Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 399: Formative Gaming Experiences

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

The Retronauts East crew gets together again for the first (and last?!) time since last year's lockdown to talk about the only topic that truly matters: The games that got us hooked on the hobby. It's a little bit about history, and a lot about love. Edits by Greg Leahy; art by John Pading. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, we take it back to the beginning. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I don't know what number of this episode is going to be because it's not actually on the schedule. It's going to just, it's going to slide into the scheduled DMs, just, you know, in a sort of shifty, shady kind of way. Because that's what we do.

We're here as Retronauts. Retronauts East. I am Jeremy Parrish. Did I say that before? I might have who else is here to take up the slack for me because I'm already, I feel weird not talking directly into a microphone or trying the socially distance pandemic lav mic setup where we can all sit like six feet apart

instead of being up in each other's faces for when we take, you know, retronauts on the road in the future. And yeah, I feel like I need a microphone directly in front of me to focus. Otherwise, I'm just like, I'm just having a conversation. This is terrible. It's already off to a terrible start. Yeah. Save me, binge. I'm Benj Edwards.

I was just saying it's funny. This whole podcast is resting on your shoulders. Yeah, we, it's funny because now it's like we actually have to talk to each other. I know, right? The microphone in front of us. Yeah, we have these lapel mic, so anyway. Ben Edwards and... Ben Elgin.

Yeah, first time using these new mics. I mean, I got used to, I finally got used to, like, the webcast mic that I had for the pandemic, but it's not here anymore. And finally. I'm Kristen, and this ain't my first rodeo. So you're comfortable with this. You're going to be your usual self. What else could I possibly be?

I don't know. It's been more than a year and a half since we have recorded together in person. It's been a minute. No, actually, it's been quite a bit longer than that. 18 months, actually. Oh, you're doing the millennial zoomer thing. Yeah, that's me. That's you.

Good old Zoomer Chris. We're all Zoomers these days. This is the first Retronuts episode we've recorded. not on Zoom in a very long time. And as such, this may also, I don't know, this may be the last time Retronauts East is able to record in person like this as well. So with that in mind, I wanted to throw aside

the plan that we had for this episode, which was to talk about a specific game and collection and history, and just go kind of casual. And talk about us, basically. I'd like for us to talk about the games that turned us into people who like video games. Our favorite games and the games that we first encountered

when we were but tiny children and made us say, ah, this is it, this is what I want to do. I want to play video games. With that said, I feel like that's pretty much what the past 15 years of retronauts has been for me. So I don't know that I necessarily need to go into a lot of detail about this, but I would love you gentlemen to share your recollections. And also I put out a call on Twitter for people to write in.

I thought, you know, it's a day before the recording. I'm probably not going to get a lot of responses. But I was mistaken, and we got something like 35. So we're going to kind of interweave community responses with our own comments and just kind of make a casual hour and a half of it, if that works for you guys. Sounds great to me. So with that said, let me ask you. Chris Sims, who is authentic and has been to many rodeos before.

Correct. What was the first video game you played where you said, Damn, this is it. This is the thing. You know, I've been thinking about that since we decided we were going to do this as the topic. And it's really tough for me to figure it out. Because as a kid, like, I mean, I made the joke earlier that we're all of the age where it's just like, yeah, I'm Super Mario Brothers. That's the end.

But there's a lot of truth to that. for me because I remember playing my aunt and uncles Nintendo as a kid and then they wound up getting me one for Christmas, I think, the year that I moved to South Carolina after my parents got divorced. So I was really looking for something to fill a void in my life at the age of five. And that, I think, like, Super Mario Brothers and like seeing all that there was to see, and it really did do something. But the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized that it wasn't

as much a specific game as it was Nintendo Power. Because that would be what I would get in the mail, and then I would go to the rental store every week, because we didn't really own that many games for the NES when I was a kid. We had Mario

Brothers, we had Tetris, we had Dr. Mario, and I got a copy of Tiger Heliot at a flea market. And I'm pretty sure that's all I ever owned. for NES, but I played everything by running it on a Friday after school and then read everything in Nintendo Power. And that's how I missed out on playing, like, Metroid until I was an adult, because I could never, like, it predated Nintendo Power.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would have occasional, like, here is a secret tip for Metroid, but the actual coverage of Metroid predates Nintendo Power, yeah. Yeah. And when I think about the games that I really loved, like, like Mega Man and Mega Man 2, Megaman 3 and DuckTales, which I've talked about as being like one of my all-time

favorites and one of the all-time best games. Like the memories that I have are often, like for Mega Man, it's less playing Mega Man and more reading that one Howard and Nestor where Howard put an arm cannon on. And I was like, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. A man with a bow tie and a hand and an arm cannon. Shooting needles out of it. Fonkers. Amazing.

so thinking about that and like I used to get the special strategy guide that you could get as a subscriber where it had like all the Mega Man games all those, all the games and those were gorgeous there was a Mario one yeah I love those I've still got them somewhere just pouring over those maps

like Star Tropic was in there which I tried to play when I got the NES Classic and I was like had to be there thinking about this is a lot better than playing it So for me, that was it. And then as it progressed, the more I started thinking about it, the more I was like, oh, that was probably also my first real exposure to manga when they got Shatari Ishinamori,

the creator of Common Writer, to do The Legend of Zalda comic. And that great Mario Brothers comic that also ran for Mario World, it was a big part of my childhood just reading that magazine and then playing the games associated with it. The games were never not there, but in a lot of ways I feel like they were secondary to the experience of knowing about things, which I feel like has been a definite pattern throughout my life of wanting to know everything about something. don't know if the Nintendo Power experience you're speaking about is something that can really be explained to kids growing up now because we have so much access to any kind of media, any kind of information, like we just go online and it's there. And you know, you're talking about wanting to know everything about something. There are sites just dedicated to like,

what is the thing you want to know about? Do you want to know about S&K fighting games? Well, here is a networked wiki that just has every possible bit of information about these games you can imagine. That did not exist at the time. So, you know, getting these magazines, especially Nintendo Power, because it was so focused on just Nintendo stuff and just on, really on the, like, the games that they said, these are going to be big, we should really promote these. There was, yeah, there was something very immersive about the, you know, just pouring over those magazines and looking at those hand-drawn or screenshot maps and just imagining yourself playing the games.

And sometimes the games did not live up to that. Yeah, Castlevania, too, was not that good, actually. Like, I was thinking more of games where, like, the jump physics are really bad. So you look and you're like, oh, that looks so cool. But then you play it and it's actually kind of miserable. Yeah. So there were kind of like the games we invented in our heads. And then when something came along that was actually as good as that, it was great.

It was like, hey, this is, this is exactly what I thought it would be, or better. I did not expect this. It's wonderful. Yeah, I felt betrayed by Nintendo Power several times because of that. Because I would rush out and rent the latest cover game. And I remember something like Bayou Billy or something was not that great. You know, I rented, that was on the cover one time, and I was sort of disappointed with that. I had that experience.

They had some of the, you know, it wasn't always, and I hated how they'd use licensed games, which I really didn't like that much. I don't remember what in particular, but, you know, some movie license or some cartoon license or something. Those games, to me, weren't as high quality as some of the other games out there. And did you have that Black Players Guide, the Nintendo Players Guide? I've got one down at the office right now. I love that. That was like my Bible because you could, it had maps in it and everything, and it just had all the games and a big list.

And it did have that sense of you could know everything about. this platform in one place. And at that time, it was relatively comprehensive because this is like really early in the Nintendo's lifespan. But, yeah, I mean, I had the Nintendo Power experience, too. We had it since issue one. My brother

got the Nintendo Fun Club News or whatever. Is that what it was called? The Precursor. The Fun Club News. Fun Club News. We got a couple issues of that when he subscribed, and then it switched over the Nintendo Power. And, yeah,

it was amazing. I don't know what it was about it. I think you just have to be that age where you can absorb and imagine anything, and it's very real to you when you see illustrations and they get translated in your brain to really visceral, real things. And there's something about, I don't know how, like, what's that thing where you feel or like you see colors or you, I mean, you see, you see, you see colors, you see colors, you see sounds, are you hear? Yeah, synesthesia. You know, whatever, yeah, synesthesia. I may have been a little bit like that when I was a kid, because I remember. looking at the pixel art in that black players guide and sort of like feeling the texture

of those images almost and I thought it just felt good you know somehow and I love the black box designs with the pixel things and how they're uniform anyway yeah like digging into the players guys and stuff it was it was our generation's wiki diving basically like even if it was something where you knew you were never going to actually get and play this game it was cool just to read about it and to explore its world without even having to you know invest in that game you still get to like see what's there and just and go exploring with the maps and stuff you know it's the same kind of impulse that like as a kid I would pull like a natural history book off the shelf and just look at animals and places and stuff and it's the same thing but for someone else's fantasy

world yeah and I would I in my experience today's children kids these days still still have that drive that desire to learn about a thing to experience a thing without actually participating in it Like, I have a nephew who really loves Minecraft, but he doesn't play it nearly as much as he just watches Minecraft videos online or, you know, Five Nights at Freddy's or Undertail or whatever. It was, it was like a year before he played Undertale, but he knew everything about it because he watched all these Undertale videos and fan theories and things like that. Like, he played the music live at a concert on drums. And I think, you know, that was before he actually had access to the game. So, so, yeah, like that still exists. like things still spark that imagination and and drive kids to want to know more about it,

to want to make that a part of their world as part of themselves, even if they don't necessarily have access to it. So I think, you know, our experiences are still, as I think about it, relatable. I was just going to say it's a good point that it's not just our wiki, but also our Twitch because this was basically the closest you would get to like a lot of these in-depth articles in Nintendo Power and the Players Guide was basically as close as you get to watching someone else, like, play the first quarter of the game. Howard Nester was a, like, a pair of frenemies doing a let's play?

Doing couch commentary, yeah. How has Nester not come back as a Twitchsar? Oh, God, yeah. V-Tuber? Yeah, he should. He should be a V-tuber. I mean, he would be. It was also for me, like, a very economical way of experiencing the most that I could.

Like, because, again, I feel like, there. There is such a hard divide culturally between, like, people who grew up and didn't have the internet until later in life and had, like, blockbuster versus people who didn't. And you would go to the video rental place on a Friday. And you'd essentially get, like, one movie and one game. And you had that for the weekend. That was your weekend. So if you got a bad game, you would just play it because that's what you had for that weekend. I had a friend who sometimes rented two games at a time.

Why? I was like, you are out of control. What are you doing? He an oil baron. But reading Nintendo Power, you... Obviously, if you got the good game, you would want to run again next week, right? But if you had Nintendo Power, you could read about all the other games and have that imagination experience. And, like you said, have the experience of...

experiencing media without indirectly, which I think is something that has carried through, not just culturally with younger people these days getting into Twitch, but, like, also me as an adult. Like, am I literally ever going to play Toki-Mecke Memorial in my life? No, absolutely not. I feel like I would hate it. Have I watched a five-hour YouTube video about Toki-Mecan Memorial? Yes, I have multiple times. I'd like to have it on one more.

I grew up watching my brother play games, too, because he's five years old than I am. And that was like my Twitch. So I experienced a lot of games just watching them. And I felt like I was playing and taking part because I'd suggest things, like, go this way, do that. Here's how you solve that puzzle and stuff. It felt like playing it to me, which is funny. So it was like Twitch plays Pokemon, but yeah, a little, like you could actually reach out and slap them. Yeah, and that was also the, like, college dorm experience for me is that, and that would be, like, Nintendo 64 PlayStation era, but we had, like, different things set up in different people's rooms.

And I definitely, like, watched other people playing stuff at least as much as I actually played things. I feel like all of us probably had the experience of being friends with a classmate that we didn't necessarily like. but who did have that oil barren money to own video games? I did. Maybe I'm a bad person or was when I was 10. It's relatable. But I do feel like that was, and I don't mean this in like a gatekeepery way, but like an obsessive way.

Like that I feel like was the dividing line between the ubiquity of the NES and being someone who was like into this like Ersat's culture of like, oh, this is going to be a thing that I'm going to do for the rest of my life. Very much like with comics, very much like with wrestling, all the other like subcultures that I ended up gravitating to as a kid, largely because they were full of stuff that I knew, and I've talked about this with the X-Men. I had the feeling when I was a kid,

oh, I'm never going to understand this because there's always going to be too much of it for me to get my head around. And that was very appealing for me because I would always be able to learn new stuff. And I felt that way with video games, and I felt that way with pro wrestling, and I felt that way with comics. In terms of actual games where I'm like,

oh, this is what did it. Again, I'm sorry to be like super basic about it, but it kind of is the one-two punch of Mario 3 and Mario World. Those were the games that I had. Like I did own Mario 3. Never on Mario 2, but I did own 1 and 3.

You jump straight from Tiger Heli to Mario 3. Exactly. If you get good at one, you'll be great at the other. They're almost the same game, really. Tiger Heli is not cited as an influence on Mario 3 as often as it should be. You know, in Yoshi, Super Mario World, too, Yoshi's Island, there's a helicopter stage. That's true.

You could play that for a while. But I think Nintendo repeated the same mistake a couple times in its Lifesanus Company, which is that the best game for A system was the one that came with it. And they did that with the Super Nintendo, and they did that with the Wii. Where, why aren't people buying more games? Well, you gave them Mario World. And they're... That's why you had to buy Mario 64

separately. Yeah. That is. That is exactly the thing. But yeah, like, I feel like those games are so good. And also, I, you know, Mario 3 was like a cultural event. And I got that one. And then Mario World came with the Super Nintendo and I would rent, you know, games.

But that was the one that I had at home. Like, if we had a summer where money was a little too tight to go rent video games every week, I just played Mario World until I could do. do it blindfolded, you know, like all 96 with the little star. I did, I remember memorizing many of the stages in Mario World and playing them over and over again and just trying to do it perfectly sometimes because I did have had nothing else to play. As an adult, um, either on an emulator, but I think it was when I got the S&ES classic.

Like I went to the, uh, the special stages and I was like, I was like, oh, I could do these when I was a kid. And it was hard, but I could do it. And as an adult, I'm like, It's been an hour. I'm not through tubular yet I'm done. I do not have the reaction time for the patients for this. You know, it's really weird. When I go back and play games from when I was a kid, sometimes games that I thought were really hard back then.

I'm just like, oh, this is nothing. This is easy. Like, this is so easy. And others that I thought were pretty easy. I'm like, what was I on? What kind of drugs was I taking? Like Battletoads, I can't do that. Ninja Guy didn't.

too. I destroyed in a weekend rental. But now I go back and play Ninja Guide in, too, and I'm like, oh, how is this humanly possible? What's wrong with me? But then, you know, there are other games where I go back and I'm like, why did I think this was so hard? This is nothing. It's really weird. So I actually just got my hands on a super NT recently. So I busted out my super Nintendo collection. Of course, the first thing we popped in with Super Mario World, started playing two-player back and forth co-op. And it's still a lot of fun. But it is really interesting like what what muscle memory comes back and what you remember and what trips you up there's definitely some stuff the breeze through and other stuff i'm like wait what what's going on here

okay this is funny uh i have you know i have two kids and i think i've joked about in another episode where i would ground my kids and then force them only to play retro games or something well last year i tried that um they were playing something for too long like minecraft 10 hours a day i'm like you got to stop for a while and take a break in but you can play i'm gonna hook up an N.S. in your room and you can play it as much as you want, you know. And so I got Super Mario Bros. 3 on there, and I was showing my kids

how to play it, and they're like, Dad, you know where everything is. How the hell do you know where that is? Like the secret blocks and this, whatever. I'm like, you have no idea. We played this over and over again for years. You know, this is what we did back then. And so they were impressed, so I got to

show off my skills. Finally a hero to your kids. Yeah. That's what it takes to bridge the generational, generational divide. They couldn't fathom that I knew all those things and remembered them. Even Super Mario where there's one. I mean, just where the secret, like where the star is, you know. The one-up mushroom right to start. Yeah.

The ghost houses and Mario were of a really dividing point. I'd get in one of those and I'd be like, okay, wait, I remember the trick to get to the regular exit, but where the heck was the other exit? I don't know. Like, every other game that I can think of as being a favorite that came out later, like, I don't think I would have loved as much if I hadn't loved those first, and if I hadn't been obsessed with the reading about them first, which then, you know, turned into, in the late 90s, getting into reading about video games online, which turned into buying a copy of The Anatomy of Castlevania, which turned into me sitting in this chair.

So it's a pretty direct line, honestly, from Howard... Mario 3 to this episode. from Howard Phillips putting on that arm cannon to me sitting in your living room. Fair enough. All right, so that was Chris Sims' thoughts. Now I'm going to read a few letters. just to kind of leaven things a little. Not that this has been heavy,

but you know what I mean, just to kind of mix things up. From Pete Shoemate, the game that made me fall in love with games was, surprisingly, the Atari 2,600 version of Pac-Man. I know now that it isn't good or even tolerable by most standards,

but it was the first game my dad and I played together. We played together on Sunday mornings before church. The game allowed me to spend time with my dad and introduced me to the joy of sharing games with people. There's a lot to be said for context, even if the game isn't that good. It really is. Like, there are, we've already talked about it. There are favorite games from when I was a kid that I have gone back to and been like, oh, this is bad.

But, like, the memories I have of it. Like, WCWNWO Revenge on the N64, not a great game, especially compared to the stuff that came out, like, immediately after. But the summer that I spent playing that every day. While also listening to a Sam Kinnison album over and over, that was a weird month of my life, let me tell you. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of this really corny habit my father-in-law has. Whenever we eat out, and it's a really nice meal, and if someone says, I hope you liked the meal, he always says the meal was okay, but the company was better. it's hokey but like I get the sentiment behind it I feel the same as true with video games

like playing a game with the right people and in the right circumstances can make it seem like it's there's something more than what's actually there and that I think is the the core to the popularity of stuff like let's plays and stuff like Twitch streaming is that it's that parasocial

hangout where I wasn't thinking that necessarily I was thinking like actually hanging out with friends Yeah, no, but, like, but, you know, especially over, you know, in the past year, Jim, I don't know if you know, it's been a hard year. It has been a little rough. Like, I, I feel like that, that parisocial aspect. I don't know, like, can't be understated.

I have a comment on that a little bit, which is that the idea of which games are good and bad is a new thing, like, well, new as in the last 15 to 20 years. Before that, when we didn't have this universal place where everyone could go read about what games everybody thought were the worst and stuff. So when I came, when the internet, you know, the web was coming out and stuff, there were no websites where people were talking about this stuff, really. And then funnel it, I think one of the defining moments was reading one of Sean Baby's websites, which I mentioned several times, and how he hated on Deadly Towers, for example.

And I love Deadly Towers. I mean, it's a terrible game, but I love playing it. And so just having someone out there cementing that idea in the culture, that other people could access, that sort of spreads and makes Deadly Tower, quote, a bad game. And the same with Pac-Man and all that stuff. That didn't, you know, lots of people loved Atari 2,600 Pac-Man. A lot of people loved it. There were bad reviews of it. It was not a great port.

But I had, so my brother's friends loved playing Pac-Man on the 2600, because they didn't know any better, and they were just, they loved having the experience of playing that at home on the only console they had. And so it wasn't until, you know, some writer or historian came along and wrote down that, oh, Pac-Man is why Atari. It's probably Stephen Kent. Folded. Yeah, it's either Stephen Kent or Leonard Herman or something.

You know, one of those Phoenix rise and fall Atari kind of things. You know, those are just cultural ideas. Everything is an idea. Like, I have an opinion on a game. I'll write it down and it becomes other people repeat it and spread it. And that's just an idea. It doesn't mean it's true. You know, so whatever you love and whatever you enjoy it,

is your truth, and that's fine. I don't know. I think, and Jeremy, I don't want to speak for you as a professional critic, but no, I think those are completely accurate and objective truths that everyone should pay attention to and go to Patreon and support monetarily. Yeah, the phenomenon you're talking about is something I definitely experience a lot with my YouTube videos. Whenever I cover an NES game that the angry video game nerd has produced a content about

saying, this is the worst game ever. Like, there's always just a stream of people coming in who, I have to assume they just click around YouTube looking for games that the Angry Video Game Nerd has panned so they can go to those videos and just repeat his jokes and, like, basically rehash everything that he said, which, you know, like, he has a thing and it's funny and was successful for him. It's been successful for him for a long time. It's made him very well liked and very famous, and that's fine. I don't begrudge that.

But I do get frustrated by people who take what is very clearly meant to be a bit by him and are like, ah, yes, this is the objective truth about this video game. It is truly terrible. And I must, you know, venture around the internet. What's the opposite of white nighting for, you know, against this game? Just any time I see a video about it, I have to go comment on it and talk about how terrible it is and repeat jokes. Like, it's tiring. I'm sure you've had this happen to you, which is that sometimes, I mean, if you've been writing long enough, people come back and correct you with your own information that you introduced, and that's like crazy. That drives me insane, but it happens, you know, and I don't exactly get that, but I do get where I'm, you know, researching a topic for retronauts. And so I started the Wikipedia page just to like kind of get a baseline before branching out into other articles and videos and that sort of thing.

and I'll be like, okay, what are some references here? And it's like, oh, Jeremy Parrish, Jeremy Parrish, that's not helpful. I need some outside opinions. So you heard it here first, folks. Jeremy Parrish says, Jekyll and Hyde for NES, number one game of all time. Absolutely. So from PC98, Audi, for me, it would be another world known as out of the world back in the day. Prior to discovering it on the Amiga, I had played games on the NES, C-64 and MSX,

and obviously loved them and enjoyed all the various experiences across genres and platforms. But another world was the game that made me think very much beyond the screen, so to speak, by making immersing me into the world, making me analyze my surroundings in great detail. Imagine the society and history you never see. And the actual sense of friendship with Buddy, the alien, made me emotionally connect with the game, unlike any other before and in many ways since. I was about 10 or so when the game came out, but that was the game that made me decide I want to.

wanted to work with video games, and still to this day is the game I credit for actually achieving that goal. But the real answer is bubsy. So this actually cements a theory that I've had, which is that the greatest game of all time is whatever you played when you were nine or ten. And I think this conversation in these mailbags will bear this out. All right, I'm going to do one more here from Angel S. Here is a stupid story from a country where it was tough as balls to get video games

for a long time, especially original ones, especially if you didn't live in the capital. I was five to six years old, one day while playing in the yard of the kindergarten on the other side of its fence, there came two to three older kids with these notebooks over which they had scribbled arrows and letters. I kept hanging around them, but on my side of the fence, and of course, eavesdropping.

What I understood was that the scribbles were codes for a game called Mortal Kombat. Prior to that moment, I might have seen some computer games, Moon Patrol or something, played a bit of Tetris, but nothing so mysterious. So this memory of secrets, rumors, codes, and the act of knowledge being passed between the kids stayed with me for maybe a few years until I started going to school and next to it was a burger place with a Mortal Kombat 3 arcade. And I finally saw the thing that those codes were for. Of course I loved it. Of course, I was getting my ass kicked on the game because I was a kid and didn't have the cash for coins to practice because post-socialist

Europe, Eastern Europe in the 90s, not the richest years, you know. However, that stuck with me for another couple of years until I finally got a Sega Mega Drive, and my friends bought me a second-hand cartridge of Mortal Kombat 3. I'd literally spent most of my summers basically playing two-player mode alone, entering the combat codes for both players on my own

until I saw every single finishing move, every combo, every bullshit that was possible in the game. Sorry if this came in too long, but this is how a fire in my heart was sparked that still burns to this day, for better or for worse. Much love from Bulgaria. Very cool.

Yeah, codes are amazing, and the transfer of knowledge between kids, like tips and things. I may have told this story before, but when Mortal Kombat came out, I had a CompuServe account and people were posting the fatality things on there. So what I did is I would download them and then change, like I'd write some kind of pseudonym on it, like the Combat Master or whatever, and I'd print it out and take it to middle school and pretend I had thought them out. Or I had like an inside source, you know, from somebody else. and I was really popular for one year because of that.

This is like the same sort of thing we were just talking about and wanting to like explore all the things about a thing. Like I've never been that great at fighting games, but sometimes it's fun to just try out all the moves and see them and find all the combos and find all the special finishing moves and just even, you know, play against a two player that's not there like he was doing so you can just do them all and see them all and see all the cool things that are in this game that you might even not get to see if you were playing it for real

because someone would just kill you before you got there. Well, I think that letter also got back to what Chris was talking about with Nintendo Power and so forth of, like, not necessarily having access to a game, but being aware of it and being, like, fascinated with its mysteries and, you know, the arcane secrets that it holds, just, you know, when you finally get a chance to experience that for yourself, it really does, you know, it felt like this culmination, like, finally, this thing that I've desired so much, this thing I've wanted to do to experience, you know, I've, I've I've trained in my brain for this day, for this moment, and it's finally come. Like, that has a great impact. That's very profound. Like, I think for me, that was probably maybe Zelda 2. I don't love that game necessarily, and I know it has a lot of flaws. But it took so long for that to come out.

Well, in Castlevania also. Like, getting my hands in those NES cartridges, I coveted them for months and months. So when I finally got my hands on them, I was like, hell yes, this is the good stuff. They were great at the time. They're just, they're hard as heck, but they're, I love them. I mean, I mostly watch my brother playing because they're too hard for me. But even now, just, well, I'm getting off tangent here. So, yeah.

Well, tell you what, let's go on to your team. What would you cite as the game that made you stop and say, this is the thing. I love video games. Gosh, that's hard to say. I have a sort of complicated answer that I actually just realized listening to Chris talk about his experiences is that when I was a kid, I didn't think that I loved video games until I was about 12 or 13 or something like that.

Because I didn't think I was good at him and I didn't think I was like a game. game player because I was judging myself against my brother who was sort of, who would play a game to obsession to completion, no matter how difficult it was. But if a game was very difficult for me, I would get frustrated and I would go up, basically. And so there are a few games when I was, you know, under 12 that I would actually play a lot. And in retrospect, I did actually play a lot of video games. I mean, what happened was when I turned 12 and 13, I started to look back and say, Now I can finally go back and actually beat Zelda by myself or try to beat Metroid by myself

or try to beat Zelda 2 by myself or something. And so I didn't think that I liked video games for a long time. I wanted the kids to go play outside with me in the woods. They were always in front of their TVs. They were like, let's go inside and play duck tails or whatever. And I'm like, no, please come on, play in the woods with me. But the first games, you know, I've probably talked about before, are, I love Donkey Kong on the Atari 800 and the seven cities of gold I mentioned on the Atari

episode was a very deep experience watching my brother play that, you know, this is before the NES because it was just a whole generated world inside the computer you could explore and it was amazing. And then I also remember Super Mario Brothers really the first one really broke open everything for me because it was very magical. It had secrets and things. And I remember I remember talking to my dad having a conversation at one point about Super Mario Brothers. I was like, dad, how do they actually make video games? Like, how do they make it so you can control something that's on the screen? You know, because it felt like witchcraft or black magic or something weird that's like something you have no fathom. If you have no fathom, if you have

no idea about computer technology or whatever when you're, you know, eight years old or something. I had no clue how it's done. He said, well, it's actually a type of computer and they can program it and they do this and that. I'm like, wow, that's the magic. Like you read books about magic your whole life, like how you actually make the magic and there's a device that lets you make the magic. You craft your own world with your own rules, your own physics, your own artwork and universe and everything and it's interactive and you can play with it and that's incredible and as an aside to that you know i wrote a history of about space war from 1961 a few years ago and um how that was like the first time man had ever really created a virtual world they could inhabit through vicariously

through an interface or they could move around a representation of themselves on a screen in a world and up until that time we had humans had always been telling stories to each other like around a campfire or whatever, and imagining these things in your head. And for the first time, we could put that world into something else, a device that would render that world for us and let us experience it and inhabit it. And it was like a groundbreaking moment in humanity. And that was the dawn of video games. And I feel like when I asked my dad that, he was like handing me a key to a forbidden kingdom of knowledge,

like that you could, it's possible to create these types of games. and, you know, make these, this magic, you know. So which game would you say specifically caused that? Wasn't Seven Cities of Gold? It was Super Mario Brothers was when I really realized what games could be, because I was finally old enough. I think we got an NES in 1988, so I was seven. But we had, I don't know, there were so many, you know,

I had so many game experiences on the Atari 800 before that, and so it was hard to say. But, yeah, I'd say a couple things. Like, Seven Cities of Gold really. was mysterious, but I never thought about how it would work and things like that until I got a little older. But yeah, as boring as it is, it's like another Super Mario Brothers moment probably. I mean, that's not boring. There is a reason that is considered a landmark video game. And it really was a revelation at the time. I mean, I was someone who played a lot

of arcade games, you know, in the early 80s. But even so, Super Mario Brothers was really impressive because it was like an arcade game, you know, visually and in terms of just how well it played and how much content there was to it. But you could play it on a home console and it made the NES like super desirable. I mean,

everyone wanted an NES and they wanted to play Super Mario Brothers because it was just like it was hard to believe that that was a game you could play at home. And it was any on top of that it was such an expansive world because like even even in the arcade a lot of the games were just like

a screen or a series of screens that you'd hit one at a time and now this, you know, Super Mario comes along with the, having these huge side-scrolling worlds and lots of them, and it's just the scope to it is so different from, from almost everything that we'd been playing before in terms of

just imagining, exploring this huge space. Oh, yeah. The fact that there were secrets hidden on purpose in that game blew my mind. Like, you could get to the war zone or that there were hidden mushrooms and things like, that. And everything was great. The fluidity of the controls, the graphics, the music,

it had background music. I mean, I came from a place where most of the games didn't have background music, you know, on Atari while you're playing, because there weren't enough audio channels, things like that. So, yeah, I mean, that's, you know, there were other PC experiences, but that was like, I think 91 or so, 1999-1991 when I was playing PC stuff. So, all right. Let's read a few more of these letters. from Blake. While my early years were spent playing my dad's in television games

and visiting the arcade, it can pinpoint falling in love with video games to when we picked up a copy of Metroid on NES. I distinctly remember turning it on for the first time and truly feeling a sense of atmosphere by the visual design, an incredibly evocative soundtrack. It was different than the simplistic games

I had played up to that point. I spent months drawing maps of each screen on notebook paper, trying to figure out where I was going, and remember also working on it with my dad. This ended up causing me to do the same thing in games like Eight Eyes and Legacy of the Wizard to games we bought later. This experience drew me in to being fully invested in video games and the industry around it from that point onward.

It's actually pronounced eight-ease. Eight-Eyes is underrated, super-undarated thing. It's hard. I never liked it. I wanted to like it because it was so Castlevania-looking, but then I played it and it was like, wow, I actually think I hate it. There's a couple elements to aid eyes to me, which is that one is I have a good memory of playing it with my brother. That's why I rate it higher than other people would.

Because the second player could actually play that little hawk thing that flies around or eagle or whatever it is. It's amazing. And then, yeah, it's got cool graphics, but yes, it is difficult and it's not that great of a game. But I still think it has that edge because of the, you can play the hawk as a second player that sort of elevates it against other, like Castlevania clones. it is the second best game by the creator of Sokoban the first being Sokoban Thinking Rabbit was a developer This also touched on another big part of the whole

exploration and digging into things we've been talking about from this area was drawing your own maps that I think sucked a lot of people into a lot of games when you just had to, you know, you had this big world and there wasn't all that information out there and you just had to plot it out for yourself and obviously lots of people have that experience because you get things like Etriian Odyssey tapping back into that well of,

oh, it's kind of cool to plot out your own map. Yeah, I would be, I would just like my brother's navigator when he was playing, I could help draw the maps and things. I mean, the games then, when else can a kid go on an adventure like that other than a video game where you feel bigger and greater and more powerful than you are and you can explore new places? So that was like an incredible fantasy world. It reminds me of people like my dad's generation talking about reading like,

gosh, boys' life? Like, yeah, boys' life or like Hardy Boys type things and, you know, Tom Swift or something like where they would imagine an adventure.

But we had that fantasy adventure, but it was interactive. Yeah, so in Metroid, if you fall into a pit, you can get back out and you're okay, whereas if you do that in the woods, there's probably going to be trouble. But yeah, I mean,

I've talked about this a lot over the years of the podcast, but Metroid definitely has that sort of foundational formative experience for me. And it was because of, you know, like, wow, here's a game that is so big that I have to draw a map to make sense of it. It's so full of secrets that I have to really just experiment

and explore, get lost. It's like it was just, you know, so much more immersive and so much more of like an actual space than any video game I played before. Even, you know, like computer-type adventure games. It just, there was nothing quite like it at that point. So it really had a huge impact. Yeah, Metroid was amazing.

The secrets, I remember discovering you bust a false wall, and that just blew my mind. Chris, you're a fan of Metroid, right? A little bit, yeah. Did you play it back on an ES? No, I never did. I never played Metroid or Metroid 2 or Super Metroid. What? Until very recently.

It was the Gameway Advance ones. It was a Fusion and Zero Mission that really got me into it. but because I had already been into the Castlevignay's. The Castlevania, I. Castlevania, yeah. The Castlevania, yeah. The Castlevania. That's perfect.

I did go back. They're very good. I mean, you played Super Metro. I think I remember you talking about playing Super Metroid for the first time, you know, a few years ago. Yeah, a couple years good. That game's good. It is. It is.

It is no. It's a master. It might have been mentioned on this podcast before. I don't know if you've heard, but Super Metroid, pretty solid gaming experience. Yeah. Environmental storytelling is what I like to say about then. How unfolds the story without having to talk to you or spill it out or whatever? Yes.

It's a shame that all went away for Metroid Fusion. But I think Metroid 5 seems like it's going to be a shut up and fight kind of game. We'll see. I was disappointed by Fusion as well, just because of that. I like Fusion, but, yeah, you have to go into it with a different mindset than Super Metroid. If you expect the sort of terse, like, wander around and get lost experience, it's going to disappoint you. If you expect it to be sort of this subversive, like it seems like it's handholding, but then you escape and do your own thing, that's cool. Anyway, here's a letter from Lucien Hoare.

The game is Attic Attack by Ultimate Play the Game. I'd seen arcade games back in 1983. I'd seen Space Invaders, Missile Command, Pac-Man, etc. I'd played combat of my uncle's VCS. I loved them all. But nothing changed my life like Attic Attack on my friend Toby's original rubber-keyed Zetex Spectrum. I visited him and he showed me the latest. game from Ultimate Play the Game, later Rare, Limited,

I didn't understand what I was seeing, a tangible, colorful world that you could explore with a myriad of strange creatures in your wave. Secret passages that you had changed depending on which of the three characters you chose at the start. There were wells you fell down. Caves to explore, Frankenstein, Dracula.

Your life meter was a roast chicken that slowly revealed the bones underneath as you got hit. It oozed personality and charm. It was fast and fun. And when I got home that night, I talked my mom and dad's ears off. I remember standing in front of their bemused faces as I described everything I'd seen. My proto-Ted Talk must have worked because they got me my own attic spectrum soon after,

and I loved it more than anything. Attic Attack showed me that games weren't just shallow, arcade-like experiences. They could be whole worlds filled with exciting adventures, filled with exploration. The types of games I love to this day. Yeah, that game looks cool. I've never played it, but I've never heard of it. I've heard of it, but because it's a spectrum game, it's never crossed my path. From Stuart Smith, if there is a single game that could be noted as why I fell in love with

video games, it would undoubtedly be The Legend of Zelda on NES. I was about five or six years old at the time and barely had any idea what a video game even was. My only previous encounter with the medium that I can remember was an arcade cabinet with Hogan's alley on it at a pizza place. So walking into my friend's house in the afternoon on Christmas Day to see him playing Zelda on his brand new NES was nothing short of a revelation. I'd never seen anything like it, thanks to its colorful graphics and unique monster designs. Though I had no real idea what it even was, I knew that my friend was controlling what was

happening on screen, and I knew that I, too, had to play with it as well. I'd just turned 40 this year, and my love for the medium remains as strong as ever. I have a memory about Zelda. I don't know if I've ever mentioned, but it's just, it doesn't mean anything to anybody but me, but I remember going to see my grandmother in Oakridge, Tennessee, or you'd go see her every spring break or something. And she had this ancient TV set that was probably from the 60s or something at that time. This is the late 80s.

Was it one that sat on the floor and was in a wood console? It was actually on a like a 1950s type metal stand with like a glass panel on the front. And it was crazy. So it wasn't quite the floor console thing. but it so we hooked up our NES to this because it was our new thing in my brother's obsession and so we brought it with us to Tennessee and we just spent that whole trip playing Zelda on my grandparents' TV while my grandma was watching and she was born in 1907 so I had no idea what she was thinking about this she's like oh this is amazing you know oh what are you doing

you know on the screen can you play it can you do you know and she didn't she was slow she didn't talk with that speed. But it's just incredible. I remember that game swirling around my head while my parents were trying to drive us around the town and show us landmarks. My brother and I were in the back seat talking about Zelda, the whole time. So it's a memory. Here's one from Andy, who says, I was presented with an NES at three years old from my very loving and well-meaning grandparents, who were also gifting it to my parents who were 24 and 21 at the time, respectively. While my dad was obsessed with Super Mario, I zeroed in, on a three-pack that included the disappointing TM&T, the utterly baffling, totally rad,

and the sublime Bucky O'Hare, which was the first game I found engrossing, but could not play. This was upended a year later when I caught vision of the 16-bit glory and my dad's friend's Sega Genesis in what was liquid cocaine itself, Sonic the Hedgehog. I used to run around with my siblings playing Sonic, but we were still very young and engulfed in transmedia properties and marketing. The first game I truly fell in love with was Shining Force 2, accessed via Sega Channel, a quest for someone who had never even played an RPG presenting. It's so epic and so different from anything,

I was creating epic battles across our tiled floor with my action figures. Amazing what bright sprites can do for you. Growing up in California, it's funny to see how different my experiences to my new home in the United Kingdom, or with my partner who grew up in Greece with PC games as her primary introduction to the medium. What a cool way to play it on Sega General, of all things. It's neat. All right.

We'll go one more letter before jumping over to Ben. From James Crisley. The one game that made me fall in love with games as a whole was probably Super Mario Brothers 3. I had relatively young parents, and one of the benefits of that, as a 3-year-old back in 1991, didn't we just read this letter? Was having access to the many of the different NES classics, including the Mario trilogy.

Mario 3 just floored me with all the different worlds, different stages, and secret after secret that I was still discovering even decades after I first played it. The letters from Princess Peach, rescuing the kings of each land, the mind-blowing nature of everything being huge and giant land, the Cuba Kids, it was the most epic adventure you could ask for, not to mention the great power-ups, like the Tanuki suit, an extremely rare Hammer Brothers suit, and the weird ones like the Magic Whistle in the music box. It was, and still is, one of the greatest games ever, and I'll still fire it up once a year just to play through it again. Not to make this long love letter to Mario 3 even longer.

Thanks for all the podcasts over the years, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. You're welcome. Thank you for listening. I feel like the Hammer Brother suit ruined a generation of people who play video games. Because, like, that is the reason that, like, there is a certain demographic that will always hit the end of a game with, like, 99 potions that you haven't used because you might need them. Because you only get that Hammer Brothers suit, like, twice. And if you get hit once it's done.

Yeah. It's so cool. But you just can't get it again. Yep. It did ruin all our life. I remember that feeling. But that's why the game genie was so special, because you could have infinite Hammer Brothers suits.

Yeah. I feel like that's, you know, playing kind of not the way the game was intended. That's the whole point of the game. They should have intended it better than. So you're saying it was a deeply flawed game is what you're saying. Deeply flawed. It's like starting Grand Theft Auto with a tank. which is, as far as I'm concerned, the only way to start Grand Theft on it.

Sounds like fun. Let me tell you about a little thing called Saints Row, you might enjoy. Here's a very short letter from Andrew McLean, the game that first made me fall in love with video games and music two is Super Mario RPG Legend of the Seven Stars. That's it. I appreciate the brevity. And it had very nice music.

That's the first RPG I liked because RPGs were one of those things where, again, I would read about them in Nintendo Power. And look, I'm a nerd. I like fantasy and swords, but, like, I tried Final Fantasy when I was a kid. I liked, Final Fantasy One, and it was not for me. It was not the game I liked. It did not spark joy. It did not spark joy.

But then Mario RPG, probably because it was a Mario game, you know, I gave it a shot. And, like, that is what hooked me into RPGs as a genre, was that bridge to it. He also, in his one sentence mentioned the music. And I think that was the first big Yoko Shimomura soundtrack we got over here, which was very nice. Unless you're counting Street Fighter 2. Oh, well, that's right. She was on that too. So, very different kind of music.

Fairly popular. Yes. Somewhat successful. Right. Good music, too. Right. I used to play. Different kinds of good music.

When Street Fire 2 came out on the Super NES, I would just sit and listen to the music. I hooked it up to my stereo and there was a test, music test mode in the options, and I would just play the music. The crank-up guy. I'll seem, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yes. So we also, we also said. Street Fighter 2 turbo into the Super NT recently and played it

for like an hour and I'm like oh my God how did I do this without destroying my hands I had such cramps. You had little baby calluses back on. I had such cramps after just trying to play some off from your analog controller You need a BX Foundry BX 110 That is exactly what I need. Only someone still made those Yeah, I can make one for you so. That is exactly what I need.

I got enough parts I think. Video. Deathloop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take it anymore. Along the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guy. You can jump in on any episode, no need to worry about continuity. Check out Video Deathloop on the Greenlit Podcast Network with new episodes every Friday. With a purposeful grimace and a terrible smile, join Nikki and Wyatt as we stomp our way through the history of Toho's Dai Kaiju films in Discuss All Monsters.

telling me we're going to discuss all monsters? We won't stop until there isn't a monster left to discuss. Smash that play button like Godzilla and King Kong smash an 18th century Japanese pagoda. Only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right, so we're going to roll into the final segment of this. Here's another letter from Matt. Some of my earliest memories involve my very early years spent living above the bar, my mother tended.

As this was circa in 1984-85, there were obviously a few arcade machines hoping to catch a few quarters from the sauced patrons, one of them being Dragonsler. In that dark bar, it lit a special place in my mind to feature quality animation and booming a track mode shining to my eyes. The perfect bait to lure me in. I would spend the hour or so before the bar opened,

pretending to play my head just high enough to see over the control panel. Despite not being a particularly good game, it still remains as a fond memory, largely defining my love for games and animation. Cool. So Ben... Sorry, go. I'm just saying,

that's neat because that game was punishingly difficult quick time event stuff but it was meant to siphon those quarters out dollars Don Blues need that money yeah anyway he left his Disney paycheck he's got to

he's got to bring in the bucks Secret of Nim didn't get him as much as he wanted give me that Dragon's layer of money Secret of Nim was great though should make a Secret of Nim game I don't know what you do with that I don't know

Would you focus on the escaping from the National Institute of Mental Health stuff or the rats having sword fights stuff is the question? Why not both? Both, clearly, yes. The 80s. Do you have that kind of space? You could have like four totally disconnected mini-game events with totally different play mechanics, none of which were any good?

That's usually how they did it. Now I'm envisioning this like Prince of Persia in the Institute of Health, like sword-fighting rats on your way out. There you go. If there, like, if, I know there was Space Ace, but like, what if there had been, like, a slew of Don Bluth? Like, what if he had the Anastasia arcade game? So this is my question. The Fifele Goes West arcade game. Great.

All right. Did I say we were going to talk to Ben while I lied? One more from Shushat. There's a lot of letters here. I got into games a bit late as there wasn't much money to spare in my younger years. But eventually, we kids got Game Boy advances for Christmas, each of the game. I got Dragon Ball Z, like a sea of Goku. and it's not a very good game.

But it was one of the first games I got to sit with for longer than a few hours at a friend's house and I didn't have the perspective that it could be bad. All I knew it was that it was a game and it was hard. So when I saw a trailer for the sequel and you could play as other characters aside from Goku, I had to have it. After mowing some yards and getting the money together,

I sat down to play and within five minutes, I knew the first legacy of Goku was bad. This new one controlled so much smoother, the combat was slicker and felt better. The level design. didn't make me want to rip my face off and throw it at someone. Legacy of Goku 2 taught me that games could be a joy to control, to beg you to explore them and reward those who do.

And it had a completion reward. For most, it's just another Dragon Ball Z game, but for me, it was a glimpse into what games could be. And despite all the changes in my life, I still had that original cartridge with all the lessons at Toppe. I don't remember if I've played that one or the second one, Legacy of Goku. I've played one of them, and I thought it was pretty good,

so it must have been the second. So, I feel like this is probably another, like a totally different episode. But was there ever a game where you realized, oh, games can be bad? Yes. I know exactly the moment it was for me. It was taboo the sixth sense, which is not actually a game. It's not a game. I loved that, though.

I rented that and loved it. I read it. I believed it. I thought I was real because I was with a little kid. It was like, man, this is talking to me. It's amazing. telling fortunes all this stuff. Anyway, but yeah, Athena was horrible. I remember renting Athena on the NES and my brother and I were like, this game sucks. Now I think some people may like it.

I don't know if so, I'm sorry, but at the time we thought it wasn't good and we were appalled at how bad it could be. It really is pretty wretched. But the box art is very nice. Yeah, that's what drew us in, I guess. All right, Ben, what was the game that made you follow in up with the video game? So I wanted to put a little bit of a twist on this just because I was also an NES kids So I had all these same formative NES experiences As pretty much all of us here

Although I did jump in with Super Mario 2 Because that was the point at which I'd save up enough money To buy myself in NES with my allowance money So I maybe have a little more attachment to Mario 2 Than other people It's a great game It is, it's another one that just has You know all these huge worlds to explore with lots of secrets and stuff

Lots of cars to explore. I think it gets a bad reputation for being weird, but, like, objectively on its own, it's a really good game. It's also a really good Mario game. Yeah. But Mario games are always different back then. Yeah, I think it's a great game. It is. So that was great.

But I also wanted to talk about the games, the games and game systems that made me feel like, and Ben scoged me on this a little bit talking about what goes into making a game and, like, the magic behind me. it. But the places where I got glimpses of things you could do to make a game, and that started out probably on the Texas Instruments, TI994A, that we did an episode on, because I had one of those, and that was one of the systems that was kind of straddling the line between being a game-playing system and being a home mini-computer. So it had basic on it. You could program. But there was kind of a disconnect between the two sides on that one, because you know, you had basic, you had these magazines that would come out that would come out with like basic programs. You could type in, but as the name implies, you would mostly do really basic things with those. You could do text-based

things. You could like maybe print out a square room in Aski and do some things and print out some graphics. But then on the other side with the cartridge is it had more arcadey games, you know, Tombstone City. It had a Pac-Man knockoff. It has a Space Invaders knockoff. So you got some idea of like how stuff was made, but you couldn't really make the games you were playing on the game side yourself just with like the basic input that was kind of beyond its capabilities but that was like a tease of like being able to do this stuff that you were playing but then what really got me into it was doing stuff on mac specifically the hypercard stuff that we also did an episode about but like the manhole from cyan it's this big point and click adventure and it was all done in

hypercard um which i had you know the program for because it came on max then too. And I was looking at what it did and what you could do, I was like, that was the first time I really had the notion I could do this. I mean, I can't do the graphics as the beautiful black and white graphics that they had. But I could like basically make this game. I could figure out how to do it. And I did. I made some similar games with not nearly as nice graphics. Not that I'm saying that the stuff I made was actually as good as the manhole. But very similar kinds of things. I could make a point and click adventure. I made some other stuff. too. And that was really transformative and got me into software and, you know, now I've been a software engineer for like 25 years or something. And also following the games that you can make with software engineering. So, yeah, that was, that was probably, probably my most transformative early experience with games that really sucked me into the whole cultural phenomena. That's cool. You know, the T.I.994A just turned 40 in June.

Oh, nice. So I did a little article about it for How To Geek on about the 40th anniversary, which is neat. You might enjoy that. Yeah, the spokesman was recently led out of jail. Well, I sort of underplayed that part of the history as he wisely should have. Anyway, here's a letter from J.A. Pinero, from Taobaha, Puerto Rico. The game that made me fall in love with gaming has to be Shining Force on the Game Gear. I always enjoyed watching older brother and cousins play Street Fighter and Contra,

but those were just action-fighting games. I'd seen them play Kung Fu, Duck Hunt, and Mario Brothers on N.E.S. I was always enthralled by the flashiness of it all. But video games didn't seem that deep. When Christmas, I received a game gear with a handful of games. The Asanaic and Power Rangers were fun, but by then I preferred reading to playing games or watching cartoons. Shining Force was the first game I was invested in the story of, and the RPG tactics side would be the foundation that made me into a lifelong Pokemon fan. That was the twist I didn't expect at the end.

I totally understand that. I totally get it. Yeah. Because like I said, Mario RPG was the first RPG that I really got into. And in fact, like in the late 90s, early 2000s,

it was one of the first games that I played on an emulator and like replayed all the way through. But after getting into like Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 9, like around the turn of the century, the only RPGs that I really stuck with

were Pokemon games. Like I played gold when I was in high school when it came out in like and then I came back with heart gold and have played all of them since until like literally three weeks ago, four weeks ago that was the RPG that I played

like the video game RPG that I played. What's the new one? I'm into persona now. Oh, okay. Yeah. So if someone could explain Person A 1 through 4 to me, that would be great. There's demons and you have to like fight them and stuff.

Oh, yeah, okay, cool. And some of the games you make friends with people in addition to the demons. Yeah, that's good. There's a pharmacy, I don't know. That's a pharmacy? He even got its own theme song. June's, yeah.

Yeah, for me the RPG turning point, I'm sure this is extremely non-controversial was Final Fantasy 2, nay, 4. But that was really the one that got me into playing RPGs for like the next decade more than anything else. I grinded Dragon Warrior nonstop for several years. It's called Dragon Quest now.

Well, it wasn't back then, not in America. So my brother came along one day and loaded up my game and he's like, man, you're level 50, but you haven't beat the first monster, you know, boss guy or whatever. I didn't know you had to do that. Yeah, I didn't know how to get to them or what to do. I just would just play it and just fight the guys over and over again because I thought it's fun and I like the music. That happened to me in 7, in Final Fantasy 7, where I had that one material that you can like learn a skill from a, from a monster. And so I had this one monster and a friend of mine told me, like, if you can

get this, like the thing that he does, then you'll have a really easy time. And so I just like would die fighting that monster over and over until I finally survived and got it, which I don't like being challenged in video games. I don't understand people who are like, oh, I want this to be more difficult. Not me. Not me. I want to crush everything that stands in my way. I have a flashback of one of our first. episodes we did together, Chris, where we talked about, we may have been talking about Metroidvania's or something. We both agreed that we loved Symphony of the Night and Metroidvania's because you could level up and get more powerful to actually make the game

easier for you. And I did that. I was like level 50 when I started progressing because I just, I didn't mind grinding in that game. I remember having the thought like when I was younger. And this would have been like around the time of like me playing. FF10 or something where I was like, I have the thought, and I no longer think this is correct before anyone writes in. I was like, oh, you can't actually be good at JRPGs. You just have to be persistent. That's why the Shinemagame Tensei series exists, to disabuse you of that notion. Well, I was playing, I've been playing also because I had to take a trip and I couldn't take my PS5 with me to continue playing persona. I was playing Tokyo Mirage Sessions,

F.E. Sharp, Encore. You got it all right. Yeah, that's a heck of the title. And there's a part in that game where, like, you can just go in and grind. It's like a little room that you go into. And every time you defeat a monster, you fight a stronger one, and they all drop things that give you more experience. And there's a little notice on the game that was like, hey, remember, though, if you do this too much, it might make the combat and the rest of the game not as fun. And I was like, you don't know what I consider fun, video game.

Yeah, I mean, people grind differently. I know I've had heated debates or discussions with Shevham Butt who has been a contributor to a lot of Retronauts episodes about how he plays Final Fantasy 5 where once he gets like any set of crystals that gives him new jobs to learn he immediately goes out and masters every single one of those jobs for all of his characters

he just grinds there's like places where you can grind and just do the same thing over and over again like that basement where there's the statues whose level is a multiple of five so you can lose level five death on them and just wipe them out in a single action. Yeah. So, you know, I find that just,

like that approach is just interminable to me. I can't imagine playing like that, but some people really enjoy it. That's what they want to do. And, you know, that's cool. I like when video games give people the opportunity to do things in a different way. I'm not a big fan of games that are like,

we, the developers, have a single path for you to get through this game, figure out what we're thinking, do the things we want you to do in the exact order that we have prescribed without telling you, and you can finish this game. That's why I don't like the Advance War series. I feel like that's the reason that I'm always going to prefer the Metroidvanias that are more like the Castlesvania

than the Metroids, because Metroids, you have a set, like, progression through the game where your increase in abilities and your increase in, like, health and power is tied to how far you are in the game. Whereas the post-Sympthianite Castlevania structure is, if you're patient and you like playing it, you can get as strong as you want whenever you want. And I like that. As long as it's fun to do.

And I think that's the trick that Cynthia Knight and like Don of Sorrow and Ari of Sorrow do better than a lot of the games is they make that process really engaging in fun. I will say that the METROids have one advantage over the Vanyas, which is that at the time of this recording session, they're still making Metroid's and not. Yeah, there is that. I mean, there's bloodstained. Yeah. They're making another one of those. Blitzine's good, actually. It just, it would be nice if it ran well on the switch.

That's all. Maybe they'll get that with the second one. I got stuck in it somewhere and I just didn't figure out, couldn't figure out where to go and I gave up. I don't know. I wanted to love it. Playing it for the third time. Really, I've really, not a joke.

I genuinely loved it a ton sitting down to play at two reviews. Yeah, I'll give it another shot. All right. Well, here is a letter from Yuhah, or Juha, home. The game that made me love video games is the Commodore 64 version of Capcom's Commando. Very specific. I was born in 84, so I didn't play it when it was new, and it wasn't until someone, sometime in 1990 or 91, when my family got to use 664 with a ton of copied games. I'm Finnish and didn't understand English at that age. So I initially only played the more arcade-y stuff, and among those, Commando really stood out to me. It looked great, played great, and had great music.

The C-64 version is very short, as it only has three levels. That didn't bother me as I had never played any other versions, so I didn't even know something was missing. I've since played the arcade game, both emulated and on original hardware, but it's just not the same without the Rob Hubbard music. That is a European-ass answer. Alejandro from Monterey Mexico says My answer is boring Because it's simple and predictable for someone my age

Mario Mario Mario I was born in 1985 So my earliest gaming memories include the tail end of the NES days But we had an Atari before my dad bought an NES Circa in 1989 So I do remember playing pitfall That terrible Pac-Man port Although there is someone

Alejandro who'd like to have words with you about that a cookie monster game and an assortment of sports carts on the 2600. But it wasn't until I saw Super Mario Brothers running on a cousin's NES that I was blown away. And it caused me to beg for that console to my dad. It's three games that changed my life and made me realize I'd be playing games forever. Super Mario Brothers, one, made me look and see how games could be more than single-screen point vests. Super Mario 3 cemented my love by losing me in this world I didn't want to get out from. and Super Mario 64 showed me

I'd never grow to be too old to be amazed by video games. To this day, I consider Sproarie Brothers 3 the best game ever made. Not an incorrect answer. I feel like it's not a controversial thing to say. It's certainly like adjusting for

any limitations of hardware. Yeah. Like, they don't get a lot better than that one. I agree. The world maps in that game are so good. Yeah. It'll always be good.

It'll always be a great game. Yeah, I'm also a little sad that even when Mario goes back to the, like, stage map, well, they're never as fun as Mario 3. Yeah. Like, there's, the, I don't think people talk about it a lot. And maybe this is just me not being aware of it. But, like, climbing up the tower in World 5 to get into the clouds is such a clever trick and such a, like, brilliant move. for that game, it's the kiss of a chef.

Beautiful. Mario has been a chef. Yoshi's cookie. It's true. I love me. She's cooking. There you go. Paul from Leads in the UK says,

Sonic the Hedgehog has caused some video game hate in his 30 years of existence, but he's also what made me fall in love with them. The first game had such an impact on me as a kid that I became a Sonic fan for life. I played the games, watched the cartoons, read the comics, the Sonic pasta shapes.

I followed the blue guy to the Saturn and Dreamcast. Saturn, what? Then when Sega left the hardware business, I ended up buying all subsequent Nintendo PlayStation and Xbox machines, catching up on a lot of games I'd missed in the process. Sega consoles died, so my love for video games could live. That's not why they died. Is it not?

Yeah, it's a shame. I'm pretty sure that was the business rationale. We want Paul from Leeds in the UK to be able to enjoy. video views. Okay. It was a very noble, noble sacrifice. Yeah.

Here is a letter from Hassan. He says simply Space Harrier. The original sit-down arcade cabinet. I was about eight years old when I saw it first, and it's the reason I chose a master system over an NES a couple of years later, when we were visiting from the States. When we were visiting the States from the UK, no regrets. So, yeah, there's something, what?

None? Evidently not. Okay, no, look. About that purchase, I think, is what he's saying. All right. Like, he probably has regrets in life, because who doesn't? But no regrets for having purchased a master system to play Space Harrier over buying an N. Okay.

Because Space Harrier, actually a better game than 3D World Runner. That was what the NES could offer. I love 3D World Runner. It was okay, but it was no Space Harrier. I like it better than Space Harrier. I don't know. I played it. I played both with the 3D Shutter Gruburner.

glasses. Isn't it the one with the shutter glasses? 3D World Runner? No. Well, I mean, on the Sega Master System, doesn't Space Harrier support the Shadows? I want to say yes, but I might be lying. Yeah, I think it is. And the 3D World Runner has the red blue

hand of this. Yeah, red blue man. Things, but anyway, they're both cool. Space Harrier when you die, you go, and the guy kind of like flies up in the air and then falls off the screen. Yeah. It's cool. I love video game deaths. We should do a master system.

episode. We should do a video game depth of a zone. Yeah, actually, like, Sega always had the best deaths. They always gave you, like, the little angel floating up with a halo. Like, that was a thing Sega did, and it's, like, people have Chronicle, like, documented how many Sega games have that in it. It was a thing for them. It was really great.

Yeah. All right, this went in a really strange direction. Let's stare back on track with a letter from Tom. Tom Hewlett. Space Invaders was my first game, and I loved the medium immediately. My parents had apparently bought into the Atari hype years earlier, but the 2,600 was collecting dust in a closet somewhere. One rainy afternoon in kindergarten, I was upset we couldn't go outside,

so she decided to bring it out. to see if games might calm me down. I guess I'm pretty chill, 35 years and a lifelong career later. I remember when I was younger, this was in the 90s, like the would have been 94, 95. I had a magazine. It was like the top 50 video games of all time. And Doom's not number one.

And the number one that they picked was Space Invaders. Wow, really? EGM did a great 100 best video games like 96 or something. I really loved that list. probably because they picked Super Metroid as number two, I think we and Tetris is number one, I remember that list. I was like, hell yeah, you guys, what's up?

You know, what's up? That was great. Yeah, I wrote Crispin Boyer emailed way back then, you know, and said that you guys did a great job. And he said, thanks. Good old Crisp. The other thing I discovered to exist recently being in a few weird arcades like

the place at Myrtle Beach is this, the giant two-player space invaders with like light guns that has like... Oh, I've played that. Yeah, it has like waves of giant space invaders going across this huge vertically oriented screen and you're just shooting them with basically light guns, like rapid fire style. It's like pixels everywhere.

The mountain guns are you... Yeah, the mountain guns. I don't even know where this came from, but I've seen it like twice in the last year. And he's played the world's largest Pac-Man that's in some of those arcades. It's a giant like LED board that's like 10 feet tall and has a joystick in the middle. It's really fun. It's basically a joystick like a beach ball. That would be fun.

It's a life-size Pac-Man that you have. stir around. What is life size for Pac-Man? You'd be surprised. It's puck size, isn't it? Because he was a fucking guy? That means they're little ghosts. Maybe like puck from Alpha Flight?

That makes a little more sense. I think that works. Oh. Okay. And I was speaking Chris's language. I have an existential question for you guys. This is slightly off topic. You know how I like charging by the hour for this?

Yeah. Yeah. My whole life I've seen sports. commentators and sports shows and stuff. They're talking about sports and sports this, sports then, sports ball and sports ball too and all the sequels. And they talk about, you know, stuff I don't understand. I mean, sorry, I'm just thinking about the sequel to sports.

Sports ball, sports two. Yeah. Anyway, so are we that, are we those guys for video games? Are we those people who talk about about something so esoteric to everyone else they can't understand what we're talking about? That's why we were raking the big bucks, man. That's what every podcast is. I just never, you know, the funny thing is I asked my wife, you know, have you

listen to Retronauts? And she's like, no, I can't, I don't understand half of what you're saying. I mean, sports people are nerds too. They're just nerds for a different thing. Yeah, that's the thing that I think was misunderstood for a long time is that people who memorize sports statistics and can tell you what the ERA of X pitcher was, you know, 30 seasons ago. Like, they are every bit as dorky and socially awkward as we video game people are.

It's just that, you know, what they're obsessing over involves large athletic men getting paid a lot of money, whereas our work involves, like, nerds in a basement. So there's, there's like a little more of us. Not as athletic people getting paid a lot of money. I mean, some YouTubers are in pretty good shape and making a lot of cash. cash, but yes. That's not who we're talking about, though. We're talking about some developers. My close personal friend Mario.

Right. Mario, he's nimble. He's got cardio. Yeah. He's been to the Olympics bunch. I know, right? And he can compete against Sonic. Like, all he does is just run fast.

So he's doing okay. Do they have, like, track events in those kids? I've never played a Mario and Sonic game. Like, there's an entire for Mario and Sonic track and field day. Yeah, no, what I'm saying is like, why, though, because we know who should win that. That's true. They have to tape lid to Sonic's feet for it to be fair. It's a handicap.

I mean, I'd be very curious in, like, other sports. I don't know, like javelin. Mario mostly throws shells forward. Like, when he throws it up, he actually has to kick it. It only goes a little ways. So I don't know about what kind of... Well, he can throw stuff in, like, the 3D games. Yoshi.

Well, the hammers. I mean, hammer suit. The hammer throws... He chucks those hammers. That is true. Anyway, what were we talking about? I hadn't actually said what game made me love video games. And not to be too obvious here, but it was Donkey Kong.

I remember seeing that in the arcades early on and just being entranced by it because the visuals were so interesting compared to other games of the era. It had this huge monkey character at the top of the screen, plus a little guy who was running back and forth, he could jump he could hit stuff with a hammer it was great there were more there were multiple screens like mostly at the time i was five six i could only i could only see that first screen because the game was hard it was too hard for my tiny little underdeveloped brain but then i would watch the big kids play and they would get to you know the uh the elevator level

sometimes they would even get to the pie factory stage wow later i learned that it was not pies But, you know, it was just enticing. What are they? There's cement. Cement factory. Yeah. We call it the Pie Factory. That's why there is a game and watch game called Mario's Cement Factory

and not an LCD game called Mario's Pie Factory. It's a shame. He didn't become a baker until Yoshi's Cookie. We talked about this earlier. Yeah. Should have been keeping notes. I feel like there's an underrated part of Donkey Hong, which is right at the beginning when he climbs up the thing

and then stomps on it and that makes the level. That's a really cool touch. That is. It's on a construction site and he's like, FU construction workers, I'm messing up all your hard work and skewing these girders. Yeah.

That's cool. That's really cool. Then to defeat him, you actually have to undo all your work on the top level of the skyscrap. You have to pull out the bolts and make the whole thing collapse. So counterproductive.

I was just going to say, Donkey Kong was influential to me too on that, but it's the Atari 800 port. There's something about the character of Mario that was very, personable and detailed at a time when most of the protagonists in those games are little stick figures even on the Atari 800. The Running Man.

So yeah, he had some detail to him and it was you know, it was a great port by Landin Dyer was his name and he, I, the coolest thing about growing up and finding the internet was that I found his website and emailed him and said, hey, I loved your port of Donkey Kong, you know, like 2006 or something. And he was like, man, thanks, you know, I'll tell you how I made it and stuff. It was great.

That's the fulfillment of one's life dreams or something. I need to direct to more game developers, I guess. It is the coolest thing. It is the coolest thing to, like, I never thought I would grow up and talk to Waz or something, because I idolize Steve Wozniak, you know, or talk to John Romero or something. You know, it's incredible. And, you know, it's not that I'm special, although it is.

It's also that anyone can do it. There's people are accessible. They're out there, and they love it, Creators love it when you tell them that you love what they've created. Yeah, I just, I work on the basic assumption that people think I'm an asshole and that I would just annoy them if I bother them. So I never, I never do that. Who do you want to talk to that you've been too shy about?

All of them. All of them. Man. I can't, like, I feel like there's a Japanese barrier that I can't break, which is unfortunate because I love so many Japanese games. But on the American side, if you can find somebody who's made a really, awesome sort of obscure game, you know, write to them and tell them, if you can find them, you know, tell them how much you love it because it will make their day and make their life.

I mean, it is amazing. I wonder what the Miller brothers are up to now. They were relaunching some online Mist thing at some point, but I don't remember where that went. Yeah, I don't know. They were, yeah, they've seemed like they've been keeping busy with stuff. I've never talked to them, though, but I love Mist. I did talk to Robin Miller at GDC like a decade ago. Then the site got shut down, so I didn't get to publish it.

Oh, man. Very cool. that's not why I love video games because of layoffs and corporate mergers. It's because of the video games and the cool experiences. It's just the memorable stuff. So, yeah. Anyway, this was a fun, low-key kind of episode. I actually think, you know, your sports ball question, in this case, this episode is the opposite of that.

I think this was a very relatable episode. I think so many of the opinions and experiences we talked about, and the letters we read were super relatable to a lot of people. You know, everyone who enjoys a thing, they always have this moment where they realize, like, this is something I like. I want more of this. Yeah.

And, you know, it's going to vary from every person from one to the other. But I think the fundamental mechanisms and the, you know, the triggers in our brains, even if you can't relate to the specific game or experience that someone had, you can say like, oh, something like that happened to me too. So, yeah, this was interesting because, yeah, just hearing kind of these experiences that are not shared experiences, but somewhat common between so many people was really enjoyable. There's still a ton of letters. So I might have to revisit this topic with another group of people just to, you know, have the excuse to read all these letters because they were all great.

And I only read like half of them. So thanks everyone who wrote in. did not have a chance to read your letter on this podcast. There were a lot of letters, but I promise that those won't go to waste. We will use every last scrap. For fire. That is the, no, not for

fire. Geez, for podcasts. Content. I'm already crumpling them up right now. Just kidding. This is what happens when we give binge gin. They're not actually paper people out there. That's about to say kids. Kids. All right. You can't actually burn them.

So, yes, thanks everyone for writing in. Thanks you guys for sharing your particular memories. And I think we're going to wrap it up here for hopefully not the final episode of Retronauts East in its current configuration. But I don't know. Things have changed a lot over the past few years. We're all in different places in life than when we first started recording together. I'd say all of us are in better places, actually. A lot taller, too.

Speak for yourself. I've actually gotten smaller, shorter. It's very sad. They keep coming at night and compressing me in my sleep. It's terrible. I don't know. I don't know who it is. A lot of JPEG artifacts on Jeremy Parrish right now.

So there's some people who have clamped to break into your bedroom every night and crush you slowly. It's positive. That's a terrible thing. That's a terrible thing. Anyway, yeah, so thanks again, everyone for listening. And if you enjoyed this freewheeling, casual conversation about video games and found it relatable, you may be able to relate to other episodes of Retronauts, of which we publish like six or seven a month.

So you can find those, you know, at Retronauts.com and on the Greenlit Podcast Network and various and sundry other podcasting devices and platforms, but you can also go to Retronauts or Patreon.com slash Retronauts and support the show for three bucks a month. You get every episode we publish on Mondays, a week early, at a high. hire bitrate quality, no advertisements, et cetera. And if you bump that pledge to five bucks a month, you also get biweekly patron exclusive episodes on every other Friday, as well as a mini podcast by Diamond Fight every weekend. You get Discord access. There's a lot of stuff that you can do and see and get for your support for the show. This show is pretty much just

made possible through Patreon. So your support is appreciated. that is my pitch for you. Now I will let others here make their pitches as well. Benj, how about you? You can find me on Twitter at Benj Edwards and come join in my weird retro adventures

and you can read the latest things I write for how to geek and I'm still making joysticks a little bit on the side. So if you really want a BX 110 or something, which is my super NES style stick, just let me know. And Ben?

I'm Ben Elgin. I have no pitch, unless you need a CNC milling machine, which you probably don't. I do. Well, okay, yeah, Bench does. But you can find me on Twitter at Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N, and sometimes I actually tweet things other than what beer I was drinking, but sometimes not. I'm Chris Sims, and you can find me by going to my website, which is T-H-E-I-S-B.com. I do a lot of things. I do a lot of podcasts that you can listen to if you like what I have to say on this one. And I've also written a bunch of stuff. But the only thing that I'm writing right now that is publicly available is actually my series of Metroidvania reviews called Castlemania, which I'm doing as a Patreon exclusive for the War Rocket Ajax Patreon, where I am ranking

every Metroidvania I have ever and will ever play. Many of his opinions are bad and wrong. That's what I hear from Jeremy Parrish who refuses to read them. Anyway, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, the person who gives Chris Simms Flack. On Patreon. Sorry. You can find me on Patreon. Sure.

Go for it. I appreciate your support for my video projects. But you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. And you can find me doing stuff at Limited Run Games. That's my day job. And you can find me on, what's this podcast? Oh, that's right. Retronauts.

So yeah, that's about it. Anyway, we all are people who have been indoctrinated into the world of video games. We like them. We may even love them. And we are going to talk more about them. But for now, that's it. This episode is over. Bring Nestor back on Twitch.

Thank you.