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.