Badassery: My Top 3 “Hell YES!” Moments in Games

As it sometimes happens, I was getting a little writers block trying to come up with my post for this week. I have only really been playing XCOM and Don’t Starve. Most of my time has been spent doing meat space things this last week. Besides the annoyance of learning Candy Crush posts on my wall 1,000 times a day (exaggeration), video games have played a relatively non-inspiring role in my life this week. So, I starting thinking about what I love about video games, or all games in general. I started thinking about those “hell yes” moments that have kept me coming back over and over again, despite having to spend hours grinding to get there or weeks preparing for a battle.

3. The existence of Realmz

Realmz was a game that created a lot of firsts for me. It was the first game that I played that I was good at. It was the first game I played that really used the roleplaying D&D style that I still find unbeatable. It was the first game I ever had that was shareware, and it introduced me to what shareware was. It was the first game that was Mac only, which introduced me to the Mac vs. PC debate. It even let me make my own characters. It came out in 1994, which coincided perfectly with a 9-year-old me that had just discovered Internet chat rooms and Encyclopedia Britannica CD ROMs. So as you can imagine, it was a whole new world.

Realmz wasn’t the first game I played, or the first game I finished (it’s not a game you can finished, really). But whenever I think about my early gaming history, that’s the game that comes to mind. So while Realmz isn’t really a “moment” in the proper sense, it represents a kind of moment in my life that was hugely influential in my becoming a gamer as an adult.

2. Beating Resident Evil 2

Now, besides the early NES games, many of which I beat collaboratively, Resident Evil 2 was the first game I ever beat. It was me and my friend Danielle, playing on her Playstation. I was supposed to have a sleepover with her on a Thursday, I believe, when there was no school on Friday. I ended up staying through Monday morning and riding with her to school. We spent the entire weekend playing obsessively. The best part was that though we were only 13 or so, no one stopped us. No one told us we were spending too much time in front of the TV or that we needed to go outside and play. I guess games were new enough still that parents didn’t have a whole list of mob-mentality scary “facts” to use against us. We were engaged, entertained, and staying out of trouble. (Maybe we stole the occasional cigarette when we couldn’t pass a level, but still).

We stayed up until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer each night. We ate pizza and drank Mountain Dew. And we beat that damn game. Just us: no cheat sheets or walkthroughs. We kicked that game’s ass. And it felt great.

1. Reaching level 65 in WoW

Back when I played World of Warcraft so obsessively that I even brought a laptop to my Master’s classes and sat in the back watching the auction house, my only goal was to reach 65. I slept, ate, and dreamt WoW. And, since I was a noob, I slept, ate, and dreamt reaching level 65. Maybe it was easy for some of you and you’re rolling your eyes thinking about how bad I must have been to have spent months trying to reach 65, but that’s how it was. Long nights having snowball fights in the middle of Stormwind, meeting that random person who have you 100 gold just because oozed noob, and reading the most sexist and racist stuff I had ever seen ticking through the trade channel. It was my world, and my very first completely immersive experience, and I loved every second of it. On a vacation once, my mom and I left to find internet so we could play. Though we had a gorgeous townhouse and our whole family back at the resort, we spent days using the shitty wifi signal in a laundry mat. But we weren’t really in a laundry mat. We were killing kobalds and trying to save enough money to buy 16 slot bags.

I played so much that a friend wrote a song for me called WoW Widow. A nice way to say that I was distracted from what others considered to be real life. Those of you who played WoW or Everquest, you probably know the feeling I’m talking about. The moment when I hit 65 was the greatest moment of my gaming life. I had gotten WoW for my birthday, right at the time the first expansion came out. I got many, many friends and family members to play. I even met people I never would have that have been really important in my life. So, hitting 65 was the pinnacle of all of that. Maybe I was just sitting home alone in a dark room when it happened, but it signified so much for me. And that makes it the #1 badass moment in my gaming history!