Brave Fencer Musashi

1998, age 16


This game represented a growing-up moment for me in terms of how I perceived games.  I somehow developed this notion as a child that a game on one console always had an equivalent game on another console.  I do not know where I developed this logic, but it was a basic assumption I held for ages.

I was looking for something Zelda-ish on the Playstation, and picked this up as a rental thinking it might be a good bet.  Afterall, it had a sort of cartoony sword-wielding character in a fantasy setting.  The gameplay, of course, was entirely different - a tunnel-ish linear path with no deviation.  I was bummed, but this game taught me two things:

1. No, games aren't guaranteed parallels across consoles
2. When I thought I wanted something "zelda-ish," I immediately thought of setting, character, and aesthetic.  Playing this game taught me that what I really wanted was a sort of open-world gameplay with lots of side quests.  I think after this experience, I started thinking about games more in terms of how they played instead of how they looked.

Hacky Sack

1998, Age 16

One day, my soccer-minded friends decided to teach me the ways of hacky sack. I fell in love with the game purely for its spontaneity of play. You could be at any gathering, especially waiting lines, and toss one out, and surely a group would straggle together to join you. Having a means to almost immediately establish bonds with strangers has always been something that intrigues me.

Magic: The Gathering

1998, Age 16 and again in 2010, Age 28

I'm not gonna lie, the biggest thing that attracted me to this game was the pretty pictures on the cards. My friends were caught up in the cardcollecting obsession, but I got my only deck as a gift from some boy who had a crush on me. I've always struggled with the decision-making process needed for strategy games, so wasn't very good, but I'd play anyway. When someone laid down a card, I'd pick it up, pretending to read the description, but really I was just admiring the artwork.

Many years passed before Magic came back into my life, and this time it was due to the XBLA Duels of the Planeswalkers game, which got EVERYONE back into magic. Suddenly I was buying cards and doing booster drafts with friends. No more was it just about the artwork, I learned about strategy and deck building. The game blossomed a thousand layers at once.

Tekken 3

1998, Age 16

A fighting game I was good at! Amazing! I fell in love with this game after the champion among my friends convinced me to play around, claiming they would go easy on me, and I totally handed his ass to him. CONFIDENCE!

This was a game a beginner could play with frantic button mashing and still hold their own against a veteran. That aspect was a big criticism of the game for many people I knew, but to me it was fantastic. It leveled the playing field, and the challenge in playing against new people came from their vast unpredictability. It was merely a different challenge to the game.