No wonder games – and the memories of them – have sustained me so long. The skies are always azure blue, the horrors always escapable, the inhabitants ever-present and compliant. You don’t need much more to be there again.Īnd while real-life memories are often complicated, ambiguous and partial, video game recollections bring us worlds unclouded by nagging doubts. You can recall the whole sense of it in a moment, a flash of movement, a line of dialogue, a world opening up around a corner, a spaceship landing. Video games are comfortable with that – you don’t have to remember whole levels, or boss fights or 20-minute cinematic cut scenes for a game to have meaning. Your first kiss might not even have been your first. The first thing you remember as a child may never really have happened. Our memories aren’t really true, of course – we construct and reconstruct them as we go, like scenes from a play continually being rewritten. The errors, the mistakes, the glitches in the matrix stick with us because they remind us how fallible and fragile everything is. This happens for the same reason we remember falling off our bikes, or that one really wet holiday where everyone caught colds. When you crash into a shop-front during a GTA Online heist, or lob a grenade that bounces right back at you in Call of Duty. We also remember imperfect, bug-ridden games or our own hilarious failures better than completely polished moments. Photograph: Creative Assembly/Sega/Feral Interactive/Steam They exist apart from the source material.įearsome … Alien Isolation. Those could be moments from Skyrim or Cyberpunk or Soul Reaver or Shadow of Mordor.
Neon signs above endless cityscapes castle towers looming over craggy mountains a precise combination of button presses to bring a sword swirling through flesh and bone. God knows how many alien worlds I’ve seen, how many dungeons I’ve explored, how many armies I’ve eviscerated – they merge into haunting collages. Games are kind of like dreams as far as the human memory is concerned – they punctuate real life with weird fantasy worlds, and the images we retain don’t always make sense. I remember, several years later, that same son playing Minecraft for the first time, and how it brought him out of himself, like a bulb switching on. Playing Sega’s The Rub Rabbits! on my Nintendo DS, but only because it was in the middle of the night, sitting with my wife as she fed our first son. Playing Bomberman with my pal Nick when I’d just started on Edge magazine and I was sad and homesick. Playing Leader Board and Sonic the Hedgehog with my dad. What strikes me now is how I tend to remember the things around games more often than the games themselves. For me, Alien Isolation ( pictured below) is just hours of staring through the grills of a locker door as something hideous stalked by. I loved the Silent Hill games but what do I remember of them? Swirling fog and rising dread. It worked, didn’t it? Some game developers concentrate on atmosphere rather than narrative images. Those memories were carefully manufactured for us, but does that make them less valid? I don’t think so. The No Russian scene in Modern Warfare 2, the giraffes in The Last of Us, the handholding in Ico. Throughout the 2000s, as games began to become more cinematic, designers began to craft memorable set-pieces, like film directors. Those moments you open a new door in the Resident Evil mansion and a scene of opulent horror oozes out, as bright and icky as decaying fruit.įun for the whole family … Space Invaders. Climbing that first wall in Tomb Raider and stumbling into the cavern network beyond. Spinning through a curve in Colin McRae Rally and seeing the muddy countryside rolling out in front of me. To me, the PlayStation/Saturn era is about glimpses of worlds opening up.
Little snatches of innovation that took my breath away. The voice synthesis at the start of Ghostbusters, the knocking at the spaceship door in Rescue on Fractalus!, the microchip mini-game in Paradroid. My memories of Commodore 64 games are similarly fractured. Playing Space Invaders somewhere – in a pub? A chippy? I remember the first alien laser blast hitting one of my forcefield defences – a memory I possibly share with Hideo Kojima: he said those very shields gave him the idea for making a stealth game. Seeing Pong on a neighbour’s TV, courtesy of a Grandstand 2000 console – I guess that would have been the late 1970s. Sitting on a bus home that evening, I tried to recall my actual real first memories of them. I t occurred to me recently that I’ve been playing video games for more than 40 years.
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