Kong Land (NGB), Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES), Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (SNES), Full Throttle (PC), I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (PC)

Year 1, 1994 ~ Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (NGB)

As I mentioned in my last post, my first game consoles were hand-me-downs. While the Super Nintendo was my first home console, my first handheld was an original grey brick Game Boy. Even after my parents took away the Super Nintendo, they relented and let us keep out portables. We were a Game Boy and DS household more than any other system until I started making enough to buy my own home consoles.

It was my dad's Game Boy. I think my mom bought it for him. I remember finding it in a desk drawer in the house I grew up in, under an obscure drawer I never looked in, with a good handful of cartridges: Super Mario Land, Baseball, Tetris, and some compilation games with stuff like Asteroids and Battleship. For the life of me, I cannot remember if Wario Land was part of that set or if it was a gift. Of every game I plan to discuss here, this might be the only one of unknown origin.

This is also the first game I ever beat on my own. Aladdin was a communal effort, but no one was ever passing around the Game Boy. Wario Land was all mine. I didn't have to replay it for this list; I actually replayed it a couple years back and I was pretty underwhelmed. It's not a particularly challenging game, unlike the other two Mario Land games. Super Mario Land is classic Mario on the go, and while it's easier than the NES Mario games, it's still a classic Mario game. Six Golden Coins is even easier, but it's still a really interesting and engaging platformer. The art is revolutionary for the tech, and it is one of my favorite examples of innovative and engaging design on portable systems which outshines home console contemporaries. I never beat Super Mario Land when I was a kid, and I only got around to Six Golden Coins last year. But I know why I beat Wario Land way back when: it's because it's an easy slog.

Wario moves like a tank, and uses his immensity to barrel through enemies, chuck them off screen, or absolutely flatten them. His power-ups iterate on the hats introduced in Six Golden Coins. And his goals veer into the collectathon realm by expanding on the backstory given to him in Six Golden Coins. He likes money, and shiny things, and especially taking others' money and shiny things, so the game actually makes a point of overselling just how much wealth the player accumulates as Wario throughout the game, and the ending changes depending on how many treasures and how much money you collect. While I didn't enjoy this game as much my last time around, I can definitely say that it provides an excellent foundation to build a spin-off franchise from.

But that's not all there is to say about Wario.

Content Warning: The rest of this post discusses fatphobia, self-hatred, bullying, and suicidal ideation.

Getting bullied when you're a kid really messes you up inside. Depending on how your brain works, that stuff never leaves you, it just twists itself into you and becomes part of you. In my case it twisted into an intense self-hatred that I am still untangling today, when I am almost 30 years old. I wasn't picked on for being fat, but I was relentlessly bullied for a lot of things I couldn't help about myself. I've forgotten what these things were, but my mom hasn't.

Around the same time that I replayed Wario Land, my mom and I were talking about what it was like for me growing up, what our home life was like, what my school life was like, all of that. I've been in and out of counselling therapy since I was 8 or 9. I thought it was because I had been diagnosed with, what we called at the time, "high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome" (we don't use those terms anymore, "high-functioning" because it is an ableist term, and "Asperger's Syndrome" because the good Dr. Asperger was a child-torturing Nazi bastard). But that's not why I'd been in therapy from such a young age. My mom reminded me that I used to call home every day after school with the office phone, asking if she could come pick me up because I had a headache. We lived very close by; it was not a long or difficult walk by any stretch. But I was genuinely in pain every day. Somedays I even told my mom that I didn't want to keep living over that same phone. Imagine being 8 and already feeling so hated that you'd rather die, then imagine actually trying to do something about it: running away from school, trying to yell so loud no one could ignore you, threatening violence in response to verbal aggression, becoming everyone else's problem because no one was helping you solve yours -- not that you could articulate those problems, you were only 8. 

I really didn't fit in with my class at that age, and being in that dynamic was not healthy for any of us, but especially not me. My psychologist worked with my school and teacher to place one of his assistants into the class covertly, introduced as a new student teacher, but actually there to monitor and assess what was happening to me. Before she was even done her placement, her report was damning -- not of me, but of the school. It was very clear the school was purposefully not doing anything to protect me, and that was only proved when the principal told my mom that even if I was moved to a different school, I'd just cause problems there, too, no recognition that they were enabling the problem in the first place. Sure enough, when I did finally get to middle school, and the principal and the staff actually gave a shit, I had a much better time. I think I'm the only person who ever had a good middle school experience.

But after all of the hell I went through in my early childhood, I kept coming back to Wario. I saw myself as Wario. I thought I was a fat piece of shit. I did gross things to get attention. If we were playing a Mario Kart or a Mario Party I would always pick Wario or Bowser. I was so excited when Wario was announced for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I made it a point to choose to be someone who made other people uncomfortable because I was so convinced that the world hated me and I was put here to make other people miserable. I chose to be Wario every day because I thought that was who I was and who I was supposed to be.

And he slots in so well to take another character's place. Wario hoards and steals treasures not for any curiosity for their purpose, but because they're worth a lot of money. His voice is not so much like gravel as it is a newly sealed driveway; I would never want to hear him sing. He wants to subjugate the world, like in the 100% ending of his game, instead of break free from something genuinely oppressing him. There were characters I wanted to be instead of him for reasons I couldn't grasp until I learned to recognize just how much help I truly needed. Men are a prison to themselves, each other, and everybody else.

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1994:

Super Return of the Jedi (SNES), Sonic & Knuckles (SG), Mega Man X (SNES), Mega Man 6 (NES)

Year 0, 1993 ~ Aladdin (SNES)

One of the oldest, faintest glimmers in my memory is of crawling beneath an old TV set to try to figure out how to make the Super Nintendo work when all the adults around me couldn't figure it out. Granted, I'm not sure if I was successful. But I do know that I would also become our house's trouble shooter. When we rented, I was the one who set the console up. When our computer blue-screened, I would wake it up. At some point I just became the person who helped set up new family tech -- the curse of being the oldest. I didn't know what I was doing, I just knew how to read.

Our first home console was a Super Nintendo, a hand-me-down from a cousin who didn't want it. I couldn't keep my hands off it. It came with Super Mario World. My folks would buy a bunch of old rental copies from a Blockbuster that was making space for the next systems: Super Star Wars (only disqualified for coming out in 1992), Super Return of the Jedi (strongly considered for this list), Donkey Kong Country (still terrified of bees thanks in no small part), Inspector Gadget (lol no way), Animaniacs (just... no), and Capcom's Aladdin.

We didn't get to keep that Super Nintendo for long. I was one of those kids who could really overreact when overstimulated, and videogames are, of course, very overstimulating. That old Super Nintendo and those games went away to my maternal grandparents' house. My brothers and I would still get to play it, but only when we went to visit my grandparents, which was a two-hour drive away.

It would take us forever to finish any of these games. I only just finished Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World for the first time a few years ago. I still haven't seen the end of the Super Star Wars series; I remember having a love-hate relationship with them even back when I was a kid. I think on them fondly but I'm pretty sure they're junk. I remember getting close to the end with Super Star Wars way back then, but never being able to make much progress with Super Return of the Jedi. Inspector Gadget and Animaniacs are both pretty bad games in their own right, though I remember Animaniacs being a bit more approachable. But of all these games, we could only beat one of them when we were kids: Aladdin.

Another of those memory glimmers is when we finished Aladdin for the first time. On the rare occasions when my brothers and I could meet up with our cousins from PEI, we would always play videogames. There was one visit when we were all at our shared grandparents' place. We packed into a spare bedroom on the top floor, two twin-sized beds to jump on, all of us taking turns and passing the controller around. Our TV was either very old or very small or both. There was a TV with those old gigantic analog dials but I can't remember if that was the one we used or if it just happened to be in the same house. But I definitely remember getting crushed by Snake Jafar on our best run yet, the anguish of that Game Over, and the immense feeling of triumph making it to the credits for the first time. That would have been one of the few videogames I'd ever beaten in my young life.

Now, in 2022, I'm playing this game for the first time since then. My younger brother, Aidan, gifted me a copy of the Disney Classic Games Collection for Switch, so I was able to play Virgin's Aladdin for the first time alongside Capcom's Aladdin. Having these two very different games to play together is truly a treat. Virgin's Aladdin is a different kind of platformer than I usually play. It is unmistakably 90s. I would describe its gameplay as more like running an obstacle course than being purely focused on making jumps. Capcom's Aladdin is, meanwhile, a standard platformer. I would even call it efficient in the way it asks you to know where everything is ahead of time so that you can perfectly answer its problems. It feels forward-facing to the designer's most famous work in how the game defines its specific parameters of what being good at this game means.

Capcom's Aladdin was designed by none other than Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. Like Mikami's more famous work, Capcom's Aladdin rewards players for their precision and and tight execution. In the first world, there's a red gem near the end of a level that you can see as you're sliding down a wire. You can't jump out of the sliding animation, just wait until you reach the end. You're actually supposed to jump from a slightly lower platform and glide with a sailing cloth you can find hidden earlier in the level. But these are two mutually-exclusive conclusions. You can either slide down the wire, or glide across a gap to get the red gem. The chasm is too deep for you to glide back over and try again, so you'll have to spend a life if you miss it (or just hit the rewind button if you're playing it in the Disney Classic Games Collection).

But it's also just not that special of a game really. It's got incredible charm to it and it's certainly not bad. But I've played other Capcom platformers. I've played other platformers. I can't say that there is anything special or unique about the Capcom's Aladdin. But I also wonder if that's because I played it back-to-back with Virgin's Aladdin, which as it turns out is a superior product with a lot of interesting development history to it.

But I've conquered so many challenging 2D platformers across my life. I remember Aladdin being so much harder than it was, but I wasn't exactly good at videogames. I don't think I've ever actually been good at videogames until maybe the last few years. Lately I've actually been on a bit of a Capcom kick because I finally have some Mega Man games under my thumb. I just played Mega Man X for the first time this year and, yeah, yeah I really get why everyone loves that game. But I've also completed Donkey Kong Country 2, and frankly, I think I was training my whole life to complete that game. That is easily the hardest game I've ever completed. Or at least it was until I finished Celeste and Cuphead within two months of each other.  I've also completed every Shovel Knight campaign, a handful of metroidvanias and cinematic platformers, and plenty of 3D platformers. What can I say? I can literally be your 1Up girl. And while it all started with Super Mario World, my first big win was Capcom's Aladdin.

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1993:

Star Fox (SNES), Virgin's Aladdin (SG), Super Mario All-Stars (SNES), Kirby's Adventure (NES), The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (NGB), Doom (PC), Sam & Max Hit the Road (PC), Day of the Tentacle (PC)

30/30 ~ An Anthology

I have been playing videogames for almost my whole life. My earliest memories come with the comfortable feel of plastic and rubber, input and guidance -- a boy, his voice near to cracking, "Yoshi" he says when he finds the egg in Super Mario World. I remember the furious eyes of giant killer wasps in the dark and the rain, eyes I still cannot face without muting their bodies' awful buzz. I remember the sound of my voice shrieking off walls when my little brother and I got our first Game Boy Colors and Pokémon versions. I remember summers and March Breaks and Christmases, the enormous rental luggage for Blockbuster's Nintendo 64, the excitement of choice for the week. I remember two cousins showing me their PlayStation, discovering fighting games in Marvel vs. Capcom, and the joy of co-op single player. I remember that thrill of wondering, can we beat this in a week if we all work together?

Of course, I remember the bad times, too, the fights I caused, my selfish obsessions, hogging the console or the TV, temper tantrums and meltdowns over losing a game. There were times I wouldn't want to go home because my friends and I were having fun. We found refuge and solace through play from a world that drove us to our exhausted depths. I did not have the words to tell my parents that the reason we were inside was because in here we had some sense of control. There was never any shame or fear in failure because we lost a videogame.

There are games I have lost myself in. There are games I have found myself in. There are games where I could abandon my problems and become someone else's solution. There are games which ended so abruptly I felt ejected back into my body with a piece of the characters still living inside my mind. There are videogames that reminded me that I did believe in God, but only enough to want to kill Him. There are games that gave me arms to do exactly that, bless them.

There were games that showed me how hurt I truly was, but that I could heal from it. There were games which made me feel more connected to my body than anything else could purely through the strain in my fingers. There were games that showed me I could change, and that showed me what I wanted to change. There were games that showed me exactly who I wanted to become, and what I wanted my life to be like. There were games that mirrored the domesticity I craved.

These are not all the games that have moved me. In fact, some of these are games with dubious claims to that name. But these are all games which held some import to stay with me over the years. Some are classics, others obscure. These are not my GOTYs, just the ones I can tell stories with.

My ambition for this page is that you will read about 30 videogames, one for every year I have lived, and understood why these games weave my story in their telling. Next year I turn 30. As you will learn, I truly did not believe I would ever make it this far. Please do not mind this work in its progress; I promise to see it through, even if it takes me well beyond my 30th year. Know there may be more in the interim.

My name is Jamie Evan Kitts, and this is my story.

I was born on April 2, 1993.