Gaming’s metamorphosis, in my life and in the mainstream

Ever since I got a Game Boy (the original, thank you) and played Tetris for the first time, I’ve been hooked on games. Games have been a major part of my life since early grade school. I have no allegiance to any one publisher, and have owned a plethora of game systems, ranging from every single Game Boy (original, pocket, color, advance, SP, and the DS), to the woefully underappreciated PSP, to the N64, the Xbox, and now the 360 and Wii. For whatever reason, portable games have always held a special place in my heart, and I will go out on a limb and say that, in my opinion, the Game Boy Advance has the most solid stable of games of any gaming platform outside the PC, and I’ve certainly poured far more hours of my life into it than I want to admit.
But I digress. It’s amazing to me the complete 180 that the reputation of gamers (and, thus, myself) has undergone in the last decade or so. It has not been a gradual process, but a series of starts and stops, a secession of plateaus marked by games so revolutionary or so good that they break into the mainstream. The one that shines earliest in my memory, besides the SNES Mario games, would be Pokémon Red and Blue. Those games were everywhere in the fourth grade, and then the trading card game came out and plunged the children’s entertainment world into chaos. After those games appeared, it was acceptable to be seen in public playing a Game Boy for at least two or three years. The next big, big game I can think of would be Mario 64. I have friends who have an N64 and just that one solitary game.
The next one belongs to the PC, and introduced girls to the wonders of gaming. The Sims rocked the electronic gaming world with the idea of making real life, with its jobs and chores, fun. It seemed ridiculous to the outsider, the non-gamer, that people would ignore real life to play a real life simulation. The next step of introducing the video gaming world to the mainstream, and thus making me just the slightest bit cooler, was the introduction of Halo: Combat Evolved. Never before had a shooter been so intuitive and easy to control, and it helped make all-night gaming sessions popular. Then Halo 2 came out, and the ridiculously full-featured and ahead of its time online gaming allowed single moms in Seattle to play against 9-year old boys in Tokyo, expanding the domain of the average gamer from his/her room to the whole world. Halo 2 was when many of my closest friends were sucked into gaming, making it a lot easier to admit to being a gamer.
However, the game(s) that most changed the way we gamers are looked at is a relatively new series that has exploded in popularity and helped to draw more non-gamers into our realm than any other games to date. I speak, of course, of the monster that has become the Guitar Hero games. These games are universally enjoyed, and have become the (legal) party game of choice. Now, if any random person walks into a room with any kind of game going, the first question is always “Hey, do you have Guitar Hero? I love that game!”
Don’t get me wrong. I love that being a gamer is slowly becoming less uncool in the public’s eye. However, there’s some small part of me that kind of liked being constantly in the underdog, us-against-the-world mindset that is slowly being lost amongst gamers. Oh well. I’m off to scratch that itch with a little Super Smash Bros. Falco… PUNCH!

- Sikatanon

~ by gablogger on September 14, 2007.