40 Years of Gaming — 1980 to 2020
Initially, the title of the article was supposed to be “My favourite top 10 computer games”. After putting together the list, I could not reduce it below 13. Then I noticed that it covered 40 years of games, that I loved, played and replayed over and over.
If you happen on this article, and like it, may be you can leave a comment with ‘your’ favourite game and the reason(s) why you love it.
Here’s the list in order of release. Don’t ask me to list them in order from most favourite to least favourite because it will be a Sisyphean task for me.
I could stop here with my article, but then you wouldn’t understand why I love all these games. But it will be a rather lengthy article to describe for each of them why I love them individually. Instead, I’ll try to give you an impression.
Starting of with Pac-Man & Tetris, they challenged my hand-eye coordination and my spirit for competition, mostly against myself. I wanted to beat my own high score, leading me to play and play and play. I remember playing Tetris in the computer lab of the University instead of programming a Game of Life assignment in Turbo Pascal.
Eye of the Beholder gave my table-top role-playing heart everything it desired, but on a computer. Hours of dungeoning, fighting of monsters and gathering magical weapons and artefacts. I replayed this game so often that I could memorise every corner and road through the multiple levels, which I mapped out meticulously on grid paper, below the city of Waterdeep. Till now, I know that a Thief can be useful, but he can also run off with some of your precious weapons.
From that moment on, I was sold on RPG games, and many followed that didn’t even make it in the list above, but were still memorable. Of the ones that made it into the list, Diablo II was definitely a new experience, as it was my first online game. I enjoyed the camaradery with other players, after joining a clan, where we helped each other out to level our characters, which I also found with the First-Person Online Shooter Destiny. While Diablo appealed to my classic RPG heart, Destiny appealed to my Sci-Fi heart with its detailed lore and intrinsic story.
As a kid, I used to devour Sci-Fi and Fantasy books. Hence, the story of the game is as important as the gameplay. Games with great stories, historical intriguing with a pinch of mystery like Assassin’s Creed II, or majestic and mythological like God Of War, or the oriental and swashbuckling Prince of Persia Sands of Time, platforming and using my Dagger to rewind time.
Aside from the story, the gameplay of Prince of Persia — Sands of Time, introduced a brand new concept! Instead of a “Game Over” screen, you were able to rewind the time, to a point before you made that stupid mistake of wall-running over an abyss with spikes and jumping into a twirling column of flesh-shredding blades. Equally new was Demon’s Souls concept of cross-worldly player messages or invaders. It was one of the most challenging, but also most rewarding games, I every played.
Ratchet and Clank — Tools of Destruction, combined an intriguing story, with the humorous interaction of space Lombax Ratchet with his robot side-kick Clank, and the hilarious weapon arsenal and its upgrade system, of a shooter with platforming, set in a space adventure. What could a boys heart want more?
A master-piece of story-writing can be found in Horizon Zero Dawn. It showed a far-away future, based on humanities destructive stupidity, leading to a world of new folklore and religions, where tribes fight for resources using a mix of technological and traditional weapons, against each other and machine-based dinosaur-like or predator-like beasts. The emotional story of a little outcast girl Aloy, growing up and becoming a hero to all the world was amazing.
While Horizon Zero Dawn was set in a distant cataclysmic future, Ghost of Tsushima, sent me back to a traditional Japanese Island where the Mongol invaders were pillaging and ransacking. A young Samurai survives the initial invasion and has to decide if he wants to stick with his beliefs and upbringing as a Samurai or set them aside (or rather complement them) with other more dishonourable means, to help his home the islands citizens to drive out the invaders. This game introduced a different way of showing the main character Jin Sakai to its next mission. Instead of using traditional pointers or waypoints, you had to follow the sound of the wind and the visuals of the flowing grass, to identify your next goal.
Last but not least, Hearthstone stand out from the above list, because it is the only collectible card-based game, that made it into the top 13. During my college years, I loved to play the card game Magic: The Gathering with my fellow study mates. We used to gather together to exchange/trade cards, build new card decks and play awesome wizard against wizard battles. Hearthstone is build on the same concept, and allowed me to compete against other players, collecting new cards and building new decks to beat and outsmart my opponents.
There you have it, 40 years of gaming, with a quick intro on why I love each of them. They accompanied me throughout my life from a teenager to an adult game, while staying young at heart.
