Editor’s note: I like Chris’ take on spotlighting memorable moments that might not necessarily be the “biggest” or the usual suspects. After all, even though pretty much all of us can remember Super Mario Bros., we’ve all got tons of memorable moments from some of the lesser-known games as well. For example, I’ll never forget spending hours upon hours at my friend’s place as a kid as we teamed up to finally take down Jason in Friday the 13th. Yes, the game sucked, but there was a sense of pride that we’d really accomplished something — and, strange as it sounds, I’ll never forget that day. -Fitch
As a member of the thirtysomething generation, I’ve witnessed the evolution from the Atari 2600 to the NES and Sega Genesis all the way to the HD gaming we’re accustomed to today. And I can look back and pinpoint several “holy crap” moments where I said to myself, “Wow, I never thought I’d see this in a video game.”
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":648786,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"A"}']I can think of at least three or four moments like that from my recent play-through of Uncharted 2. (Without spoiling anything for those of you who haven’t played it yet, the trucks scene immediately comes to mind.) I’m a relatively recent PS3 owner, as I mentioned in a previous post, so I’m still in the “wow” phase of this current generation of games. And that’s gotten me thinking about other times in my gaming life when I’ve had this same feeling. Some of them might surprise you, and I’d love to hear yours.
In no particular order, here are just a few milestones, leaving out the obvious innovators like Super Mario Bros. and Grand Theft Auto III. These aren’t necessarily my favorite games, and you won’t find many of them on any all-time-greatest-games lists, but each of them showed me something new at the time, captured my imagination, and broadened my mind as to what was possible in a video game.
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987, PC)
I remember my best friend describing this game one day in the school cafeteria. I pretty much called him a liar: “Wait, you’re telling me that I can have sex with a prostitute, and if I don’t wear a condom, my crotch starts to glow and I die?”
But all was — ahem — revealed after I snuck a copy onto my parents’ crappy Tandy 2000 after school and cracked the ridiculous age-verification quiz to get into the game. So what if the sophomoric humor of Larry Laffer hasn’t exactly, uh, held up over time? It showed that games could have hilarious risqué subject matter geared towar adults — or at least hormonal adolescent boys.
Resident Evil (1996, PlayStation)
As the first game I bought for the PlayStation, the original Resident Evil remains one of the few games that has ever made me literally jump with fright while playing it: That scene with the damn zombie dogs got me good the first time I played it. And for me, the terrible voice acting only added to the B-movie vibe. I’d played the original Alone in the Dark on PC, but that game just didn’t inspire the same kind of tension that Resident Evil did — it was the first title that proved games can inspire real fear.
Star Wars: Battlefront (2005, PS2)
Yes, it certainly had its flaws, but for someone who grew up with the action figures as a kid and loved the movies, this was the pinnacle of Star Wars gaming for me for one simple reason: online multiplayer.
Living in Maryland, I could ride shotgun in a snow speeder with my cousin in Virginia, firing a tow cable at just the right moment as he looped around the AT-AT Imperial Walker. I remember the first time we took one down — the two of us cracked up at how much fun it was and the fact that we could do this in a video game, remembering watching the movies together as kids.
Those are just a few that come to mind. What games have opened your eyes and broadened your horizons as to what a game can be? What are the game-changing moments from your gaming life?