We all have that one game that holds a special place in our hearts. What game is it for you?
For me, it’s Metal Slug. Growing up, every Monday, my parents would drag me to the laundromat after work. As a kid, it was a pretty boring, but I had my toys, origami books, and coloring books to keep me entertained. However, my favorite thing to do was playing the Metal Slug arcade machine with my dad.
My dad was great at the game, and he taught me how to play. Though I improved, I could never keep up. When I’d inevitably die, he’d let me take over his side to let me have a bit more playtime. My favorite part was when he’d share stories from when he lived in another country and would go to the local arcade.
Those moments are cherished memories, and even today, whenever I visit an arcade, Metal Slug is the first game I play, despite still being terrible at it haha
Honorable mention goes to Mario 64, another game that holds a special place in my heart. I got an N64 from a garage sale, and playing Mario 64 while at home, with my mom’s “chore” music in the background ignited my love for gaming
So many.
Doom, the og, first FPS… we had Wolfenstein 3D before that but it always felt like it was a demo of something to come for me. Doom felt like it stood on its own. I couldn’t play it at home, had to go to a friend’s house to play, for two reasons. 1. I couldn’t run it, and 2. My parents were kinda uptight… they loosened up over the years, but it kept me from a lot of good stuff.
Quake was the next one up really land at least on PC… we had a lab of Pentium computers at school that were all networked with what I now know is called 10Base5 or 10base2 (not sure which)… it was the first “real” network we experienced, and it was great. At the time those premiums were basically brand new, state of the art machines… the teacher was cool enough to let us use the lab to play quake over the lunch hour sometimes… so we had quake LAN parties over lunch.
On PC, there were a lot of greats, but nothing too groundbreaking until half-life… but I’m guessing most people experienced that. I’ll give an honorable mention to unreal and unreal tournament as well (every version). Bluntly, UT was significantly better than quake arena.
We had a short list of consoles over the years. But I have to take my hat off for final Fantasy (either 3 or 6, whatever you want to call it, the one on the SNES)… which I was obsessed with for a while there. We only had three consoles over the years that I recall… the NES, SNES, and genesis. After that, we couldn’t continue to convince my parents to keep buying consoles. I eventually picked up a PlayStation, but that was a long time later.