There are many things I mourn about Times Gone By, but I think the biggest thing I miss is being able to enjoy video games together with other people. Oh, sure, you can play online with anyone in the world, but getting someone in the same room as you to play something with you — or even just sit and watch while you play! — feels like a distant memory at this point. And yet it used to be such an important part of our daily lives!
When I was growing up, I used to spend a lot of time "going on the computer". This was primarily a solitary activity, though I do recall my Dad and brother getting involved in the very early years, giving me an introduction to programming in Atari BASIC and teaching me how to use both the Atari 8-bit and ST machines.
One of the things I loved doing when I either went to a friend's house or had them over to my place was "going on the computer" together. At my friend Matthew's house, we'd play on his BBC Micro when we were younger, and later on his Archimedes. His Dad worked for Acorn, so these were the computers in his house; although I was an Atari fan by virtue of the computers we had in our house, I enjoyed the unique experiences that both the Beeb and the Archie offered, since they were often completely distinct from what I could enjoy at home.
I believe I went to my sometimes-friend Dale's house on just one occasion, and I remember that was the one and only time I played on a Sega Master System as a kid, but I remember really liking the few games he had. My friend Mike, meanwhile, had an Amiga, and we had a lot of fun with that — not just playing games, but also fiddling with creative programs like Deluxe Paint and the like.
Once we got to secondary school, my closest friends went to one another's houses a lot, and we would play on both computers and consoles together. At my friend Edd's house, we'd play on his Amiga and Mega Drive; at my friend Andrew's house, we'd play on his MS-DOS PC and Super NES; later, we'd all get Nintendo 64s and PlayStations, and we'd play together on those.
At university, we spent a lot of time going to one another's houses to play Nintendo 64 in particular, as that console remains unmatched for the sheer breadth of multiplayer titles on offer. But a little later, when the next generation of consoles rolled around, I would have friends over and we'd play Grand Theft Auto III together, despite it not being multiplayer, and we'd play through entire cooperative campaigns of games like Halo and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. I have some truly wonderful memories of enjoying games like that.
Today, though, it is almost unimaginable to play through an entire game with a single co-op partner in the same room as me. Hell, at this point, it's unimaginable to even have a few friendly matches on a fighting game, first-person shooter or racing game.
And this sucks! I've got easy access to more games than we have ever had at any point in our lives, but getting anyone to actually want to come play them with me is like pulling teeth from a particularly bloodless stone. That makes me intensely, terribly sad, and I wish things could be different. But the world has, apparently, moved on from this sort of thing as a regular, normal thing to do; I just have to take whatever opportunities I can get — which very occasionally come up, but not often — to enjoy this long-lost art of having fun together.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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