10 Videogames That Changed My Life

There’s this list meme that’s going on in Facebook lately, and someone asked me for my own. I’ve had a hard time putting this together because frankly I’ve played a lot of games in my life, and 10 seems to be too few to list. It took a while to distill, but here’s what I’ve come up with.

Super Mario World #

If I recall correctly this was the first videogame I played. Definitely not the oldest, but arguably one of the most influential of all time. I’d spend hours on this, and it was the first game I ever really beat. In those days, there was no GameFAQs.com and PRIMA Strategy Guides were expensive as hell, so I felt really proud about finding out how to access The Special Zone, and even more so for discovering how to unlock Top Secret Area. Up to now, I still remember many levels like the back of my hand. In my mind, it’s the pinnacle of game design and it’s the benchmark against which I hold my own games.

Super Mario Kart #

Let it be known that “Nintendo Kid” does not equate “Non-competitive.” Super Mario Kart taught me about rivalry, strategy, grudges, trash-talking, cheating, and how to win - and lose - against another human being. If I taught about videogames, I’d make Super Mario Kart a requirement for learning how to take defeat like a champ and how to be a graceful victor, all within the ordered chaos of a game’s rules.

The Secret of Monkey Island #

Yeah, I played Loom, Day of the Tentacle, and Dig. All were great, but none made me laugh as much as Monkey Island. With a protagonist named Guybrush Threepwood, how could you go wrong? I remember spending hours at a time just figuring out puzzles, learning how to think with the absurd kind of logic it took to create a game like this, and above all, memorizing insult swordfighting. I’ve yet to come across a game that featured a dueling system as enjoyable as TSMI’s.

Final Fantasy Tactics #

This game was my chess, and the probably the first where I really got into metagaming. Even when I was out and away from the console, I’d be thinking about job combinations, party configurations, equipment builds, and all sorts of theorycrafting. If Super Mario Kart taught me about strategy, FFT taught me about optimization. I believe the lessons I learned thanks to this game have influenced the way I play every game since, including Dungeons and Dragons.

Super Smash Brothers #

We all have wondered this before. Who’d win, Batman or Superman? Jet Li or Jackie Chan? Godzilla or King Kong? Whoever the combatants, the question of “who would win in a fight” is never far from the back of anybody’s mind. For me, it was between Yoshi and Pikachu. SSB fulfilled so many dreams I never even knew I had, and it was the first game I felt really comfortable with playing against other people. It taught me how to not take thing too personally, to just relax and have fun winning or losing.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time #

If ever there was a piece of fiction that made me want to learn more about the world it took place in, it’s The Legend of Zelda. Its history, lore, characters, races, gods, and everything else about it completely captivated me. Every time I played it, the game would reveal just a little tiny bit about the world, and I swear if Wikipedia had been invented at the time this came out I’d spend all our dial-up minutes on it. LoZ got me so into worldbuilding, at one point I attempted to make a Zelda-themed roleplaying system.

Half-Life #

My first FPS, or at least the first one I consider worth remembering. I can describe it as being terrifying, exhilarating, frustrating, and ultimately satisfying enough to have cemented the genre as my new favorite one. Many of my favorite games after Half Life are first person shooters - Counterstrike, Quake II, Team Fortress 1 & 2, Rainbow Six/GRAW/SWAT4, Left 4 Dead, Borderlands 1 & 2, Battlefield: 1942/BC2, Star Wars: Battlefront II, and more - and countless hours of my life have been spent behind the 3D model of a gun pointed dead center at the screen.

SimCity 2000 #

Nothing, not even the sequels of this series, has compared to the original feeling of being able to build my own city from nothing but a power plant, a few roads, and small plots of residential, commercial, and industrial zones, into a successfully self-sustaining metropolis. And then letting lose a volcano, meteor, or monster right in the middle of it all

SimCopter #

Well, nothing except flying through that very same city that I just made in a helicopter. Seriously, this has got to be one of the most underrated mindblow of the 90’s and arguably the early 2000’s. You could make your own city, and then drive or fly through the neighborhoods you built. I’m still waiting for the inevitable combination of SimCity and The Sims, complete with drivable vehicles. You can’t tell me this is an impossibility now when Maxis gave me a taste of it in 1996.

Terraria #

Though lately I’ve become enamored with Starbound, I do have to pay respects to the game that made it possible. Even though Terraria followed Minecraft’s footsteps in the whole build-it-yourself sandbox craze, it was the first game that did it with style. Exploration and discovery was as big a part of Terraria as building and survival was, and there were certain intagibles that made this game all the more memorable for me.