Playing Catch-Up

I’m embarrassed to say that the first video game I ever owned was Pokemon. Yes, when I was 11 years old, my brother and I spent a happy summer trading virtual creatures between our Gameboy Colors. But, though it may be hard for me to admit that I actually went to one of those Pokemon conventions in sixth grade, I’m not embarrassed about having been briefly obsessed with the game. Despite the ridiculous hype surrounding it and the even more ridiculous Anime series it spawned, the Pokemon games have always been pretty high-quality.

And yet I began by saying I was embarrassed—and I maintain that I am—by the fact that I didn’t own a video game until 1999. I think of myself as a “hardcore gamer,” which basically means I own several video game systems and tons of games, stay caught up with game industry news, and have a pretty extensive knowledge of all things game-related—or so it might appear.

But despite my game-obsessed facade, I lack one of the essential qualities of a true hardcore gamer: I started playing games well after the Nintendo 64 had been released. This means I never had a Super Nintendo, or any of the other systems that were all-the-rage when I was busy starting elementary school.

If you know any self-proclaimed hardcore gamers personally, you’ll immediately know why it’s such a sin that I never had a Super Nintendo: many of the widely renowned “best games ever” were made if not for the Super Nintendo itself, then for one of the other systems out at the time. And many, if not most, hardcore gamers enjoy telling other, lesser gamers that video games peaked on the Super Nintendo, and that they’ll never be as good again.

And so my Achilles’ heel of gaming has been revealed—though I may know a great deal about most prominent games released between 1985 and 1995, I’ve actually played very few of them. It’s a pretty significant handicap, if you ask me, and one that I usually try to keep under wraps.

But, even though I may never be able to play Final Fantasy VI (one of those “best games ever” I was talking about) with the same feelings of wonder felt by those who picked it up back in 1994, there can be benefits to this particular deficiency.

I recently started playing FFVI in its re-released form on the Gameboy Advance. It’s only the latest in my running project to catch up on all those “best games ever” that I never played the first time around—and, in so doing, prove that playing games the first time around isn’t all there is to gaming.

Because it’s a favorite series of mine, catching up on the Final Fantasy games has been a top priority. So, by now, not only have I played all of FFVI’s prequels—some of which weren’t even released in America when FFVI came out—but I’ve also played the sequels. For me, instead of simply being the next Final Fantasy game, FFVI is the last missing step in the series’s evolution.

Of course—like any discerning mid-’90s gamer—while playing FFVI, I can trace elements of the game back to its predecessors. But I can also trace aspects of FFVI forward, and see its influence on later Final Fantasies, which adds a whole new level of enjoyment to the game—and surely couldn’t have been done by any non-psychic gamers in 1994. And besides all that, FFVI is still a lot of fun, even after all this time.

So, if you’re a slow, deliberate gamer, or if you just don’t feel like putting down your entire year’s earnings to buy a Playstation 3 before it becomes obsolete, don’t worry about it. Despite what the elitist hardcore gamers would have you believe, playing a game well after its release, even 13 years after—even one of the “best games ever”—doesn’t detract in the least from the enjoyment of the game. If you’re as nerdy as I am and like to put games into their historical contexts, waiting can even add to the experience.

Most importantly, the fact that you don’t feel like rushing to the store every time a new game comes out doesn’t make you any less of a gamer. And the fact that my parents didn’t buy me a Super Nintendo when I was six years old doesn’t make me any less of one, either.