Resident Evil 2 holds a special place for me in gaming history. I remember seeing the commercials for it on tv back in ’98, didn’t really know what it was, and never gave it a second thought. It wasn’t until about a year or two after it released that I finally got to experience Survival Horror.
I wasn’t a Playstation owner. I was a Nintendo guy, and didn’t give much thought to what Sony was doing. I know that sounds absurd now, but back in 1996 the Playstation was still the new kid on the block, and kids like me that could only save up for one console at a time went with what they knew. I knew Mario.
I also knew that Nintendo was revolutionizing game play with their analog stick, while Sony and Sega were stuck with D-pads. Every time I played the Playstation at a friend’s house I couldn’t get over the clunky controls of pretty much every game he had. Even Final Fantasy VII, which I was in love with, was a sloggy mess before the Dual Shock came along.
So you’ll have to forgive me when I say that I had never experienced the Resident Evil franchise until a few years later when I was in college. And it wasn’t even on the Playstation. At the time, my PC was an IBM rocking a Pentium II 400Mhz processor, 128MB of RAM, and a 56k modem (GPU’s as we know them today weren’t a thing just yet back then, though that was around they time they started appearing at a consumer level). In any case, that thing was a BEAST. I didn’t do a whole lot of gaming on it, it was mainly for school, but one day when I was at Toys R Us, I saw Resident Evil 2 on sale for $20. It was the PC version, but I checked the specs and thought “Oh yeah, my comp could run this easy.”
And it did.
The first thing I noticed after watching that sick intro was the sound. I had some external speakers that screwed onto the side of my CRT, so I cranked them up. The moans of the zombies, the sound of the wind, the echoes of Leon’s heels clopping in the police station. It was all very surreal, and totally engrossing. Thanks to a digital control scheme due to Sony’s analog-less controller, those tank controls worked swimmingly on a keyboard. Weaving Leon and Claire down hallways full of zombies was a cinch. At the time, I was amazed at the cinematic quality of the game. Having only dabbled with PC games before, like MYST, 7th Guest, and maybe some Duke Nukem 3D, I hadn’t ever really played a game that contained story, and voice-recorded dialogue, and definitely nothing with cutscenes. Aside from the aforementioned FFVII, I didn’t know games like this even existed.
I played through Resident Evil 2 on my computer and relished every minute of it. After it was done, I had to play the first Resident Evil. Locating that first RE game on PC turned out to be pretty freakin’ impossible for me, but hey look! That Sony Playstation has it readily available (as the Greatest Hits Director’s Cut version).
I was working at a restaurant at the time so it took me a little while to save up the cash (I guess some things never change… FML) but I remember having a friend drive me to Toys R Us and I bought a Playstation and the Greatest Hits version of Resident Evil. Also Final Fantasy VII because duh.
The next few weeks were gaming bliss. My apt was right next door to a CD Warehouse, which also carried used games, and I usually hung out in there and talked to the employees, (so much so that they started giving me the employee discount). I hit them up weekly, and before long I had accumulated a brand new copy of Silent Hill for about 20 bucks, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy VIII. A Blockbuster down the street from work had a used games shelf (Pre-Played, as they put it) that I picked through on a regular basis. I got some of the best games I’d ever had from that Blockbuster, for $10 or $15 bucks a pop. I got Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Ghost in the Shell, Dino Crisis, Tekken 3, and pretty much every Capcom fighter at the time, like Street Fighter Alpha 3, Marvel Super Heroes, X-men vs. Street Fighter, Darkstalkers 3, Pocket Fighter, and X-men Children of the Atom. I had them all, and some of them I still own, complete with their ugly ass Blockbuster stickers.
It was an absolutely magical time as a gamer. It was a time before Gamestop placed a value on used video games, when places used to see old games as a waste of inventory to be gotten rid of. During my time in college was when the gaming landscape began to change. Nintendo lost tons of market share to Sony. Sega released the Dreamcast, then killed the Dreamcast and went third party, news that was earth-shattering at the time. Then in 2001, gaming hit the mainstream when Sony sold out of PS2’s in minutes. Nothing would ever be the same again.
It’s weird that this entire retrospective look at my life of gaming started with a write-up I was going to do on Resident Evil 2. Thinking back on that game stirred up a huge array of memories. It doesn’t just speak to a great game that came out back in the late 90’s, it speaks to an entire chapter in my life. Not many games open those doors (no pun intended). Thinking of Metal Gear Solid doesn’t trigger that nostalgia. Neither does Silent Hill, even though both were great games. Yet Ocarina of Time will, just like A Link to the Past. Those games came at pivotal moments in my life. A Link to the Past came when I was in high school. A Link to the Past and Street Fighter II kept me company on many nights when my phone wasn’t ringing.
Ocarina of Time was delayed often, but released just after I moved to a different city to start school. I had no friends, didn’t know anything about where I was, and was incredibly homesick. But I had Zelda to take my mind off it, and that Kokiri Village music will put a lump in my throat every time I hear it.
The list goes on. The Ghost House music from Super Mario World takes me back to summers with my cousins. Xbox Live launched right before I met my future wife, my nightly gaming sessions with friends were spent on mute as I chatted with her on the phone. My entire life is intertwined with gaming moments. Going forward in life, it’s hard to imagine things today affecting me in 20 years like they have in the past.
We are in world that is super-saturated with video games, media, Facebook, Instagram. Reminders slap us in the face daily. We see photos of events that happened five years ago like they were yesterday. How can something ever invoke nostalgia if we’re never allowed time to forget?
