Go to college, or start a career? This is the first real choice you make when you play The Game of Life. It seems so straightforward when you're playing. This first moment determines your starting job and salary, what job spaces give you a free pass from paying a fee, whether your opponents have to pay the bank back or give money to you, and how much money you make when you pass a Pay Day space. It's completely random if you choose the career path. The game auto-selects your job and salary, and you have fewer spaces to travel before you reach the end. But if you go to college, the game gives you three random options for your job and salary once you finish college. So why would anyone just start a career when college gives you such a big leg up? Well sir, that would be because, even in life's digital board game, you enter the workforce in student debt.
The 1998 Game of Life for PC and PlayStation is yet another favorite cereal box game, courtesy of General Mills and Hasbro. While this game came out the year my baby brother was born, we definitely played this strange time capsule of a game for years after that. We were a board game family, my parents making sure we had a regular board game night for a while. While my parents weren't interested in playing board games on the computer, my brothers and I would definitely play them. Or at least we played The Game of Life. We played this cereal box CD-Rom so much our parents bought a physical copy for us all to play together, but I mostly remember playing the physical version with my brothers when I was in high school. I don't remember why but we went on a spree of playing it with my brother Aidan's friends when I was in Grade 11.
If you've never seen the '98 PC version of the game, god, there is absolutely nothing like its terrifying 3D models and plinky-plonky musical pastiche. When I call this game a time capsule I don't just mean of its time, but also its bizarre callbacks to decades past. The '98 Game of Life recreates the sound and touchstones of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even envisions an idea of what the millennial decade would sound like. These are the most sanitized ideas of these decades, of course, not meant to invoke the breadth of experience but just the most poppy and bright ideas.
This extends into how it represents the spaces you can land on too. Obviously the spaces from the hard copy physical boardgame are recreated for the videogame, but it's the way the game dramatizes these spaces that make it so unique. It would be one thing to just represent the board as a kind of living, sprawling landscape as it does. But the '98 game goes further by using cutscenes to act out the spaces. Sometimes these are just narrated comic-style panels, not unlike the cartoon Whammies from the gameshow Press Your Luck, but there are also CG animated cutscenes using terribly outdated 3D models, and this is where the real character of this game lies. They are so superbly goofy that you really need to see them for yourself. They turn moments like, for example, your house flooding and needing to buy a new one into just a silly little thing that happens to your character instead of a genuine tragedy your family lives through. Your greatest triumphs, your big decisions, your losses and your gains, all so much uncanny slapstick.
These moments of comic relief are funny as a kid, but as adults they actually make it easier to laugh at them as they happen to you. This game isn't just outdated in its aesthetic, but in its ideology. Queerness doesn't exist in this version, but marriage, buying a house, and retiring are all necessary stops you make along the way. They serve a mechanical function, but they feel unrealistic by most conceivable metric. My dad retired years ago technically but his pension simply doesn't pay the bills. It doesn't seem likely my brothers and I will ever own a house as our parents did. And marriage... look, if I play this game again and I have to watch the man I'm assigned Milhouse his eyebrows at me for the millionth time, I will actually slap his stupid face through the screen. I haven't played any of the updated videogames versions of The Game of Life, but if I can't share domestic partnership with at least one other woman I simply won't be interested enough to purchase them.
And just to turn back to that first option that kicks off the game, well, if I had any selection of jobs available after finishing my BA in English, I probably wouldn't have done my Master's in English. And if there were any choice of careers after finishing my MA, well I probably wouldn't have signed up to go get my PhD. But hey, somehow I'm not in debt, which is nice, just the crushing poverty of being a career student with no other prospects. But I'm a published author which is nice! Life's little games and gambles and such. Four years from now I'll be Dr. Kitts, with tidy total sum of academic funding over $100,000 so far.
Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1998:
Banjo-Kazooie (N64), F-Zero X (N64), Grim Fandango (PC), Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (PS), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64), Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (N64)
