I have always been a nerdy stoner kid—now, I’m a nerdy stoner adult. When I was a kid, we were pretty poor and I didn’t have many friends, but my Mom always had two jobs and there were two times a year that she would make sure I got a special present. Every birthday and Christmas, she would go out of her way to get me what I really wanted: Air Jordans and video games. The Air Jordans were to help me get friends and the video games were for when the Air Jordans didn’t work. I am exactly the right age to have watched the video game industry go from an indistinct vague novelty market to a juggernaut of financial power. Video games are now a huge, multi-billion dollar industry and "nerd" is now the new "cool." I have played thousands of games over my life and currently have several hundred in my collection. So, here is my list of the best games ever made. It’s probably different from yours, but you don’t have a monthly article, so you don’t get to tell us what you think. If you’d have made better choices, you’d have a list too, sucka.
The Zelda franchise has touched millions of lives and several generations of gamers. My connection with Zelda goes all the way back to when I was four years old—it was the first game I ever beat, and also, it was the first and last game I ever played with my father. My dad was a drunk and shitty father—he was abusive and when he wasn’t abusing us, he was ignoring us. But, there was one week during the mid-eighties, where we both had the flu. During that week, we sat in matching ’80s Lazy Boys, ate soup, threw up and played Zelda. The Legend Of Zelda was a real adventure, where you could explore and discover the world of the game. It taught you how to be successful—subtly and beautifully. It was the very first game where the choices you made early in the game affected how hard the end was. It is still the best memory I have with a game and one of the very few good memories I have with my dad.
This game was fucking harder than a titty in winter. One of the reasons depressed people like video games, is that they give a sense of accomplishment. And, it turns out that your brain doesn’t care what makes the chemicals release, just that they do. In the eighties, Nintendo couldn’t make games that were hundreds of hours long, so they made them "Nintendo hard." If you can’t make em’ long, make them impossible. This was how you got value out of a game back then. It took me the better part of a year to beat this game. It is solely responsible for me learning that Nintendo controllers were indestructible. Imagine being my Mom and hearing "FUCK!" come out of a five-year-old, followed by SLAM as the controller contacts with the wall. The thing that kept me going back to that game was that it was really good. The controls did what they should, and when you died, you didn’t feel like it was the game’s fault. You just had to get good. [ED: And buy a copy of Nintendo Power to figure out how to squat next to that wall during the storm, in order to progress to the next level.]
It was June 2, 1990, when I turned eight years old and got a Super Nintendo for my birthday. I will never forget how it felt, to put Super Mario World in and turn it on the first time. These days when a console generation upgrades its graphics horsepower, it looks like a small improvement—it’s all about resolution and frame rate. Back in the day, though, it was about how the machine drew the graphics and how much data it had access to. A cartridge could only hold so much and the console could only draw what it could draw. The O.G. Nintendo was fucking awesome compared to the Atari 2600 and the Super Nintendo was exactly what it said. A super fucking Nintendo. Mario was brighter, more colorful and smoother than we had ever seen him. And, of course, he was brought to us in obsessive Nintendo perfection. I have probably beaten Super Mario World a hundred times in my life. It will always be familiar and fun.
I was 15 years old when GoldenEye came out and I tasted my first real first-person shooter—now, we could really step into the perspective of our character in the game. I know that FPS games existed before this one, but those games were either on the PC or terrible console ports of them. And, to be completely honest, we were too poor for a computer in our house back then. GoldenEye brought me and my friends together in a basement, every single day, for a long time. We would just smoke weed and murder each other for hours. We’d stay up all night laughing and talking shit. It was the first time in my life that I had a real set of friends. Video games had grown and matured, and instead of simply being a way to heal from loneliness, they became how we related to each other. We were gamers and while we were in that basement, we weren’t gangsters or criminals in the streets. We could still be kids.
I didn’t play a lot of games between 1997 and 2001. During that time, I was basically doing criminal shit. I ended up going to prison for a while when I was 19 and I got out late 2001. Sometime around 2002, I got my first apartment that wasn’t provided by the state and got my very own XBOX. The only game I bought was Halo: Combat Evolved, or what most people call Halo 1. This was the next time my fucking mind was blown by how beautiful a game was. I played Halo and only Halo for five years, during which time I was on house arrest, so I played a lot. I played the first one until Halo 2 came out. When Halo 2 came out, I made my next big step in life. I got high-speed internet at my house. Then, I played Halo online multi-player. About that time, I met my next group of friends. We played Halo together, just like my friends and I played GoldenEye together. The difference was, we were adults now. Then, Halo 3 was released. By the time Halo 3 came out, I was really really fucking good at Halo—with this most perfectly made game ever, I became competitive. We would drive around to play in tournaments and we’d play in tournaments online. We created a clan and were ranked in the top 100 teams in the world. We were, for a brief time, nerd royalty. People would tell their friends when they got matched with us online. The internet had shown us, that you can get really popular if you’re a giant fucking nerd on house arrest. I still have old videos of me playing saved on YouTube. Halo 3 is the best game from the best franchise ever made.
Do you love games too? Do you have your own top-five-games-of-all-time list? I love hearing from all my gaming brothers and sisters on my Twitter, where I tell jokes and talk about shit including video games and game collecting. Feel free to hit me up there (@NextGenRetro1) or via electronic mail at NextGenerationRetro@Gmail.com.
