Triple Click - The Games That Shaped Our Childhoods

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

In this bonus episode, Kirk, Jason and Maddy each picked five games that played a formative role in their development as little lower-case “g" gamers. And then they talked about them!KIRK:TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan (1990)  Kings Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992)  Quest For Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness (1993)  The 7th Guest (1993)  Magic: The Gathering (1993)MADDY:Tetris (1989)Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins (1992)The Oregon Trail Deluxe (1992)Myst (1993)Doom (1993)JASON:Zork Zero (1988)  Final Fantasy IV (1991)  Warcraft II:Tides of Darkness (1995)  Evergrace (2000)  Aliens vs. Predator MUD (1997)------------Featuring musical excerpts from Tetris (Russian trad.) and Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness (Aubrey Hodges)Join the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Hello, lovely listener is Kirk here with a blast from the past for you all, really a double blast from the past, a bonus episode from a couple years back that is itself all about the games that we played when we were kids. Back in September of 2022, the three of us recorded a max fun bonus episode all about the games we played when we were younger, the games that formed us. And it was a really fun conversation. We're off this week and we thought we would drop it in the main feed for everyone to hear. And of course, just as a reminder, if you want to hear a bunch more bonus episodes like the one you're about to hear, you can become a maximum fun member at maximum fund.org slash join. And doing so will also support triple click. We really do appreciate everyone who supports the show. You make it possible for us to keep making it. We've got a bunch of fun bonus episodes planned for the rest of the year. We've got one very cool, very different thing planned that we are currently working on and should be announcing before too long. So yeah, maximum fun.org slash join. Come be a part of it. Okay, hope you enjoy this bonus episode.

We'll be back with a normal episode next week. I'm Jason Trier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers. Hello again. And welcome back to another bonus episode. Bonus episode. Bonus.

Bonus time. Bonus. Beans time. Beans talk. Thank you. All of you out there, if you're listening to this, then thank you for being a member. Thank you for helping make this show pop. We really appreciate it.

And to show our appreciation, we are making you a bonus podcast. That's right. Look at that. It's just for you. It's just for you. Specifically for you. So for this month's bonus episode, Kirk Maddie, we are getting nostalgic. We are going back and ripping open our childhoods and mining.

We're digging into our childhoods and mining for gold, for memories, memory gold to share with the worlds. Our personal histories. our biographies, our memoirs. Hope you're ready for some fracking. I hope you ready for some memory fracking, some childhood fracking. This is how you turn your childhood into content. Yeah.

So this is the exercise, the kind of little game we're going to play today. So each of us have come with five games, five formative games from our childhood. Maddie tried to make it like 12 games, but I was like, no. For some reason that was considered not, just not allowed too many.

No, not part of the game. I do have the full list here, but I will not review it. You're not allowed to read it. You can tweet about it. So here's the thing about these games. And the criteria for these games are that. They're not the greatest games of all time. They're not the best games we've ever played. They're the games that were formative to our childhoods, to us as human beings in some way or another. Maybe we learned something from them. Maybe they had an impact on us in some way, some interesting way. And so we're going to go around and we're each going to

pick a game and share. We're going to each going to share a game one at a time until we each get to five and talk about why we picked it for a couple of minutes. So, let's get on with it, shall we? You guys have your lists. You have your game names in front of you. Let's do it. Kirk, kick us off. It'll be Kirk, Maddie, Jason.

Okay, so my first game is a Game Boy game from the early 90s, I think, from 93. Let me see if I'm right about that. Oh, no, wow, much earlier. 1990. So this is actually, this is the first game on my list, and I was 10 years old in 19, 90 when I played this game. Amazing. The game is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Fall of the Foot Clan.

I have this game and I played it a lot. The sound effects were super good. So yeah, so this game was obviously a licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's game. It is, I think, included now in isn't there a new collection? Yes, there is. I'm seeing it is the Kawabunga Collection, which was just released and has, I think, all 18 million of the various Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games that were released between. whatever it is, 88 and 92, or you know, with the absolute peak of Turtle Mania.

And this is the one that I played because I only had a Game Boy. So the reason I brought this in and the reason it was formative for me was it's kind of emblematic of a certain type of Game Boy game that I really enjoyed, which was the type of Game Boy game that made me feel like, okay, maybe this isn't the big Nintendo one. This isn't in color, but it's the next best thing. and I'm getting to experience video games in a way that had previously been denied to me. So I've explained before, I've mentioned many times that I wasn't really allowed to have video game consoles when I was a kid. This was just kind of my parents' belief that I would be too into them or they would take too much time

and they didn't want watching TV all the time. And I give them credit for that. I think, you know, as much as I love video games now and have kind of had the... That's true. I've had the last laugh in terms of making... making video games a major part of my life. It was probably good for me as a kid to not be playing Nintendo on my own TV all the time, even though I played a lot of video games at Friends houses.

So they made an exception for the Game Boy. And the deal was, this is also, I think, a common approach that I got a Game Boy, but my sister also got one. So we each had them. My sister was a couple years older than me. Less into video games, but she really liked the Game Boy as well. She liked Tetris. She had a few games she was into. you. And we both got a Game Boy at the same time. I think I got it for my birthday, but then she also got one for my birthday.

Happy birthday to me and you, apparently. Amazing. So I played to, I mean, when I look back at the games that I played on the Game Boy, did both of you had Game Boys? Oh, yeah. I've got some Game Boy games. It's coming up. My rule was I'm only allowed to use a Game Boy while traveling, but I can use it unlimited on planes. So I learned to love plane rides because. Wow. There were no restrictions on my Game Boy usage at all, which I'm now realizing was a huge freedom for me. But of course, no TV. There probably was some restriction on my usage, but then I think because it was portable, it was just so easy to play it. Yep. And yeah, and so that was kind of my way into video games, really. For a long time, I didn't have console. I think my first console was an Xbox, an original Xbox that I just bought myself in college in like the year 2001. So quite a bit after this.

So anyways, I would play, I think I played the Mario, whatever the first Mario game was. Mario Land. That was on Game Boy. Yeah. Mario Land, yes. You had to fly in a ship. There's some cool mechanics in that game. Right.

So some of those Nintendo games, those first party Game Boy games are good, but there was a lot of drek on the Game Boy from third parties. In this case, this was a Konami game, Fall of the Footland. And the thing was, I was obsessed with the Nintendo. TMNT game because I was really into Ninja Turtles. When I was 10, I was the exact age that Ninja Turtles were the coolest thing in the world. I read the comics because I had a friend who was like my hip comic video game friend who hit me to all the cool. I saw Akura at his house for the first time like Vampire 100D.

We saw all the weird anime and stuff. And then he was into the Ninja Turtles like the manga. And so the black and white like kind of gritty. It's really violent. It is. I read them as an adult. I feel like as a kid, maybe the fact that it was trying to be a parody wasn't as obvious, and it just came off as completely straight lace. Right.

And because it's kind of R-rated or it's sort of edgy in that way, it just seemed like as a kid, I was like, oh, well, this is serious. This is serious business. And then, of course, it became more and more silly. I was excited about the live action movie. Oh, my God. I was so excited. I'll never forget when I saw a poster movie. There were a few of them.

One of them, they were all wearing samurai gear, I remember. Yes, turtles in time. I think they go back in time to, like, you know, to Japan. But really, the peak of the series was the Super Nintendo one, which is another Turtles in Time, like they're going through time. I don't know if you ever play that one. Oh, yeah, that was the one that was in arcades as well. Yes.

And that the newest Shredder's Revenge is kind of fashioned on that. That's the beat-em-up. So I was really into the NES one just because I didn't have a Nintendo. It's more of a platformer than a beat-em-up. It was a platform, and it also had a kind of top-down section where you're, like, moving through the world and going between manhole covers. Oh, yeah. And I've never played it.

I don't really know what it looks like because, I read the entire guide in Nintendo Power, which this is, again, something we've talked about before, but because I wasn't allowed to have the console, I would get a Nintendo Power, or I would buy the, I think I would find a way to get the walkthrough at the Scholastic Book Fair. And then it was like I was, it was basically reading a let's play, you know, a guide. Just imagining that you could play it, cutting out the characters and moving them around on the rug. Like, I don't think that game was very good. So, like, I don't, you know, I don't think I was missing much by imagining it.

I probably was imagining a better game than it actually would have played. It was hard. It was very hard. Yeah, so was Fall of the Footplant. So when I finally got Fall of the Footland, I was so psyched because it was like, I'm going to play a Ninja Turtle's game now. And it was on my Game Boy, but it still looked pretty cool. My main memory of it is like the turtles looked cool. The art was pretty good.

And it was brutally difficult. It was so hard. I mean, it was just a side-scrolling action game, just like the NES one. But I played it so much. Like, there are a bunch of games like that. the Terminator 2 like Game Boy game, these kind of terrible licensed Game Boy games.

The Home Alone one I played a whole bunch of. So this is kind of standing in for all of those games. Yeah, you had to set the traps for as you were going to. There were a lot of intruders in your house. It wasn't just too. The wet bandits were more of a kind of gang. Terrifying. So that's my first pick is Fall of the Foot Clan,

the Game Boy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game from 1990. Maddie, what's your first game? So mine is also a Game Boy game. 1989, Tetris. I know we said these weren't the best games of all time. Yeah, this counts. This is one of the best games of all time. This is an extremely formative game for me.

I had a few games in that category. Like, I also had Pac-Man, but I just was never that into Pac-Man. But Tetris was, I mean, it is a video game to me. Like, it is the definition of a video game, and it is the metric by which I judge all other video games in terms of music, design, colors, everything else. Is it fun? Can you play it for the rest of your natural life? I mean, I don't know. I just have so many memories of playing Tetris forever and ever and ever. Getting frustrated with it and I know I've described very gently throwing my Game Boy on the bed in anger, but like your your wherewithal is such that

you are able to gently throw it on the bed. I remember doing that if I felt as though Tetris had treated me unfairly and had given me a string of blocks that made no sense for what I had. We've all been there. I also remember, I did this with a couple Game Boy games, but I would just put the music on in the morning, like while I was getting dressed for the day. Like I would like just put it on and just have the Game Boy playing a song for the day. Because it's not like it was easy to just listen to any song you wanted in this time period. Right. There was no YouTube where you could just listen to every version of the Tetris soundtrack

from all the time. Exactly, or like every version of whatever song you liked. That wasn't possible. So, you know, I would tape things off the radio on cassette tapes, but also I would just boot up my Game Boy to like a level that I thought had a cool sound or whatever and play the song. And in Tetris, every single song is great. I would change the song and convince myself that changing the song somehow changed my strategy. Like if I was getting sick of Tetris, I would just change the song and then it's like a whole new video game.

I don't know. Tetris is freaking incredible. And I still have it on my phone. And I still play it sometimes because it's still good. You should check out the new Tetris, aka Threes, which is the only game that has come close to matching Tetris. I don't know. Tetris Effect is where I thought you were going to go with it.

Tetris Effect is amazing. I've got that on Steam deck now and I just, I play that all the time. No, but that's just more Tetris. Well, but who needs anything else is my team? I'm just saying if there's another puzzle game that is like as timeless and perfect as Tetris. I like threes. I do like it, but I don't agree. I think Tetris is the go.

Yeah, I don't know. Tetris is pretty special. And it's funny, I played a ton of Tetris on Game Boy as well, just because it came with the Game Boy and I had no money. And I was like, well, I guess this is video games for me. And it is wild to imagine my past self, seeing my future self, playing Tetris Effect on a steam deck at 60 FPS. And it's like exploding lights and colors on this beautiful thing.

And I, man, I love Tetris Effect. I've actually been playing that recently. It's such a good game. All right. My first game is a game that you guys probably have not played. I don't think you play this game. It's a game called Zork Zero. Are you guys familiar with this? You're familiar with Zork? Only from you. Of the Zork games. I definitely played the original games. I definitely play the original game. That was almost one of my one of my games. So the Zork games are of course classic interaction, interactive fiction, interactive fiction from the 70s, 80s. And there was an entire, I mean, there was a company called Infocom that just made a ton of this interactive text-based fiction. You're standing in front of a White House. Yes, there's a mailbox. There's a mailbox. Yeah. So a 10 of those games were, I used to play a ton of those games because my mom was worked, worked in, she worked for Scholastic, the kids company, the kids like entertainment company.

And she wound up getting like all these games and stuff as part of her work. And she would bring them home and just give them to me. And so I got all these free games. Even as a young child, I was getting free games. No, really just, that's just been your life. It's pretty crazy, right? I mean, that in itself is probably what led to my career, just getting a ton of, like, free PC games.

But anyway. They're not free? Wait, you have to pay for them? I got, right? How can I hack this? So she brought home a lot of these Infocom games, and we'd play them together and stuff. But there were always too hard for me,

or, like, I was young and didn't really, could never really get super far until I got to Zork Zero, which came out in 1988. So I would have been one when it came out. So obviously, I played it a few years after it came out. but Zork Zero, unlike many of the others, is a comedy game. And so essentially it's a prequel to the Zork series. There are a ton of games in the Zork series,

including some more modern ones where it turned into like a graphical game and they had a graphics. But at first it was just a text game. Zork Zero was made as kind of like a prequel, like side story that is also a comedy. The Zork games are very serious. This is not. And so it tells the story of like the ancient empire.

So Zork takes place in this like ruined empire. and Zorke Zero tells a story of like how it was ruined and what led to that. And it actually ends Kirk with you are standing in front of a White House. There is a mailbox. Right. Okay, sure. But Zork Zero is just like hilarious and weird and quirky and difficult and challenging. And I eventually wound up just playing it by reading through a walkthrough as I played.

But I enjoyed every second of it despite that. Because there's so much quirkiness to it. You like, you have to go around this weird word. world, collecting different objects that belong to all these Zork royalty figures. And they're all friggin' weird and dumb and stupid. There's this elaborate, there's this jester who keeps popping up randomly as you go and will like cast spells on you to like, like suddenly you'll feel yourself suffocating and you'll realize you have a clown nose on you and you have to remove it or he'll turn you into

like an animal for a couple of turns. There's a card game that you have to play and the card game is like, it's like Calvin ball where the rules are impossible and just made up as they go along and so you have to find a trick to circumnavigate it. There are a lot of weird little puzzles like that. It's also a game that is like so poorly designed that you can lock yourself out of victory just by doing the wrong thing at any turn. So it is not it is not necessarily a good game. But I just remember loving it as a child and loving all this interaction. It was just like the perfect example of like interaction interactive fiction for me. And I think uh, I always loved like reading and writing. But I think

certainly one of the reasons that I wound up wanting to be a writer is because I played so much of that interactive fiction, including Zork Zero, which was my favorite of the bunch. So that's my first. Kirk, you're up next. I'm up next. Okay, well, this is another very writerly game with a lot of writing. They're not interactive fiction.

And that is from 1992, Kingsquest Six, air today, gone tomorrow. Have either of you played this game? No, but I'm very familiar with that. But I've played other Kings Quest games. Yeah, it's an interesting series. This is the one that I am by far the most familiar with. It's a little bit like it's the where in time is Carmen San Diego of the Kings Quest series.

I think it's kind of seen as the peak of this series. So this was a series by, well, I know Roberta Williams was one of the main writers. She and her husband started Sierra, but I don't know how involved he was. This game was directed by her and also Jane Jensen. He was more of the businessman. That's kind of what I thought. So she designed this along with Jane Jensen, who then would go on to make Gabriel Knight. So these two women were responsible for kind of a lot of the games that I played in the 90s.

And this is one that's always been kind of special to me. I think I played this a little later. I don't think I played this right when it came out. And I think I'd probably played a few other Sierra Point and Click Adventure games before it. Something we talked about, I think, in our episode about Monkey Island on our main feed episode was the difference between LucasArts and Sierra games and how in LucasArts games you couldn't die. And that was this really important distinction because in Sierra games, oh, you could definitely die. And I think my next game is also a Sierra game. So I'll talk about that

more there too. But in this game, there's not combat in Kingsquest 6. You play like a prince, I think. What's his name? I should know this. But he's basically like exiled and trying to come back and find his way back to the throne. I mean, each Kingsquest game is sort of about that. It's very kind of pro-royal. But in a kind of silly fairy tale kind of way, like the world of Kings Quest mashes up a whole bunch of different fairy tales. So you'll be in Alice in Wonderland one minute,

and then, I don't know, whatever, some other fairy tale, the next minute. And it's all pretty silly. Like, oh, you fight the Minotaur at one point in this game. There's a whole minotar maze. And so it's kind of like, it's funny, but it's also kind of melodramatic. like it has a sort of a dramatic, romantic streak to it. And it's dangerous because you can die.

And you can even, I don't know if you can get stuck, like fully. You can screw yourself by like not picking up a thing that you needed. But it's definitely got some of that weirdness that adventure games like this had. So the main reason that I want to mention this is because it's tied to one of my fondest memories, which is that I played through this entire game while my grandma watched me when I was probably 13 years old or something, which is so... It's so cute. It's so cute. And it's not something that I ever really did, but I was really excited about this game.

I've been playing it on, like, my dad's computer downstairs. And I think I had been just sort of talking about it and telling my grandma, oh, well, you know, it's all these fairy tales and whatever, you know, it's so cool. You know, you control the guy and you have to solve the puzzles. And so she asked to see it. And I wound up playing through... She just kind of hung out. And I played through, like, many hours of the game.

I think maybe most of the game. And I think it was stuff that I hadn't played through as well. And just while she watched me. And it's kind of, you know, this was a while ago. And she died quite a while ago now, you know, maybe in 10 years ago or 15 years ago or something. So like I don't have that many recent memories of her. But it's just this very strong memory. And it was a funny moment of this nerdy kid being like, look at this game.

And I think she really legitimately thought it was cool because it was all of this mythology and these stories that she was familiar with. And it was so clever. and the story is charming and funny. So I think she genuinely liked it and wasn't just humoring me. Or at least that's what I tell myself. Yeah, that's great. She probably liked reading along with the story.

Yeah. Those games are pretty cool. The main reason I am familiar with them, yeah, is from let's play as in reading about them. So I feel like I've played them just from people talking about what it's like to play them. And they're just as entertaining in that format. Right.

You lose almost nothing by not playing them. Yeah. Maddie, you're up next. Okay. So I've got a second game. game here and it is Super Mario Land 2, six golden coins. Oh man. So this came out when I was six. I don't know how old I was when I played it. I might have been six. I remember this game because it was the first game I beat. That might be a false memory.

And I was I was really thinking back like is this, have I just told myself this or maybe Kirby's Dreamland was the first game? I will never know. But I do know that Mario Land was very hard for me. that Super Mario Land 2, or Mario Land 2, maybe there's no super there, was significantly easier. And this is, it's apparently notorious for this. I was Googling this. And people are like, this is a notoriously easy game. But to young me, I was just like, thank God I can freaking play this, man. Because you get the bunny ears and you get the bunny ears.

You can fly around. You can fly around. But also the save point system is a little different. And you collect the coins and that somehow affects how many lives you get or something. I don't remember that. I remember this game. I remember the. suit. Okay, I haven't thought about this game in a long time.

I know. This is really taking me back. Well, the lands are so iconic and there's the pumpkin land and then there's the giant Mario. That's the most memorable one, I think. The giant Mario robot. Yep. Incredible level. Incredible stuff. I just was so excited

to beat a video game. And I also, my older sister was better at Mario than I was, which was infuriating to me. She could beat Mario Land and she started like speed running it on her game boy and being like, oh, it's so easy. And I was like it's really not and so it was very excited to me when I beat this which naturally she was

like I've already beaten that like you know ages ago and I was like whatever I beat it I beat a video game so that was a huge deal for me beginning of early competitive Maddie right nice six golden coins yeah a great game um okay my next one is I was really debating here between final fantasy four and final fantasy six but I feel like the three of the three of us have talked enough about Final Fantasy 6, so I'll stick with Final Fantasy 4. So Final Fantasy 4 was known as Final Fantasy 2 when I played it back in

the 90s for the Super Nintendo. And what really struck me about that game when I played it was it was really the first game I played, at least on consoles, that told a story and had characters who you cared about and did things that no other game did, including like

forcing me to read and forcing me to learn words that I didn't know, like Spoonie. There's line, an infamous line, you spoonie Bart. Yes. But yeah, I feel like I wouldn't, I learned a lot of reading skills from playing this game because I played it so young. And then it kind of led me, because I, I played the first Final Fantasy on the NES. I think I've told you guys this. But like as a kid, I could never get past a certain choke point. And so I just played the first intro area over and over again,

like barely, only would finish it years and years later. But Final Fantasy, too, I could actually play through. I don't know how old I was, six, seven, one. And so I was. whatever it was. But it was the first sort of like you, Maddie, it was like an RPG that I could actually finish. And I learned the characters and like would be on the playground with friends who had played it, pretending to be the characters with them. And it was the first game that really stuck with me as like, oh, okay. And of course, it would lead me to review Final Fantasy 15 one one day. No, it would, it would stick with me. And I think it was the first time that I was like, I really fell in love with that series and that genre and that type of game.

you read and you learn a story and it's all kind of like manifested in the gameplay. And even today it still does some super clever things. Like there's a character named Tella and his whole storyline is that he he forgot all of his spells and he wants to go relearn this one spell so he can kill the big bad guy Galvez. And that's reflected by his magic points, which is that like he learns, well, oh, sorry, sorry, backing up a second. So then when he does relearn his spells, there's this one spell, Meteo that is like, the ultimate powerful spell, but he knows if he uses it, it will kill him.

And that's reflected by his magic points. So you see it in his spell menu the entire time. We're playing with him, but you can't use it. It's grayed out. It's like it costs 99 magic points and you only have 90. And then when he finally, he uses it during the story cutscene that is also an in-battle scene. And it wipes him out. It's like the magic points were actually his energy and it wiped him out entirely.

And so it kills him as part of the story. And that was a really cool moment. Like, this is the first game I had played where, like, characters die and don't come back. And, like, their plot twists. And, like, it's a whole elaborate story. There's, like, the game came included with this manual that walked you through the first few hours of the game. And I thought that would be the entire game. But then, no, it ends at, like, this point where you go to the underground.

And there's an entire new map. And then you fly to the moon. And there's another map. So, yeah, it was just mind-blowing for me as a kid playing this game and kind of realizing what games were capable of and the scopes and scales that they could reach. So that's Final Fantasy 4. Kirk, you're out. All right, I'm debating which of my two games to do next.

I guess I'll keep it on the adventure game in that zone. And say that another very formative game for me, among many adventure games I played, was Quest for Glory for Shadows of Darkness. Of course. Jason, you're smiling. So you've played this game? I have, yeah, it's a classic.

Another tough game. but yeah so many fun memories I remember always turning into like a werewolf for something and dying or letting the werewolf escape or something like that it's true you could die a lot of different ways you could die in all of these games so this series was this was another Sierra series

that man I played the first Quest for Glory game it was like I was young enough where I just was at software etc or whatever and looking at games and just saw this game called Quest for Glory and the back of the box I remember the back of the box saying, you know, groundbreaking visuals. And it was the visual, it was like, I think that this character you talked to at the first in is on the back of the box.

I could probably find a picture of the back of the box and really take myself back. But anyways, and just being like, groundbreaking visuals, I'm in and buying it. And then playing it and really liking it. So these games were kind of groundbreaking in some ways. The visuals, perhaps, were? Really in some gameplay ways. but also they were kind of nice looking. They had some things that you now see in,

I mean, in Mass Effector and in BioWare games, where you would create a hero in the first game, and then if you beat the game, you could transfer your save file onto a floppy disk and then load it up in the next game in the series, and your same hero would be playable. And the funny thing was, I don't remember the exact variables between characters,

but they all kind of look the same. Like you're the basic guy in Quest for Glory, is just this white blonde dude with a sword who's just like a very, you know, very boring early names. The big difference was the classes. You could be a fighter or a maids or a thief and then a paladin in four eventually.

The thief, I remember, had the coolest stuff because you could go join the thieves guile's guilt. Yes, yes. There was a whole thief plotline and you kind of had, you wanted to play the game multiple times to see all that. But it was just thinking about a game like Mass Effect where a lot of the appeal is that people put a lot of work

into the look of their character, and that look is, like, really tied to how they envision the character. This is just, you're some guy, and, like, maybe you're a thief, maybe you're a warrior. But it was still pretty cool that that was possible. I think I maybe only did it once, like, carried a character over. I usually just started fresh, and a lot of times my friends and I, I will admit now, because I think the statute of limitations has expired, we would totally take the discs and, you know, give them to one another.

Because these games came on, like, this one on, Quest for Glory Four came on, like, 12, floppy disks or something. So my friend would play the game and install it and play it, and then he'd give me the discs. And there was totally like copy protection and you had to kind of share it around to be able to all play it at the same time. But I have these memories of sort of carrying boxes of floppy disks to my friend's houses and installing them.

So the other thing I'll say. So anyways, Quest for Glory 4. It's kind of different than the other ones. It's tonally the same, but the setting is very different. So each setting, I suppose, is kind of different. The first one is kind of traditional, just sort of European fantasy, I guess. This one is a little more Brothers Grimm with kind of some Lovecraft stuff in there, too. I was watching some clips just of this game to refresh myself on it.

And I'd kind of forgotten that a lot of the plot is about resurrecting this dark god that's kind of unify the spheres or whatever the hell. They get kind of Lovecraftian, which is funny, just because these games are very silly. And they always were, this one in particular. There's a bunny. Is it a Vorpal Bunny? Is that what it's called? It's basically the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It's this blood fanged, but it's a tiny little rabbit, and then you have to fight it. There's combat in these games that's pretty terrible. You click on enemies. The thing that was always stressful for me was the timer because it was like on this actual day cycle. And if you spent too much time clicking around, you would lose because you would run out of time to do something. And that always stressed me out as a kid playing it. Yeah, it was definitely a sort of chance. challenging game on a lot of levels, though kind of experimental.

Like it was, looking back on it now, it's sort of surprising how many sharp edges it had and just how strange it was in a lot of ways. It would actually be probably kind of fun to replay it. So the last thing I will say is that this, I have this really strong memory of the menu music from this game because it features this keyboard guitar solo. So the music was composed by someone named Aubrey Hodges, who's a composer I'm not familiar with. but there's this very surprisingly convincing fake guitar solo that plays during the credits music.

I just listen back to it. It's pretty, like they do some guitar stuff, some bends that are like exactly what you would do on guitar, but it's not a guitar. It's totally this keyboard switch for 1993 is pretty convincing. And that made an impression on me even then. I remember like distinctly thinking this isn't a guitar, but it sounds like a guitar. How did they do that? And sort of being interested in that.

So that's kind of a, it was kind of a strong memory. for me. So that's a quest for glory for shadows of darkness. Oh man, I can talk about that game for a while. Maybe we should do a triple play sometime.

Yeah, that would be pretty fun. I'd be into it. Total listens. 20. Who cares? You have a lot of your negative subscribers. Maddie, go ahead.

Well, I'm going to go with a mega blockbuster the Oregon Trail. So specifically, I want to say the Oregon Trail deluxe. was the version that I want to talk about here, which came out in 92. So I did play the original one at school. That was at school. But this one was the one that my parents bought for our home computer for whatever reason.

And I looked it up today and just looking at this detailed pixel art instantly transported me back in time. And it was like such an intense feeling to look at it and be like, oh my God, I looked at this so much. I didn't have that many games. This was one of the ones that I had. And it was also the game that made me really. realize that I really liked first person shooters, although I didn't know what those were yet then. So there was a hunting game in the original Oregon Trail. But in Oregon Trail deluxe, it was much more, like, there's a reticle on the screen for your gun, for one thing. And there's like

animals that go back and forth, like a big buck hunter situation. And it's, it's, it's a little bit more detailed, basically. Like, it's a shooter. And I would challenge myself and I'd be like, okay, I'm only going to live off rabbits because they move the fastest, so I'm going to do an all rabbits run. And I, you know, just stupid crap like that. And I would try to, I would try to bring as little food as possible and only survive on my food. And I don't know. I was playing a lot of Oregon Trail and it wasn't that interesting.

But really, I was just playing the hunting mini game constantly. And then eventually I learned about shooters. And I was like, oh, there's entire games where you can just click on stuff to shoot at it. That's great. because I didn't know that was a genre. But yeah, I played it a lot. And the other thing I did that I mentioned this in passing, and Nico and Gita made fun of me for it.

And so now I'm just going to confess it. I used to name all my wagon mates after my crushes at school to motivate myself. Everybody does this. How could they make fun of you for that? They were like, wow, that's so weird, Maddie. And I'm like, no, everyone, come on, everyone did that, right? Totally normal. Every single time I played an RPG.

you with a female character, I would name her after whoever I was crushing on. I mean, perhaps the weird part was that I would always, of course, have multiple crushes. And I would never assume that any of them would actually be interested in me. So it wasn't like I thought there was some type of conflict of interest in terms of them all being in the wagon with me or like we were all dating. That wasn't the fantasy. The fantasy was just that I would take care of all of them and make sure they all didn't die. And I, it was very motivated. Which is basically your job now is just taking care of everybody making sure you.

Kind of is. Yeah, I guess. And hunting every now and then. I have to bring home bunnies to make sure that Dina is well-fed and Polygon. That's all I do now. That's my main thing. So yeah, I played a lot of Oregon Trail deluxe a lot. It really is Big Buck Hunter. I'm looking at these screenshots. And it's never really made that connection before. But Big Buck Hunter is just, what if Oregon Trail hunting game was in an arcade and had a gun? Yeah, the difference being that you shoot it. It's a lot more kind of immersive to shoot a actual gun. I mean, you're holding a gun. usually in a CD bar. When you're a kid, it's the same difference. Really, Duck Hunt is the original. Yes, Duck Hunt. Well, actually, Oregon Channel was before Duck Hunt. But yeah.

Okay, my next game is a little old game called Warcraft 2. Oh, my God. Wow. Man, I almost flunked French class because of Warcraft 2. Oh, my God, Warcraft 2. So in the 1990s, I played every single game that Blizzard came out with. But I was super young when Warcraft 2 came. out. I believe it was 1994, so I would have been seven. And I remember getting it as like pretty much

when it came out. But like, as was often the case with me in games like that, games back then, any game back then, I couldn't beat it. I wasn't like I couldn't wrap my head around a lot of stuff. I couldn't figure out it to be. It was very complicated, a lot of resource mechanics, etc. So I would always just use cheat codes. And I got so much satisfaction over just like making myself ultra powerful and blazing through every single mission and just beating it with cheat codes on. go on to do the same with Starcraft when that came out, with Diablo 1 when that came out. Diablo 2 was the first Blizzard game that I like played for real and spent many hundreds of hours playing. But Warcraft 2 was really my first.

I played a little bit of Warcraft 1 but never really got into it. Warcraft 2 was the first game that like turned me into like a Blizzard fan back then and too it got me to the point where I was like I have to play everything this company comes up with because I was obsessed with it. My goodness. The way it looked, the way it sounded, the way it felt. play the way that like if you clicked on a character multiple times they would like get pissed off and yell at you like the little charm even though it was like the serious story there was all this weird charm like the the orcs going ork and like the weird weird sounds and noises and the music and

man everything about it was just was just fantastic i loved the ogres the way that the ogers would just like yell at each other the two heads would yell at each other uh if you clicked him enough times yeah that was such an early experience with game addiction for me that's probably the first video game I got addicted to. And I really, like, I really was like not studying for a French final. I remember it very vividly because I was in high school. And just playing and playing. And I was like, I just would

rather do this than study for French. And then I got up doing very badly. So this is the key to Blizzard success. It was also one of the first games that you could actually log in and play against other people. And it worked pretty well. And you could just play against your buddies or you could play against random people. It was just, it was a seamless experience.

And then obviously they would overhaul that. make that even better, improve that over time. And Starcraft was really the game that I spent just like playing endless, endless stuff, like custom games with other people and stuff like that. Oh my God, the custom games in StarCraft, the original Moba and of Strife. I used to play all the time in StarCraft in the late 90s. But, yeah, Warcraft really set it all in motion. And, of course, was Blizzard's, Warcraft was successful for Blizzard, but not like, like Warcraft

2 was what made Blizzard, Blizzard back then. So, yeah, good stuff. Good, good stuff. Kirk, you're up next. All right, well, this is a game that I wanted to like and then realize that I didn't like. And I think that's an important moment when you first have a game that you really think

it just has to be good. Excellent. And then you realize that you just don't like it. And that is the seventh guest. Oh, man. Do you know this game, Jason? I didn't play it, but I know it. Yeah, I know of it.

Maddie, do you know the seventh guest? I've heard of it. So this was a full motion video game. It originally came out in 1993. So it was 13. It's on CD-ROM, and it was really hyped when it came out. It was developed by Trilobite, which even seeing that name really takes me back. And the whole thing was that there were actors kind of superimposed onto a, you know, video game scene.

So it wasn't live, it wasn't full motion video like it's, you know, actors on a real set. It was like actors moving through a video game. And, man, it was so cool looking. It was so exciting. because it felt like this was, you know, the kind of the age of full motion video because, so shortly after this, this is when Gabriel Knight 2 would be full motion video.

Roberta Williams would go on to make Phantasmagoria, that very misbegotten game that is full motion video. And we get, there's kind of this whole weird era of full motion video games that I'm sure a lot of people know about. This was kind of the beginning of that. And the belief was, well, yeah, I mean, that this is where we're going, right? Obviously, like, video games are just going to become interactive movies.

and it's actually really interesting to think about this game in the context of immortality, yeah. Which really has some sort of similarities. Yeah. Yeah, though immortality has the kind of haunting quality, like where the person that you are, like, is, you know, the thing you learn by your own unique vantage point winds up being part of the story, which was true in the seventh guest as well.

This is like a haunted house game where this guy killed a bunch of people. He became a really successful toy maker. but he was always kind of evil, and then a bunch of kids die, and he becomes a recluse and goes back to his house. And then you go there, and it's the ghosts of these people that he invites these six guests who each have their own stories, a little bit like Clue, or, you know, I don't know, pick your famous Hitchcock or Agatha Christie's story.

And then they all turn on one another, and they get killed by traps in the house, or they kill one another. And you kind of just go through and solve all the puzzles that they're trying to solve to see this stuff all happen. I finally watched the ending of this on YouTube, but I never finished this game, and I never even really liked it because I think I was a little too young. It's kind of an adult story in a certain way, which isn't a knock against it exactly, but I wasn't that into this story. It's kind of hammy, but it is a lot of adults doing kind of adult stuff. Like it has a lot of sort of that feels a little like BioShack, if you want to pick a more recent game that has a similar energy.

And then the puzzles are really hard. Like that was the other thing. It's just as a kid, I liked solving puzzles and I liked adventure game puzzles, but these puzzles are, they were just more sort of abstract and more like really challenging just, you know, grid puzzles or word puzzles that you were very restricted. You just, they showed you a thing and then you had to figure out what to do. There may be exceptions to that, but mostly it was like you're looking at the puzzle and you're solving it. Kind of like missed, if you want to compare it to another, another very successful game. Where I really liked puzzles more like in Monkey Island where you're walking around, you're picking up things, and then you think, oh yeah, I got that thing, and I kind of need something here.

So I can use that chicken as a pulley to get across this rope, whatever. Whatever it's going to be. I'm totally with you. Hated mists, love those types of others. Right. So it was kind of a moment for me to realize, oh, like, well, I'm excited by how this looks, and I think this is cool because I'm into the technology, but I just don't really like this game, and I don't like playing it.

And I really kind of hit my head against it for a while until I finally just stopped because I wasn't having fun. So I think that was kind of an important moment for me. Um, fun fact, seven cast, I believe the designer of that game was Graham Devine, who I spoke to you for my first book, because he went on to work on Halo Wars. A whole bunch of other other stuff. Yeah, it is. I was wondering if any of the people who worked on some of the, on that game had gone on to do things. That's cool.

Maddie, you're up next. What's your fourth? Mine is Mist. Gotta, gotta have Mist on my list. I know if you guys aren't as into it, but I loved Mist. I was so into Mist. My whole family played Mist. which was a huge deal for me at the time.

Like the idea that my parents would play a computer game was like so weird and fascinating to me. And I also think I was too young to really understand it. And I don't even think Miss is that complicated, but it's just complicated enough. So I would have been seven when it came out. I don't know if I played it right then, but I might have. And we had the strategy guide, which was really helpful for the puzzles, which, like Kirk said, it can be very difficult and opaque.

And sometimes you're just, so it's kind of first person, but really you're just like scrolling through a series of what looked like crappy Polaroid pictures and like a tiny sink on your crappy Macintosh computer or whatever we had. It didn't look good. I also remember thinking most of the characters were black characters because of how poor the rendering was. And then, like, much later in life, I was like,

oh, I thought the actress family was like all black actors who were cast. No. No, it's just really hard to see them. You were like, wow, who said, why do people think diversity is a problem? Yeah, I was like, what about all of me? I think I literally did Google that like pretty early on in my game's rating and I was like, but what about all the characters and mess? And then I was like, oh, no, I just had like a really crappy monitor. That's interesting.

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Anywho, the main twist of MEST, which I guess I can spoil in case anyone somehow hasn't played MIST and still wants to, go for it. It's kind of a pain in the butt to play. So there's these two brothers, and they're trapped in these mystical books. And you yourself are also trapped in a book. You enter the world of mist by being transported into a book. So there's books within books.

Christopher Nolan would love it. So you're talking to these two brothers who are each trapped in a book, and they're both not trustworthy. Like one of them kind of has an anger problem, and the other one is sort of like he's really smarmy, and he's always sucking up to you, but he also doesn't seem trustworthy. So they both seem, they're both antagonists. And as a kid, I was like, wow, I really don't trust either of these guys.

And I got to the end, like you collect all the pages. And I remember choosing one. And he kills you if you complete his quest. And he's like, ha ha, now you're going to be trapped in the book because you completed my quest. And I was like, okay, did that wrong. Let me reload that. Let me try the other brother.

And then I also died. And I was like so confused by that. I was like, how is there no ending to this? game. Like what the hell? Like what's happening here? And I was like flummoxed by the idea that there could be two different bad endings and that I had chosen both of them. And I was like, well, what am I even supposed to do? I don't even, I don't even get what this game is then. And my sister, my sister, of course, had already beaten the game. Classic. And she was like, it's just the worst. She was like, God, you dummy. She was very, she was very kind and caring, even though my competitive spirit was like,

I can't believe she's already beaten this. But she was like, well, so the two brothers told you not to trust their dad, but you shouldn't trust either of them, right? So maybe you should try talking to their dad. And I was like, but I've been told not to talk to their dad for the whole game. That's what they told me not to do. And I was like, just my mind was blown by that. That that was the real way that you win was to do what the two characters had been telling you to never do. Like, especially as a child, I feel like the idea that a game character could lie to you was like crazy to me. I was like, what, they could just lie? Like, that's nuts.

Like, the game's supposed to tell you where to go. It blew my mind. And it still kind of does. I still think Miss is pretty iconic, honestly. Pretty good ending. Oh, man. I remember it was the biggest game in the whole world. Yeah.

And I did kind of feel pushed away by the puzzles, but the atmosphere was so remarkable in that game. Yeah. It just still has that weird, lonely sort of vibe. There's not really another game that feels like. It's cool. It's weird. And it feels almost kind of scary at points because you're like, I'm all, Like, what is happening?

And nothing ever jumps out at you, but it always kind of feels like maybe it could. Yeah, I never got as far as the story because I was always just like turned off by all the levers and things to rotate and shit like that. I was like, what is going on here? Yeah, whereas I was like I am exactly like Leonardo da Vinci. I love puzzles. I love this shit. Give me a lever. I'll rotate that.

I'll play a little piano ditty and like unlock something. Great. Because I really love the room games now. And those are a lot like Mist. I feel like I would maybe like Mist now if I want to... Maybe. I don't know. It's pretty tedious.

Well, they made that sequel, whatever it's called. Yeah, Riven. Yeah, I never beat that. Well, there's another more recent... Well, more recently, abduction is a bit more recently. Yeah, that's an abduction. All right, my game is kind of along the same theme as yours, Kirk, is that it is a game I hated.

So my game is a little game called Ever Grace. Ever Grace is developed by a little... little company named Chrome Software of all people. Okay, so from Software pre-Miazaki was a very different type of company. Anyway, so here's the context. Let me set the scene. It is

2000. I have, uh, I grew up playing Nintendo systems and then switched to PlayStation because Final Fantasy switched to PlayStation and like many kids, I was going where Final Fantasy went. And then I wanted a PlayStation 2 because Final Fantasy 10 was going to be on PlayStation 2

and I had to have to play. Because it was twice as good as the original PlayStation. Exactly. The place is good. So cut to 2000. I remember it was like I asked my parents for a PlayStation 2 for my birthday because it was like coming out later that year and they were like, this is $300. Are you kidding me?

I was like, what if it's like also my bar mitzom present? What if it's combined with what if it's also Chlamika? What if it's like all these. I want to catch in. I'll never ask for anything again. I'll have taken advance on presents. Anyway, they were very generous, got me a PS2 in October or another. whenever it came out that year. And like many consoles, the launch lineup for the PlayStation

2 was not very robust. But I told my parents and they knew that I liked role-playing games. That was pretty much all I played. So they got me the two role-playing games that came out alongside the PS2. And those were both by From Software. One was called Eternal Ring. The other was called Ever Grace. And so the reason that Ever Grace was formative was because it was the first game I played and I was like, wow, this is terrible. I never. want to play this again. Because when you're growing up, when I was growing up, I played a lot of bad games. The NES had a ton of crap shovel where Game Boy did too, as you mentioned Kirk before.

There was a lot of bad stuff that I played. But like when you're a kid, you don't realize it's bad. You just kind of play it. And you're like, you know what? I haven't. I'm just going to play it. It's a video game. You don't have that many games.

Yeah. You don't have that many games. You're just going to keep playing it. Maybe you'll stop playing it. But you'll assume it's because of you and not because of the game. Like you don't, you don't have the critical thinking skills necessary to be like, oh, this is a bad piece of art. But at 13, I was owned enough to recognize like, wow, this is bad. And so Evergrace is a formative experience because it was my first game that I got. And I was like, wow,

this is really shitty. I don't want to play this anymore. I can't believe that I, like, my parents spent money on this thing. And so my PS2 sat around, like unused for a long time until I think Final Fantasy 10 came out or some other like RPG that was actually decent came out. And I could play that on there and I went back to the PS1 and I don't know if my parents actually knew that this PS2 that I had begged them for that they spent a lot of money on was just like sitting around collecting dust but I hope they never found out because it was very very sad experience so yeah sometimes the formative games are the ones that teach you that there are bad games in this world that you should not play I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry for this and it says

Gameplay. Ever Grace features two main characters, Darius the Swordsman and Charlene the Homemaker, with two distinctly different storylines and different battle techniques. I don't think I play that much. I definitely didn't play enough to remember that. You didn't meet Charlene the Homemaker. Charlene the Homemaker, wow. I wonder what that involved. You've got to make cupcakes in time for the school board meeting. Like, what is the gameplay of that?

This is a from software game. Like today, in Eldon Ring, you would find an MPC name Charlie and the Homemaker, and she would be the hardest boss in the game. So, like, it does the same. That's true. We can't read too much from a name. It's true. Reading Wikipedia out of context isn't totally fair.

But yeah, Evergrey's a bad game. Anyway, let's get to our final selections. Final picks. All right, mine is not a video game. It's a card game. A card game called Magic the Gathering. Of course. I played kind of a lot of Magic the Gathering when I was in middle school.

So this game, I believe, came out in 1993. And I was probably playing it in 1994, which I wouldn't have guessed when I was playing it, that it had come out as recently as it had. Because it just seemed kind of established. And I wish I could remember hearing about this game or sort of what it was, like who it was who told me about it and how they described it to me to get me into it. But at some point, a group of friends and I, after school, we would take the, I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. We would take the local city bus after middle school.

There was a bus stop right by our school. We would go down and get on the bus, and we would go downtown. And downtown in Bloomington, Indiana, that's like Kirkwood, which is the street. That's the kind of main drag for Indiana University, which is in Bloomington. Did you spend a lot of time on Kirkwood? I would, wouldn't I? Beautiful. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff there.

That's where the library is. where just sort of places you can go hang out if you're, you know, still kind of a kid, but you're in middle school and you, right, you want to go have some fun. So I'll go to the library to the Monroe County Public Library on Kirkwood and Bloomington. And I know that at least three people listening to this are probably very excited to hear me calling out these places. So at the library, I don't know, we would kind of just go there and hang out. And then at some point we met up, we started hanging out with these older kids who would play Magic the Gathering. And I don't remember who any of them really were.

They were kind of like older nerds from the high school that I would eventually go to. And we were younger nerds who were going to go to that high school. And I wound up in this just sort of rotating group where there was a little area in the library and everyone would bring their decks and people would just play. And it would kind of be, I don't think we ever did a tournament, but it was kind of, you know, I got next, you know, people rotating around. And it was really fun. It's the only time I've ever done something like that with like a competitive game or certainly

a card game. I tried to get into the unfortunately named Jihad, which was the game based on Vampire the Masquerade, which is also a card game and a role-playing game I'd played some of. But I was never really that into it. But I got pretty into Magic the Gathering. I had a black deck. That was my sort of element. That's where I used the swamps to get power. And I had a card called the nightmare, which is a card that scales in power with how many swamps you have in play. I wonder if the nightmare still exists. It was ludicrously overpowered, at least in my deck, and I had like three of them. And so it was the kind of thing where I would just play until I could bring out my nightmares, and I would be playing all these swamps. And then I'd play them, and they'd just, you know,

be whatever, like a nine-nine monster or something, and I would just destroy my opponents. But I wasn't actually good. I just kind of had that one cheesy strategy that worked on some of my friends. But I think when I would play the high school kids who had, you know, good decks and knew what they were doing, they would just mop the floor with me. Did you ever play the computer game, the magic computer game? A little bit. I played the one that was, they came out with a version

that was on iPad and I played a little bit of that and I guess I played Ascension which is very similar and then since then I've played so many digital card games that are all inspired in some way but no I haven't really Well the one in 1997

was special because that was one where there was like this world and a story and you go around and you kill creatures and take their cars and stuff it wasn't just like a translation of the car game It was a card game was gameplay for this bigger thing. So sort of like the Witcher Gwent game where there's a story.

Exactly. But that came, just a fun little tangent here. There's a character in that game named Tutorial Witch, and you will not believe who the actress is who plays Tutorial Witch. Are you ready? Meryl Streep. Maddie, any guesses? Jennifer Hale.

I don't know. Ray Seahorn. Kim Wexler herself is Tutorial. Amazing. Amazing. The Magic the Gathering. I love early career casting like that. That's so cool.

That's awesome. Yeah, that was a cool thing about Magic the Gathering was that the art was so fantastic. And it really like, even the names of the cards, it really implied a whole world without needing to flesh it out with Laura. But it did really capture my imagination. I remember the Force of Nature. I think I maybe did a green black deck sometimes

because I had some good green cards. That was a powerful green card. It looked kind of like swamp thing. And it was just called Force of Nature. And it was like, oh, what's that? So lots of things like that. Do you remember Sarah Angel? That was always one of my go-to-es.

Yeah, oh man, that's right. Sarah Angel, that was a white card, right? It was like, yeah, just a beefy, like a 5-5 flying creature. And then was it called Black Orpheus? Was that the name of the card? No, it wasn't. Black Orpheus is a jazz standard. Black Lotus?

Is that what you're thinking? Yeah, it's Black Lotus. I had a friend who had a Black Lotus. No way. They're worth so much money. I bet now it's worth even more. It was worth a lot even then. The game was pretty new.

even back then because it was banned. They had this collection. They were like, the computer game used it small. They had the banned cards were in the computer game, but they were as like legendary cards. So there was only one would exist in the whole world. Oh, wow. That's funny. It was cool.

Yeah, it was a cool game. The computer game also had cards that would not be possible in the real world because they used like random numbers. So it created a couple of cards that would be possible only in that. Oh, man, I'm reading. And yeah, Black Lotus is the single most valuable normally printed card in the game of magic, printed in a standard set. Yeah, because it was banned.

They stopped producing them, so that's why. Because it was too powerful. There's a finite number of them. It was zero. You put it down for free and you sacrifice it and you get three mana. It was like you could destroy anybody if you got that in your opening hand. It was like a way to do a Zurgrush kind of thing at the very beginning. Okay, so I'm just reading a little more here.

This is via the Magic the Gathering wiki. Sorry, but in 2019, a 9.5 grade mint version, Alpha Black Lotus, sold for $166,100. Great. And, oh, my God, wait. And in 2021, a mint 10 grade sold for $511,000. This is making me wonder if my friend. Yeah, you've got to find out of it.

I'm still in touch with him. I'm going to ask him because it could be he had a fake one or something. Like, this was a long time ago. I think he had a real one, though. Man, I'm going to have to ask him if he hung on to that. If I remember correctly, it was always tough to tell if something was fake or real. Right, and they were definitely forged black lotuses out there for sure. $511,000 to buy a house for that.

Yeah. Wow. Like a pretty nice house. Goodness gracious. Did you ever play Harthstone, Kirk? Yeah, I really liked it. I didn't get super into it. I did too.

I liked it too. It's fun. Yeah, it felt like a worthy, worthy successor in some ways. For sure. All right, Maddie, what's your final game? My final game is Doom. I really stuck with elementary school for all my picks, by the way. I feel like if I'd gone all the way up to 13

I can't believe you didn't pick Street Fighter Well see that's that's what I was gonna say Because I well I didn't play those till later in life for one But the other thing I didn't start playing fighting games And Counterstrike until you know 13 and up And I just I didn't go that I didn't go that high up in my age here Doom was like the first violent adult game that I played And I played it at a friend's house on his dad's computer

And we weren't supposed to be playing it but he had already secretly played all of it and was like, all right, we're going to do this. I'm going to show you this whole game. And we played it. And I don't know, his dad wasn't home and his mom always just kind of let us do whatever we were going to do. I think she got very tired of us times. We could be very loud. But yeah, I remember that game was like the first serious shooter I had ever seen, I think.

Post-Oregon Trail deluxe years, of course, where I was like, oh, you can just shoot it, guys. with a gun? That's so cool. I don't know what was wrong with my brain that I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I thought Doom was the coolest thing ever. I think a lot of people thought Doom was the coolest thing ever. It kind of was.

And it was also a little scary. I mean, not in like a horror jump out way, but like a illicit violent way in the way that like Mortal Kombat kind of was. And it was like, the satanic stuff. The satanic panic was not too far behind us. And like, you know,

people were still like, oh, are video games a little bit dangerous and like adult? Like that was, it was prime that time period. So I have good memories of playing Doom and being like, ooh, this is like a whole new world I'm entering into. And then, you know, it's just all downhill from there. Doom holds up. It's pretty great.

It's pretty great. It's still really fun. I would sneak up at like five in the morning before school to play Doom on my dad's laptop and then I would erase it so that he didn't know that I was playing it. I think I've told this story on the show before. I just need to ask my parents if they knew if they knew that I'm sure Aaron's dad knew and I'm sure he did not care like I just I think he probably was like they're having a good time you know there's nothing that bad in there right part part of the whole parenting thing is deciding what to let slide and I imagine it's like that's fine that's such a big deal um okay my final game is sort of is an online game it is a mud a multi-user dungeon dimension right I know you play these called AVP AVP mud. So like many millennials, I think I think pretty much everyone who grew up during the internet age wound up finding like an internet home, so to speak, the place where they spend the most

of their time, whether it was like Neopets forums or AOL message board chat rooms or whatever, or live chat rooms or whatever, or websites, like game facts. A lot of people are on the game faunfiction.net. But usually it was someplace where you could communicate with other people, not just like post your own things, like a forum of some sort. This was the pre-Twitter. Facebook days. So nowadays Twitter or Facebook is everyone's home but internet home but this was a different time or Discord or whatever.

So when you say AVP, I have an immediate association with those letters that I believe is the correct association but I want to hear about that. Alien versus Predator. Remember the other day? Remember a few weeks ago you were talking about prey and I was like I have a lot of predator lore because I used to play as a predator. So basically

so a mud for people aren't familiar is essentially a proto-emorto Before there were MMOs, there were MMOs. Muds are text-based MMOs. So instead of like clicking, instead of having a graphical interface, you just have text and you just read. And it'll say you are standing in front of a White House or whatever. You were standing here in this place. And there are people who ran these things. They would be coders and builders and they would write descriptions of each room you would come across. And so you get to this room and it's written by someone who runs the game. And so I, a friend of mine, got me into this AVP and I started playing it. And it became my internet home. I became friends with people on there. I started, it's a PVP mud. So it's very competitive. And you go around and like, you level up and then you try to fight each other. And it was, it's like, it was a perfect size because it was like big enough that there were always a few players online, but it was small enough that like you could really get to know a lot of the people who you played with. And then over the course of like the next five, six years,

basically throughout all of high school, like eighth grade to college. All I did was play Muts. Like that was my leisure time. That was my social life to the point where like I got a girlfriend to play a mud with me. So I started off just as a player, wound up like becoming a staff member and like working on the game. I have this like, I have this vivid memory of the first time that I got like quote unquote promoted to staff member and like getting to use these tools.

Unpaid, I assume. Of course I'm paid. It was all. This thing was totally free. Like no one was making money. Well, some people were making money off muds, but not the one I played. The one I played was totally free. No microtransactions or anything, although micro transactions really started in the mud, in the mud days in various forms.

But anyway, so I would, yeah, I would play with it. I have this intimate, this vivid memory of the first time that I got a behind-the-scenes glimpse and I could, like, move rooms around and control things. I was like, oh, my God, so much power. And yeah, this is like essentially my internet. I created my own mud. You guys will not be surprised to hear that I made a mud based on Sweet Codon, and it was said in the world of Cicodon, and people could, like, play with each other in this world. Holy shit. Does this still exist somewhere?

Are there going to be people who write in and are like, I played Jason's sweet coden mud, and I am only now learning that that happened? I would love to hear from those people. Because that would be why. I don't think so. It wasn't that popular. Like, we had a few people, but it wasn't like. So two people total played it, and Jason knows both of them. It could be that popular.

It could. Yeah, it could, it's possible. I have the code on my desktop. You basically, you need to, like, have a unique server that you, that you pay for in order to get it running. And it's a bit of a process. I'm going to guess we can make this happen within seconds. Like, by merely going to the triple, like, just sort of asking one question. I really want to play Jason Sweet Code in one. I doubt it. I don't think that many people played it. Because, like, no, I mean, I am sure somebody has a Unix server that we could put it on. If we wanted to run it. I wouldn't even know where to start. barely remember. But I did learn how to code. I did learn how to program just so I could do this. I had like, at one point when I was like 12, I had like a fake like an internet girlfriend. I still don't even, to this day, I don't even know if it was a real woman or if it was like a catfish. Probably was a real person. An internet crush like a crush in a mud. Like this became my life. This was the pre like I only, I got into wow for a bit, but I never really got into any MMO's like hard tour. This was my version of that. I would like, I remember

going on vacation to like a foreign country with my family and like finding an internet cafe and just being like, just park me here. Just park me here. I got to check in because I would tell people like, hey, I'm gone for a week. Like don't, in case you're wondering, I'm going away for a week.

You would have clans and like guilds and stuff. You would all hang out together. To the day, I mean, there are still a couple people I'm like semi in touch with who I played much with back in the day. And we would like be, we We were staffed together. And the guy who ran AVP Mata, I haven't talked to him in a long time, but he works for Blizzard now. So he wound up becoming like a programmer in the video game industry.

I haven't talked to him very long time. But yeah, that was my internet social life for a very long time was like this tech space game. So yes, Kirk, aliens and predators. If you played it as an alien, you like started off as a face hugger and then became a chest buster and then like evolved your way up. That's perfect. You could be a Marine. And you could hang out on the... Who would want to be a name of that?

Why would you do that? The Nostromo or whatever is. Because you got a lot of... You hung out of the Nostromo. Yep. Because you could get like plasma rifles and like cool weapons as a movie. Who cares? You want to be an alien. Come on.

I was always a predator. If you're a predator, you start off in like these hunting grounds as a yautja and you can speak the yautja language and get like... You can turn invisible and stop people. Because remember, so this is a PVP mud. So you're fighting against the other races. And so there would be times when like someone would be like war in such and such and everyone would go to that zone and like take each other on and fight each other. And it taught me out of type very fast because the only way to like the way to play was to tell very fast.

Did you ever play the PVP Alien versus Predator game where you could play as either of the three? It's pretty cool. It would not be it would not. If it's not text based, I'm not. Oh no. I mean I'm not at all saying that it was I'm sure it's not as cool as the mud. But it was it was I remember it being a surprisingly cool game where it would not. it was a super like asymmetrical game where you could be a marine running around with a gun or you're an alien like climbing the walls and the camera went all fish eye and crazy and then you're a predator with night vision like stomping around blowing stuff up uh it was it was at least a cool concept i don't know how it would hold up now but it was so one of the most fun things back then was again becoming staff and like creating stuff and then learning how to code some basic stuff through that and basically my my introduction in the world of coding which i'm sure is a lot of people how a lot of people do this was just like

like reading someone else's code and just copying, like figuring out, okay, this is what I want to do. I'm just going to copy what this person did here and then take from here and then take from here. Like how I learned HTML. Exactly. Exactly. No, it was so. That's what I hear anyway. There was nothing more satisfying as like a teenager than like someone requesting something of me and like one of the muds I ran, whether it was sweet code in. I had like a Diablo mud at some point. And me being like, okay, let me figure out if I can make this happen at like learning the code for it and then injecting. it into the system and being like okay it works now um i remember building like a whole combat system for sweet code and mud uh i remember playing around with a turn base system in one point which did not work super well but anyway yeah i had some addicted players which was cool watching people being like

addicted to the game that i created was a fun experience game developer jason also kind of got all of the any sort of game design instincts i might have had got all that out as a teen right zero interest in ever designing but yeah that was my uh vp mud was was the place to be back then. Yeah, if any triple click listeners have played AVP mud, let me know. Probably, I doubt anyone has played Sweet Cutta Mud, but if by some chance you have, I remember creating like an Asky World map where it was like a map that was like, sure, like letters, like asterisks and other just various like at signs and hashtags and stuff like that. Great. Yeah, it's fun times. That's amazing. I've learned so much about you two. This was fun.

Yeah, those were, those are our formative, our formative experiences. Yeah, that was 15 good games there. Well, some of them weren't good, I guess. Some of them don't hold up at all, but they made us who we are today. They did, it's true. So should we all, let's all, before we wrap, let's all just list our games real quick. Sure. So people have a reference point.

Kirkke, start, just a year five. Sure, I'll go first. And I'll put these in the show notes as well. So my games were Teenage Muti Ninja Turtles, fall of the foot clan for the Game Boy. Kings Quest 6, air today, gone tomorrow. for the PC, at least I played it on PC, the seventh guest for CD-ROM PC, Quest for Glory for Shadows of Darkness,

also on PC, and Match of the Gathering, a card game that you play, IRL. Cool. So mine are Tetris for the Game Boy, Super Mario Land 2, six golden coins,

Oregon Trail deluxe for PC, mist for PC, and Doom for PC. Nice, guys. Mine are Zork Zero, Final Fantasy 4, Warcraft 2, Ever Grace, the one and only Ever Grace, an AVP mud. Cool. Well, that has been it for this month's bonus episode. Once again, thank you to all of you for being supporters of our little show. Thanks. And we will see you all next time. Yeah, see you next time.

Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun podcast network, and if you're listening to this bonus episode, it means you're already a member, so thank you. We really appreciate your support. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artist owned, audience supported. Jason's frozen Yeah Oh no he's just not moving I was just not moving Yeah it's just not moving We didn't know You didn't just send us proof of life

No he's just being still That's weird Why don't people do that more Where they like pretend to be like We need to know They're not frozen They're just pretending It's terrifying

Right oh my gosh I bet you that human statues Do that to fuck with their coworkers It's like human statue skills On Zoom See, that's remote work. Am I right, guys? How was that not an

SNL sketch? You should send this to SNM. It was like the stupidest sketch idea ever. It would have been a perfect like. A human statue meeting on Zoom and like all of them keep freezing. Right, it would have been right early, when they're all on Zoom. Just terrible like early COVID sketch where it's like the human statues are going on Zoom too.

Let's just say it was. Jason like really froze now Wait hold on hold on hold on Jason you just froze again I just froze for real What is real What is fake Hold on I'm gonna switch

I'm gonna switch around a little bit Give me one sec Remote podcasting