So I assume many of us have played some games for the first time long after their release date. Like, maybe you didn’t have a specific console growing up so we didn’t play the “classics” on it, or something.
I’m just wondering how many of you have played an older game and thought “wow, I wish I grew up with this game”?
For example, for me, many years ago I played Super Metroid for the first time and fell in love with the idea of just wandering aimlessly around the game world, occasionally stumbling into new areas. I would have loved to have played it as a kid with childlike wonder without worrying about finishing the game or making progress.
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I was a console kid and wish I had more exposure to the beefier DOS/PC games available in the 90’s, lots of gems
I feel like I almost completely missed out on PC gaming from the late 80s to the early 2000s. I played a few mil-sim games from Novalogic and Jane’s but that was about it.
I wasn’t exposed to an FPS until half-life was a few years old. My first real gaming PC was built for Half-Life 2.
I totally missed Doom, Quake, Descent, Diablo, System Shock, Deus Ex, Wolfenstein, Fallout. I didn’t even know about Elder Scrolls, Myst, Riven, Maniac Mansion (or any of the other Lucasfilm or Tim Schafer games like it).
I did catch some lower spec games like Sim City, StarCraft, Worms, etc., But it seemed like none of them really caught my attention longer than a few hours. I was mostly interested in SNES and PS1 around that time I guess.
The Elder scrolls
You put it perfectly here
I would have loved to have played it as a kid with childlike wonder
That feeling you get when you play a game you like when you are a kid is something you don’t get again as an adult, I remember the first times I played Minecraft, I remember that sense of adventure and discoverery that sadly I haven’t been able to experience again.
I can only imagine what would have felt playing Morrowind, Oblivion and even Skyrim with the mind of a child.
I know these games are not that old… but hey! I was a child when they came out.
Morrowind was earth shattering when it came out. It looks like ass compared to today’s games but at the time we’d never seen anything that looked that good, with that epic scale of a world, before. It was magical.
I wish i had Minecraft as a ten year old. By the time it came out my i interests were shifted to all the Call of Duty clones and action games.
Agree completely. Feel like I missed the boat on Elder Scrolls, but would have loved it as a kid/teenager.
Not really older games, since I grew up parallel to them, but I’m kind of jealous of the ubiquitous NES culture in the US in the mid-late 80s.
Consoles were a rarity in the UK till the 90s, and the Sega Mastersystem was largely the only game in town where I was before that. I didn’t even see a NES in person till the 00s. Seeing ads in comics for NES games, or hints of NES Mario and Zelda in magazines was a rare glimpse into another world.
I found an SNES Mini on eBay that they stuffed with EVERY ROM from Atari to SNES (and then some). My wife and I just beat Donkey Kong Country 2 yesterday. That’s one I had missed back in the day. If you’re interested in seeing what you missed out on, I HIGHLY recommend! So much fun!
Way ahead of you… I have about five devices stuffed with just about every game from before 2000 :)
Particular favourite is my MiSTer FPGA device, which does a lower level emulation than software emulation and tends to give extremely accurate results! Finally, I can be the nerdy 80s high school kid hooked on NES and hijincks that I always dreamed of being :)
Final fantasy 7. But for a different reason. I tried playing that game many times wayyy after it’s release but I just couldn’t get into it. But I got really big into final fantasy 6 and I got really big into other JRPGs, so it wasn’t that the gameplay was bad just that the 3d graphic hasn’t aged well. But I also played some pretty crusty PlayStation 1 games back in the day, so it’s not like if I didn’t play it at the right time I wouldn’t have loved it. But just cuz I didn’t play it around release, cuz I didn’t know about it I was a kid, kind of missed out on an entire thing.
I like the remake but, I don’t think it’s the same.
While I think it would have been easier to get into FF7 at the time of release, I did try at that time, and actually never finished it until maybe 6 years ago. I had played 4-6 and subsequently 8 multiple times, but 7 never grabbed me the same way. I know it’s a bit of a “you had to be there at the time” game, but I don’t think being there at the time guarantees enjoying it either.
My friend lent me his copy of FF7 PC, and I tried playing it – albeit after I played earlier FF games.
There were two problems. First, it was…kinda weird compared to earlier games. Sure, the steampunk vibes began in FF6, but we didn’t have Literally An Evil Megacorp and Literally Eco-Terrorists fighting over Something That Feels A Lot Like An Analogy For Nuclear Power. That was a whole nother level. Nothing wrong with this per se, but it just felt like something quite different. Neat, but just not the same FF I was used to.
But, perhaps more importantly, the game just kept crashing. I kept going as far as I could, but the game just wouldn’t progress past the introduction to the Gold Saucer.
I played it as a kid using gameshark because my dad just got me one so I used it on everything I played…
Took the challenge out of it, but thinking back kid me would’ve been stuck somewhere somehow…
Didn’t think it was all that tho, I liked Suikoden better still…
The one sure thing I’ve picked is my girl preference since then has been Tifa Lockhart like haha
King’s Quest and Final Fantasy.
KQ I did go back and play through the entire series about a decade ago and had a great time. Final Fantasy I’ve just recently got into with 7 (original) and 8 but I don’t have the patience to finish either. I would have if I’d have got into it back in the day.
Ooh, great question! Super Metroid is one for me too. I love metroidvanias now, and really enjoyed the nonlinear / exploration elements of Super Mario World, but I didn’t play a proper metroidvania until my teens. I think I’d take CV:SotN over Super Metroid, but I bet I’d have been more than happy with either.
I wish I grew up with some OG gameboy RPGs. Final Fantasy Legend, Dragon Warrior Monsters, Crystalis. They were just a bit too far before my time for me to get much exposure when I would have liked them best, so I don’t have any real nostalgia, but in revisiting old games I’ve always been drawn to those.
I went back and played (and beat) Super Metroid finally a few years ago. It was an amazing experience that I’m sorry I missed out on as a kid, but I don’t think I would have had the patience to beat it then. I ended up on a Metroid binge after that. Played the Samus Returns remake and Dread, and am currently playing the Prime remake. I think Metroid has been stuck in niche consoles for so long a lot of folks haven’t been exposed so I appreciate the remakes.
The first time played Super Metroid, it was after I played Fusion and Zero Mission, and I was actually rather unimpressed by it, despite it being basically a platinum standard for 2D metroidvanias.
It was only later, after playing various romhacks including randomizers and getting much more accustomed to the game engine and the sheer number of possibilities afforded by various speed tricks and sequence-breaking techniques, that I gradually realized why it’s held in such high regard. The game is…neat, if you simply play through it once. But the more you learn about it the more you can do with it and the more fascinating it becomes. There is a seemingly infinite depth to it, which is not at all obvious on a first playthrough. In fact, some of it appears to be accidental, possibly game design bugs on the programmers’ part, yet somehow such imperfects have made it even more of a masterpiece.
I think there’s something to be said that there’s a certain level of intellectual maturity that’s needed to truly enjoy these games.
I grew up with NES Metroid, and despite having read the manual many times over, as a kid I never made sense of the game. I could play it, I could insert the Justin Bailey code, I could move around and do stuff, but I never truly understood what I was meant to do. I stumbled into Tourian one day and promptly got pwned by metroids, and then I never found my way back until I was an adult.
The second metroidvania game I played was Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. Maybe it’s an easier game – it’s certainly less confusingly open-ended than Metroid 1 – but I absolutely loved the experience. I deeply appreciated the narrative journey of being trapped in this castle, full of weirdness and twisty passages that were slightly off from each other, having the mid-game bombshell dropped on me, and piecing together a mystery until I was able to find out what was going on. I played it all night, and in a story I like to tell people, the morning after I beat it (and finally got the best ending), as the sun came out, I put on the Aloha de Chocobo music from Final Fantasy IX and it was the most glorious feeling. But this depended on me understanding that I was immersed in a maze, and understanding what I needed to do to find my way out of the maze.
And I’ve been enjoying this genre since.
That sounds like an amazing experience haha. I have some fond memories like that with these games too.
I think in my case, the narrative isn’t the main thing I enjoy about metroidvanias - rewarding exploration is what I really love. Though I didn’t play a true metroidvania until I was into my teens, some of my favorite games before that were exploration-focused platformers and (simple) RPGs.
I probably would have been frustrated and given up with my favorite metroidvanias if I had played any too young, but 8-12ish would have hit that nostalgia + enjoyment sweet spot. But hey, even without any early nostalgia I can still love them :)
I was fortunate to own Crystalis when I was young, but didn’t actually beat it until I was a teenager. The GBC port was supposedly bad. Never played it. But the NES game is criminally not well known.
That’s awesome! I’ve only ever heard of Crystalis in the context of games that flew under the radar, I don’t think many people can say they actually owned it. Too bad the GBC port isn’t great.
I wish I grew up with tactics ogre. I just discovered this game a few months ago and it truly blew my mind. I could have been into TRPGs if I had played it.
For me, I recently played Earthbound for the first time on the Switch after seeing J.J. McCullough rave about it nostalgically. I can’t believe I had a SNES as a kid and missed out on it, but I guess I might have tried it and didn’t like it. I was probably a bit too young when it came out.
For the rest, I really wish I had BotW/TOTK as a kid. Even as an adult, the level of Immersiveness that these games have is amazing.
Earthbound is such a great game. I didn’t have a lot of snes games as a kid so this one kind of eluded me at the time but I just recently played it and loved it. I did not like JRPGs as a kid (still don’t but was able to still enjoy it as an adult) so maybe it’s for the best I had to wait to experience it
I always always always wanted to play Final Fantasy after Final Fantasy 7…but I was super poor and couldn’t get a Playstation.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Just totally missed the boat when they were in the zeitgeist - I ended up loving them 15 years later though.
Kingdom Hearts feels like a series I would be all over with considering how much I loved Disney and liked Final Fantasy. Shame I never really got around to playing it.
Half Life series
I missed NES games almost entirely. I was exposed to Super Mario (at friend’s houses for a few minutes at a time) and literally nothing else until decades later. I would have liked to have played the greats like Mega Man, Metroid, or Zelda.
I think I really would have liked to have played Zelda the most. I loved ALttP but imagine I would have loved the first one a lot too. It’s really hard to go back now when my experience of newer games sets my expectations. I still get frustrated today trying to navigate and survive when playing it.
I also completely missed out on Sega, but to this day I still don’t feel like I missed out on much.
Take it from someone who was around back then, you didn’t really miss much. The NES revitalized video gaming and brought the industry back from near-death, but the SNES/Gensis era was truly the golden age of gaming. Maybe because the tech NES was so limited or something, but most of the early franchises back set the stage for greater heights, but other than Super Mario 3 nothing is really worth going back to. Zelda, Super Metroid, Sonic, Final Fantasy, Mega Man X, Contra, Tetris, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Castlevania, Phantasy Star, Chrono Trigger, Mother 2/Earthbound, F-zero, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, etc etc etc etc all REALLY got their start, and became what they are today, in the 90s with the SNES and Genesis
I owned Banjo Kazooie very briefly as a child but I think my dad sold it. Replayed it on XBLA years later and loved it. I wish I experienced it at the time along with the other great N64 games.
I didn’t play any Halo games until MCC on PC. However, not sure I wish I’d grown up with them, since I hate shooters with controllers, and I enjoyed playing the games in chronological order over release order.
But at least it’s now one of my favourite series.
