For me, fear and videogames have always been inexorably linked. The earliest games I have memories of are the ones that terrified me; and the ones that stuck with me longest are the ones that left a general dread in my soul. We all — secretly or not — love to be scared, don’t we? Some pretty silly stuff scared me when I was a kid, but that was my overactive imagination doing most of the work. In my teens I got into the real deal. Okay, maybe not the real deal; I’m still too skittish for straight horror games,
Author: scwiba
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2004
Like everybody else in 2004, I was eagerly awaiting Half-Life 2. But I wouldn’t be a massive Doom geek if I wasn’t looking forward to Doom 3 more. I was 16 when Doom 3 came out in the summer of 2004. I’d been back into the Doom scene for a solid two years, probably more, and that’s on top of Doom having been one of the biggest games in my house for most of the ’90s. I was making my first maps at this point, awful as they might have been. Doom was in my blood, and I was ready
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2003
There’s a fella named Jeff Vogel who’s been making indie, shoestring budget RPGs since the mid-’90s. He’s gotten kind of a bum rap lately because of his penchant for playing it way too safe — all his games are almost identical mechanically, his series tend to run for five or six games each, and he’s currently in the process of remaking his most famous series for the second time. Jeff’s an undeniably talented creator, though, a fact I became wise to the moment I played Exile III in the late ’90s. I could have written this about any of Spiderweb
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2002
If you know me or digitaleidoscope at all, you may be surprised that not a single Metroid game has appeared on this list yet. Metroid is my favorite videogame franchise, and by the 2000s a good portion of the series was already released. The first game hit in 1986, followed by Metroid II in 1991 and what most people would consider Metroid’s peak, Super Metroid, in 1994. Truth is that I almost completely missed out on all the Metroid games during my childhood, and didn’t get into the series until Other M was already on the horizon. An old friend finally convinced me around 2010 that
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2001
Hey! Do you like anime?! Bungie sure does! There was a time, long long ago, when Bungie made things other than Halo and Destiny games. The most well-known is Marathon; but the best… is Oni. I feel like everyone in the US collectively discovered anime around the same time, just before the turn of the century. Bungie certainly did, because Oni is the most anime shit ever made. It’s a third-person action game (I think the kids call them “character action” games now?) where everything is anime-stylized, the plot is ripped off big time from Ghost in the Shell, and… well, it’s called Oni! It’s
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2000
Diablo II is a lot of things to me. In late 2000 I’d just upgraded from the old family computer to a brand new one I got for my 13th birthday, and Diablo II was among the first games I installed on it. My brother had found the CD abandoned in the college computer lab he worked-studied in, and decided to give it to me. The expansion pack, Lord of Destruction, was the first game I bought with my own money, after I convinced my sister to drive me to the store so I could get it without my parents knowing. A
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1999
In the very early 1990s, Sierra owned a chat room… online gambling… games service… thing called ImagiNation Network. I have no idea what any of the games on ImagiNation Network were called, but one of them was a multiplayer RPG that made me aware for the first time of the possibility of worlds inhabited by other real people. I didn’t actually play one of those multiplayer games until the The Realm, an awesome 1996 multi-user dungeon my brothers and I could only ever play using the free trial, so we were forever creating our characters anew when the trial expired every 30 days. In the
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1998
Now for something completely different. So far we’ve only talked about games that, in some form or another, I love. Today, we’ve got something different. Are you one of the countless folks who consider themselves fans of the 1998 FPS Unreal? Awesome! I’m really glad you do! I, on the other hand, absolutely hate it. The beauty, though, is that we can disagree about that and still get along, right? All signs pointed to my becoming a megafan of Unreal. I had already played Unreal Tournament and thought it was the greatest multiplayer FPS I’d ever seen. I had — and have always
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1997
1997’s “game” is a late entry on this list. If you looked at the thumbnail previews before today, you might have been able to identify a screencap from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, which is most certainly not what is pictured in the banner above. I wanted desperately to feature Turok as a part of this retrospective, as a game very dear to my heart, and one of the first I can recall that was a real social gaming experience. I didn’t own it, so I was forced to go to friends’ houses and play, and those friends and I spent many
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1996
1996. Enter WarCraft II. Or… more specifically, WarCraft II‘s map editor. Or even more specifically, the map editor for WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal — the expansion to the original game, which was the version of it that I owned. Beyond the Dark Portal came out in 1996, a year after OG WarCraft II, which conveniently allows me to sneak it onto this list! I’ve told this story a little out of order. The journey that started as a taste of creation in the early 1990s with SimCity — and ultimately led to creating full game mods in the 2000s with Doom — was