As I absorb the news that Sony is giving up on physical releases of games — something I have had a good rant about at much more length over on MoeGamer, so please go read that — I can't help but think back to the time PlayStation hit the scene, and the incredible amount of promise that video games showed back then. This coincides with a period of time I often describe as the happiest of my life, and the video games were a big part of that, for a variety of reasons.
I remember my first encounter with PlayStation vividly. My brother had come home to visit, and, as he often did, he had brought some gaming hardware with him. On previous visits — and prior to me getting my own SNES — he had brought both a Super Famicom and Mega Drive back with him on various occasions, but this new PlayStation thing was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen.
We loaded up Ridge Racer and you could play Galaxian while it was loading. Supposedly you could unlock some stuff if you could win the Galaxian game before the game finished loading, but I didn't manage that right away. (I mastered it some time later.) Then, once Ridge Racer was loaded, it was another example of something we'd previously described the SNES as being: "like having an arcade machine hooked up to your TV".
This feeling didn't go away with Tekken, which my brother had a prerelease copy of. He also had Raiden Project, which, while less obviously "impressive" than both Ridge Racer and Tekken, I found myself enjoying a lot, and still consider one of my favourite PlayStation titles to this day.
Eventually, my brother left behind this Japanese-model PlayStation at my parents' house for me to have — he had got his own British model. I was thrilled, particularly once I learned the "pen-lid trick" — a means of circumventing the console's region and copy protection by propping the disc tray open and carefully timing the swapping of discs. It was a good way to wear out your laser before long, but until I got my own UK PlayStation, it was my main means of experiencing PAL releases.
My friends got PlayStations around a similar time, and we all really enjoyed them, each cultivating our own little collection of games.
Then came Final Fantasy VII. I first heard about this from my brother, and one thing made me want to pick it up immediately: he told me that it was the first game that had made him and various other people he knew cry. This might seem like a strange reason to be excited for a game, but having been enjoying point-and-click adventures on PC for a few years at this point, I was immensely excited by the possibilities that interactive storytelling offered, and I was curious exactly what this game actually was.
I started to play it and was initially confused. Why did the screen go all swirly and then I couldn't move, but I had to select things from a menu instead? Why did the characters look different when they were walking around to when they were in battle? Why were numbers popping out of things?
I'd encountered the RPG genre in a very early form back on the Atari 8-bit, but had always found those games to be difficult to understand as a child. Some years later, I got into HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest, and started to understand how numbers and turn-based combat worked together. And with Final Fantasy VII, I quickly learned how the computerised take on an RPG worked — and that I liked it a lot.
My friends loved it, too. We all swapped stories of our custom-named parties at school, arguing over who had given their characters the "best" names and who had recoloured the text window the most attractively garish combination of shades. We all agreed it was an incredible experience, and played it multiple times in succession — often in immediate succession. I estimate over the course of one particular summer, each of us must have played through the entirety of that game somewhere between six and ten times.
My parents went away for a few weeks and left me in charge of the house. I hosted an ill-advised party that I got into a lot of trouble for — I have to laugh in retrospect — but the best thing about that summer was having my friends over pretty much every day, and we would just play Final Fantasy VII together while eating Pot Noodles and getting steadily quite drunk. On one particularly memorable occasion, we challenged one another to play from the beginning and stay up as long as possible; we played through the night and into the next morning, hitting each other with sofa cushions to wake each other up if we looked like we were nodding off. It was a truly wonderful experience, and absolutely a treasured memory.
It all feels so far away now. I would love to have a summer like that which I just described again, but it feels like a far-off dream at this point.
Still, I mean I am still in touch with some of those friends, so perhaps, just perhaps, we could make something like that happen once again sometime. Maybe.
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