When I was in middle school, pretty much every weekend my friends would come over and we’d
play video games in my parent’s basement. Back then, couch multiplayer was at its peak,
and we sunk countless hours into whatever game we could get our hands on. Like, over
the course of those years, I heard the City Trial theme so many times that it's been permanently
burnt into my brain, I completed literally thousands of laps in baby park, and I put
more hours into Melee than anyone who is as bad at it as I am has any business doing.
There were an abundance of fun and creative games for us to play together in person, and
we had the spare time and lack of any real responsibilities to try out as many of them
as possible. And one of those games that we tried out and eventually fell in love with
was Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. It’s a game that never got the widespread recognition
it deserved, but it is beloved by the few who played it. It’s colorful, has interesting
character designs and just feels like a perfect fit for the GameCube. Most importantly for
us though, it provided an incredible multiplayer experience that my friends and I had a stupid
amount of fun playing. And I’ve pretty much forgotten everything about it. Like, I remember
that we played it, but I don’t remember actually playing it. Despite playing 30 plus
hours of its multiplayer, I honestly can’t tell you anything about it aside from: “push
egg and it get bigger”. I don’t remember the objective of it, I don’t remember the
maps, I don’t remember if there were different modes, I don’t remember what abilities you
have or if you even have them. All I remember is that I had fun playing it and thought it
was good.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that I feel this way about more and more games
from when I was a kid. I know I liked them, and I still feel as if I like them, but aside
from a few tiny details that don’t give much insight about them, All that is left
now is a general sense that they were important to me. And it's a weird feeling to have. It
obviously can be categorized under the wide umbrella of nostalgia, but it is a markedly
different feeling from what I normally experience it. The unreliability of memory always plays
a role, but more often than not it isn’t this drastic. For instance, when it comes
to the other games I was playing around the same time as Billy Hatcher, like Kirby Air
Ride, Double Dash, and Melee, it's incredibly easy for me to give a relatively accurate
description about what each of them is like in terms of gameplay. I remember most things
about them, and while I’m sure that description would be through rose-tinted glasses that
ignore some of the more frustrating elements of each game, it still would be a solid characterization
of how they are to play. With Billy Hatcher though, I feel less like I am looking at it
with rose-tinted glasses and more like I am just looking at the color red. Every detail
has been smoothed away, and the only thing I can say about it is “game good.”
From a psychological standpoint, I imagine this is mostly because my memories of those
other games are stored in a part of my brain that, for a handful of reasons, is easier
for me to pull information from. Like, I played those 3 games way more than I played Billy
Hatcher, making them a bigger part of my life at the time and creating way more opportunities
for potential memories. Also, Melee and Double Dash are both a part of long running series
that for the most part I’ve kept up with, so even though it's been a long time since
playing those two titles in particular, it hasn’t been that long since I last played
their successors. While Smash and Mario Kart have shifted a fair bit since their respective
releases on the gamecube, both series’ still function similarly enough to them that I’ve
never really had the chance to forget how they work. As for Kirby Air Ride, a big reason
I remember it so well is simply because I have gone back to play it a few times throughout
the years. It’s not a common occurrence, but even just booting it up once in a blue
moon helps keep my memory of it intact. On top of that, one of the first scripts I ever
wrote for this channel was a review of it, and although I never ended up turning it into
video because it was bad, it did get me to spend a bunch of time actively thinking about
the mechanics of the game and why I liked it in a way I never did with Billy Hatcher.
While the level of exposure you have to something is not the only aspect that will affect your
memory of it, clearly it is a significant one. For further proof of this, take my experience
with Gun, a western open-world game where you roam from town to town doling out vigilante
justice in an effort to save—wait, that’s Red Dead. Well then what the hell was gun
about? All right there we go. I played Gun pretty much right when it released, and it
immediately became one of my favorite games. The week I got it, when I wasn’t playing
it, all I could do was think about playing it, making it even harder than normal to suffer
through the school day. I loved the setting as I felt that wild west just lent itself
so well to an open-world game that took a lot of cues from the GTA series. Then of course
five years later, Rockstar released their own open-world wild west game, and at some
point between first playing it and now, my memory of Gun has been completely absorbed
by my memory of playing Red Dead Redemption. And it's frustrating because I can always
recognize that I’m just thinking about RDR, but that doesn’t change anything. The two
share a lot of the same DNA, and now that I’m so far removed from the last time I
played Gun, it's nearly impossible for me to come up with anything that is unique to
it. As I played Read Dead more recently and for much longer, it has stuck around far more
clearly. And if I’m being really honest, while there are a handful of things I remember
about Red Dead Redemption, a lot of my memories of it have now melded with my memories of
Red Dead Redemption 2, adding even more noise and making it harder to distinguish anything
about Gun. At this point, the only thing I remember about Gun that sets it apart from
Red Dead Redemption is that the horse can go really fast for a little bit. The only
thing I remember about Gun that sets it apart is that the horse can go really fast for a
little bit. Despite that, any time Gun has come up since I played it, which clearly wasn’t
that often otherwise I’d probably remember it better, I’d tell people that it was a
ton of fun and definitely worth playing. There obviously was a time when I could have said
that and known it was true, but when I reflect on it now, I really have no idea if playing
it is worthwhile because a different game has taken its place in my head entirely.
An even more egregious example of this can be seen with one of the first games I ever
fell in love with, Ski or Die. When I was 6 or 7, my cousin gave her NES to my brother
and I, and it quickly became a staple in our life. She had had a pretty substantial collection
of games, and we’d cycle through them constantly. While most of our time was spent on Mario
and Zelda, Ski or Die was one we came back to pretty regularly. Essentially it s a collection
of winter-themed mini-games, and until I looked some stuff up recently for the purposes of
this video, the two things I remembered about it were this weird guy being on one of the
menus and that there was one mini-game where you ski down a hill and every once and a while
a yeti comes out to try to grab you. The thing is though, this memory is a false one. These
are two different titles. The one with the yeti that chases you is called Ski Free, a
game originally made for windows in 1991 and the one that is a collection of mini-games
and has the weird guy is actually Ski or Die. I have no recollection of ever playing Ski
Free, but I must have at some point otherwise I wouldn’t have misremembered it as being
a part of Ski or Die. In fairness to me, they are both snow-based games, and Ski or Die
does have a minigame where you downhill ski and there’s a different one where you can
throw snowballs at what looks to be a yeti, so I don’t know, maybe that was why my brain
connected them together or maybe it's just that I played them literal decades ago before
my brain had fully developed. The weirdest part of it to me though is that when I visualized
the image of the yeti chasing the skier down the mountain, it was in the artstyle of Ski
or Die, and looked nothing like Ski Free. Memory is fickle, and while I’d like to
think I can trust mine for the most part, this is definitive proof that I am susceptible
to not just over romanticizing things I played in the past, but being entirely wrong about
the content of them.
Now, me forgetting the details about games that I played 15 plus years ago but still
feeling positively about them is not a novel concept. It’s a fundamental part of getting
older. Our brains are capable of storing an incredible amount of information, but they’re
not always the best at being able to retrieve said information. They generally aim to do
the least amount of work possible, always looking for shortcuts and simplified versions
of things. The less you think about a memory, the further back it gets pushed in your mental
storage, making it harder to access., and we are always adding new things to think about
that are almost always more important than a game you liked as a kid. In one form or
another, this is something we all experience, but I find that it’s not something we talk
about much or at least it’s not something I’ve talked about all that much. Of course,
that makes sense simply because when you aren’t spending
time trying to recall those things, you don’t even realize that you’ve started to forget
them. Also, it is just kind of a bummer to talk and think about the ways in which we
decay. However, now that my job centers around reflecting on games, both new and old, it’s
kind of become unavoidable. I’ve made a handful of videos about the way I view different
games from my past, and through the process of doing that, is how I realized I don’t
remember anything about titles like Billy Hatcher, Gun, and Ski or Die. And since it
became something I’ve actively paid attention to, I’ve had some troubles coming to terms
with the idea of it. Like, if I can’t recall any notable details about them, did they really
matter to me that much? Is the positive emotion I feel towards them tied to my love of the
game or just that time of my life?How much of a title do I need to remember in order
to have a valid opinion about it? As I’m sure you’ve been able to tell by now, I
don’t really care about being objective when talking about games, partially because
I don’t think it’s truly possible to do, but I always want to have a strong logical
basis for why I do or don’t like something, so having games where pretty much the only
thing I remember about them is that I once thought they were good feels weird. It is
a hypercharged form of nostalgia, and I don’t really know what to make of it.
In general, nostalgia plays an interesting role in the gaming landscape. It both heavily
informs everyone’s opinions about video games and is constantly used as a means to
be dismissive of everyone’s opinions about video games. Especially on the internet, it
is almost impossible to talk positively about a title that is more than 10 years old without
being told by someone that it’s just your nostalgia talking. It's an assertion that
the only reason you could possibly still think something is good or even think that it was
ever good was because you liked it as a kid and now aren’t able to separate your emotional
connection from the content of the game itself to see it for what it really is. For the most
part, I find this kind of criticism to be annoying as at its core, it’s belittling.
It doesn’t add anything to the discussion, and assumes people have no self-awarenss.
Now, I get why nostalgia is unappealing to some people. My emotional connection to a
title is not helpful to those trying to learn more about it to see whether or not it is
something they might want to play. Also, if they don’t think the game in question is
good, it can be hard to comprehend why someone else loves it so much. And furthermore, as
memory is so flawed, it can be hard to know how strong or accurate any given person’s
recollection of a game will be, so it is understandable why someone might question those with a lot
of nostalgia towards a title. Of course, having a long running emotional connection to a game
does not disqualify you from holding worthwhile opinions on it. Sure, I do think it is important
for people to reflect on the ways in which their nostalgia influences their thoughts
on things, but using it as a gotcha isn’t constructive. Most of the time, people who
have nostalgia for a thing are still able to form well-reasoned arguments about what
they feel works about it, so saying it is just their nostalgia talking mostly acts as
a way to not have to have an actual conversation. With that said, I can’t really ignore the
fact that when it comes to Billy Hatcher, Gun, and Ski or Die, it truly is just my nostalgia
talking, and while I still have a decent memory of games that I played a while back, it won’t
always stay that way, and I’ll be faced with this more and more.
And the question I keep coming back to is whether or not it is worthwhile for me to
do something about it. If I wanted to, I could make it so I never forget another game again
by staying on top of all of my favorite titles and revisiting them constantly so they don’t
fade into obscurity. Now obviously I won’t. It is an obsessive pursuit with little to
pay off. I’d just be replaying the same titles over and over again, and it’d be
hard to find time to play anything new. It’d essentially be making the bet that the best
games that will ever come out have already come out, and that’s just not something
I believe. And even if it were, a game’s quality does not necessarily correlate with
how much enjoyment you’ll get from it especially when replaying games in this way as it often
comes with diminishing returns.
A little while back, I put out a video called The Games I Wish I Had Never Replayed that
focused mostly on my turbulent relationship with three of my old favorites, BioShock Infinite,
Majora’s Mask, and Assassin’s Creed II. For the longest time I considered them to
be some of the best games ever made, but when I went back to actually replay them, my feelings
shifted. Due to the ways I’ve changed, the ways the gaming landscape has changed, and
the ways my memory has changed, I didn’t feel the same connection to them when playing
as I once did, and unfortunately, that experience tarnished my feelings towards them. And now
I am kind of afraid to replay games I used to love.
One idea I didn’t touch on in that video but wish I would have is that part of the
problem is it's impossible to perfectly recreate the conditions of when you first fell in love
with a game. A replay will never include the full context of who I was in the past. No
matter how hard I try, I can’t make it be the year 2000 again. The reason I avoided
talking about this in the video was because I worried people would ignore all my other
points and just attribute my disappointment with these games to me missing being a kid.
And jokes on me I guess because plenty of people did that anyway. Ultimately, I think
not focusing on this at all was a mistake because while this isn’t the only factor,
it is still a factor, Going in with the mindset that a title will be just as good as you once
found it to be will almost always lead to some amount of disappointment. I’ve known
this for awhile, which is why I generally try to set realistic expectations for myself,
but I think in doing so, I sometimes overcorrect. For instance, when replaying Infinite, Majora’s
Mask, and Assassin’s Creed 2, I largely tried to separate myself from my emotional
connection to them. In an effort to avoid the disappointment that might come from not
feeling the same magic while playing them as I once did, I examined them through the
lens of my current standards, pretty much playing them in the same way I would play
a new game. However, divorcing myself from these titles in this way robbed me of an important
and legitimate reason to enjoy them. Just because they no longer wowed me didn’t mean
that I couldn’t appreciate the fact that they once did. The better mindset to have
when replaying a game is somewhere in the between; a massive space that I still find
myself struggling to fall within. The goal should not be to recreate the magic of a first
playthrough or view the title through an impartial lens, but to use a replay as a way to remember
the original experience. This isn’t exactly a new revelation for me. It’s something
I’ve been circling around for a long awhile and find myself relearning every few years.
And I’ll be the first to admit that it shouldn’t be this hard for me to approach replaying
a title in this kind of way, but it is something I struggle with. While I have no issue with
letting nostalgia influence the way I think about a game when I’m relatively far removed
from it, I’ve found that when I am actually replaying one that I’m resistant to letting
it take over too much. As a person who analyzes video games on the internet, I want to hold
everything I play to a certain standard, to be able to consider fully what makes things
work and what doesn’t, and it's hard to ignore hard evidence that’s right in front
of me, but I think viewing old favorites in that way and not taking into account and respecting
all the reasons they used to matter to me only serves to make them harder to enjoy.
Now, going in to a replay with the right mindset doesn’t guarantee that it will be an enjoyable
experience as again there are plenty of other factors, but it certainly does help.
In regards to what I should do about Billy Hatcher, Gun, Ski or Die and any other title
I may begin to forget, I don’t think it is worthwhile or sustainable to worry about
remembering them all. There are too many experiences to have in life for all of them to stay relevant,
so it is okay for something new to replace the memory of something old. At some point
everything fades and that just has to be okay. Throughout all of this, I have found myself
conflicted with the best way to preserve a memory of a game, and I imagine that’s because
there isn’t a uniform answer. Some titles will be worth replaying until the day I die
where others are better suited to just remain vague memories. It can be hard to tell sometimes
which is which, but with these games where I remember so little about them, I think it
is worth occasionally jumping into them, not to relive the past, but to be reminded of
what it was. Because even though I’ll never again be 7 and competing with my brother in
a downhill race as a yeti may or may not be chasing us or a freshman in highschool waiting
for that last bell to ring so I can go home and speed along on horseback or a carefree
12 year-old who has the same group of friends come over every weekend to spend hours pushing
an egg around I can still get pretty close.
With all this thinking about the past, I decided to look back a bit at some stuff from the
early days of this channel, particularly the script on Kirby Air Ride that I mentioned
in this video, and after reading it I decided that it’d be fun to take that script and
just actually make it. It’s filled with 2013 YouTube humor, some good takes, many
bad takes, and modern day me interrupting every so often to give some thoughts on it
all, and you can watch that right now over on Nebula. Nebula is a streaming service owned
by creators, myself included, and over there you can watch everything I post on YouTube
ad-free as well as a ton of videos that are exclusive to Nebula. When I put a video out
here, I also put one out there, and at this point, I’ve put out a ton of stuff ranging
from top 5 lists, to typical essays to now a video that I thought wasn’t good enough
to make back in 2013 so of course it must be a great idea to make now. It is one of
the best ways to support me as a creator because when you sign up for Nebula using my link
the description I get a chunk of that money for as long as you're subscribed. And for
a limited time, Nebula is offering a lifetime membership. For a one-time payment of $300
you get access to all the great stuff over there like original series, podcasts, and
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Regardless of the plan you choose, Nebula is one of the best places on the internet
for high quality entertainment, and it is well worth the money. So yeah, give it a look,
help support me, and watch me publicly embarrass myself by bringing a script that should have
stayed in the drafts to life. Anyway, thanks to Nebula for sponsoring this video. For all
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I hope you all have a great day and/or night, and I will see you in the next one.