Any player who grew up in a family with a older brother or sister and who has had access to a console or a PC has experienced at least once the thrill of being stolen the game station from the infamous joint, or having engaged in long river discussions about favorite games. A classic, above all in the late 90s, when the video game was entering our homes massively and becoming the new television, in a way.
Well, the writer has not only experienced the experience (not too hard, actually) of sharing his PC, his Super Nintendo and his PlayStation 1 and 2 with an older sister tastes a little different from hers (like me from Metal Gear Solid, she from Crash Bandicot), but also with the other woman of the house: my mother, a great lover of graphic adventures.
Follow me in this short tour of memories of afternoons spent between Gabriel Knight, math homework and a thousand adventures: I assure you that you will not regret it.
Rain of memories
If I close my eyes and think back to period between the end of elementary school and that of middle and high school I don't just happen to rethink the game sessions of Super Mario, Donkey Kong o MGS. Another image that comes to mind, for example, she is a mother in front of the PC in my bedroom, cigarette in her mouth, hand on the mouse, eyes lost on the screen.
In front of her one of these titles: the aforementioned Gabriel knight, The last express (beautiful spy-story set during the last journey of the Orient Express before the Great War), Black Dahlia (point-and-click on the case of the Black Dahlia, dark murder that took place in Los Angeles in 1945) and one of the other twenty or thirty games we had amassed at home during that time.
She said they relaxed her. Her first approach to the video game was, to be honest, with what I remember being the very first 3D home game, Duke Nukem, but the romance had lasted until the moment she got tired ("Oh but here they all shoot, it makes me nervous!") and had discovered the fascination of graphic adventures.
Oh, obviously she wasn't the only one in the house who loved the genre: Simona and I, my elder sister, we diligently gave her the change in front of the station, we exchanged ideas with her, we helped her to look for the phantom "solutions" on the old portals of the time (oh my, if I think back to the completed games following step-by-step those guides a part of me dies ... sins of youth!).
Passion spreads
It wasn't just us playing, as a family. In a short time, my mother's passion also contaminated my aunt, and another of the memories that come to me are the negotiations between her and my parent when buying new games, which went more or less like this: "So you take Hitchcock's, I that of the desert (nb never that they remembered a title well!) and then we exchange it, oh well? ".
And the contagion did not end within the family walls, no-no: soon it also reached a Laura, my best friend's mother in elementary school, involved in the conversations between me and him and my mother's stories. I think for them they were different pastimes than usual, different from the books they read, from the television, perhaps more immediate and relaxing pastimes. Perhaps this was what made the breach.
In fact, another memory I have is that of the mom-aunt-Laura trio leaving shipping for the game store in my city looking for a new title or, after the discovery of the first digital markets for used games, to the post office.
You went home, took off your backpack, ran to your room and you found the new cd to insert in your PC or PlayStation 1 (did someone say Broken Sword and Broken Sword 2?) and down to play until the evening, homework permitting. Indeed, let's face it: often my homework sessions were poor, but after all I was studying with my mother at my side intent on saving the world or to solve a great mystery of humanity, how could I resist the temptation of a peek (oh well, let's take ten peeks)?
It was a good time, guys. A beautiful moment in all: school, homework, toys and mom playing on the PC, no thoughts on the future, no adolescent crises on the horizon, still no international political upheavals to think about (even if 11/XNUMX was just around the corner).
Oh, actually I was pretty scarce playing with this genre (not that graphic adventures drive me crazy today), and I often left the task to mom. but yet those afternoons must have somehow trained me well, if today I write about video games and, above all, if the earliest memories of creative writing I have are real fan-fiction of Gabriel Knight and The Last Express, right?
Things have a change
We come to today.
Twenty years have passed since those afternoons, and many things have changed, including inevitable personal growth and above all the partial sunset of graphic adventures during the early 2000s.
Today aunt doesn't play anymore, Simona has fully converted to my nephew's Switch, I have now given myself to action or at most to film games or narrative games.
But Mom still plays when she likes.
Of course, we see that the golden age has passed. To the various Monkey Island or Myst it has replaced many of those flash-like games based on the search for objects within a scene, and after all ... well, the years pass, perhaps patience is reduced, and without a doubt the market and the decline of the genre they didn't help keep the passion alive as it once was.
As I said, however, you still play when you like. She still stands in front of the PC, cigarette in hand, eyes lost on the screen. I stop to look at her, I think about how much I don't like most of the games she plays today, however much I am pleased to see her still so engrossed in her games.
But, above all, sometimes I think back to those afternoons and I find myself thanking that they were there.
With the hope, why not, that they can return.
