I started this blog five years ago today.
Whatever else has happened in the last five years — the ups and downs, rough patches and bright ones — digitaleidoscope has been a profoundly positive influence in my life. It’s been a place for me to be in love with videogames: to explore the love that I have, to deepen it, and to share it with others.
While digitaleidoscope turns 5 today… I’m looking ahead to another birthday. In just over a month, I’m turning 30. Three zero. 30. And for most of those 30 years, I’ve been a gamer. For a long time I’ve alluded to being born into videogames, to growing up on them and through them, to how they’ve shaped the way I see the world. But with a few exceptions, I haven’t really explored in detail the games that affected me the most.
So for the next 30 days, I’ll be choosing the game that means the most to me from each of the thirty years I’ve existed, starting with 1987 and running through 2016. (2017, after all, hasn’t even ended, let alone had enough time to change my life quite yet.) Every day, I’ll post a new review/essay/anecdote about a game that I lost myself in, that changed the way I see the world, that taught me something about myself, or that in some cases did all three — and more.
Here are at least some of the games that developed me: 30 games that made me who I am.
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Some of these games are very difficult to find nowadays, or to take screenshots of with the setup I’ve got. In the cases where I used images I didn’t capture myself, I’ve included credits below:
1999 — by illmyrin on the IGN messageboards
2010 — via the Kirby Wiki
2015 — screencapped from EggScrambledGamer’s LP
