Toronto Thumbs

I believe the hype
Coming to terms with my video game addiction

I always excited about video games being on sale. Heck, they often don’t even have to be on sale. They can just be for sale – regular priced. I just like looking at them in stores. Earlier today, I had no clue why. But I’ve been thinking about it for a few hours now, and like an episode of The X-Files, my conclusions only raise more questions. It’s interesting.

I’ve been gaming for as long as I could remember. And for as long as I could remember, I owned cartridge-based video game systems. These systems had high-priced games and this was normal. In fact, as a high school student with no job and no source of income save for a $10/week allowance, I somehow saved up enough to buy Killer Instinct for the Super Nintendo the day it was released.

At the time, the game was $100, not including taxes. The day I bought it is one I’ll never forget. Adam Russell (infrequent writer but stellar Thumbscaster) and I used to live on the same street with just few houses between ours. We’d hang out a lot and even spend much of our time at local arcades playing either Killer Instinct or Mortal Kombat 2. When Killer Instinct was making its console debut, Adam and I were ecstatic.

I woke up early that day and called every store I could think of that sold video games. These were the days before the corporate giant that is Electronics Boutique was everywhere, and certainly before Future Shop decided to sell gaming goods. So the calls were to stores like Zellers, Towers, K-Mart, and Sears. Oh, and a particular store that went by the name Aardvark Entertainment. I called that place so many times that day that they just started answering, “we don’t have Killer Instinct yet.” When I would call.

Wonder if they had caller ID.

Adam ended up calling me between my dialing. He’d struck gold. The K-Mart had copies in and they were just putting them out. He and I ran down the street to the bus stop, went to K-Mart, bought the game, and rather than wait for the bus back (there was a transfer involved, too), ran all the way back to my house.

We played the game for hours. It was our first real game night – and yes, we played till the a.m.

Thinking back on that day, and days like it, it’s easy to see how much things have changed despite our friendship and love of gaming being the same. If a big game is released now, every store has it – even grocery stores. Gaming has gained such a level of mainstream acceptance that the thought of only a handful of stores selling games is boggling to the mind.

Back then, one game would last me a year, often more. We had gaming media in the form of magazines, and hype came in the form of bonus VHS cassettes that Nintendo Power sent out. I remember borrowing the Donkey Kong Country preview tape from Adam and dubbing it for myself. In many ways, it was the first game that I got excited about that hadn’t already been released. And come to think of it, I’ve always tended to get games that I read about first – whether they be in magazines or, more recently, online.

There was a canned scene at the end of the Donkey Kong Country preview cassette where the cameraman allegedly and accidentally walked into a room where developers were playing a part of Killer Instinct and was immediately and via poor acting forced out of the room. And boy, did we speculate as to what that was all about!

These days, we’re bombarded (albeit by choice, mostly – in my case) by the onslaught that is the gaming hype machine. You might recognize it from its previous jobs as Movie Hype Machine and Music Hype Machine. But those industries have long since changed and its efforts in those are becoming ever more obvious and sad. Gaming media is still relatively new, so hype has found its new playground.

Granted, some games are really deserving of all the hype they get. However, it’s been my observation that the amount of hype a game gets is often somewhat inversely related to how good a game is. So what does this even have to do with my gaming addiction? Easy! My addiction is fuelled by hype. I still believe it. I still fall for it.

It seems that barely a game has left one of my consoles that I start fantasizing about playing the next best thing. And again, the music business metaphor applies. With music (and I have written for various music magazines for years) I’ve found that the topic of many cover stories is always the “next big thing” or more often the featured band is touted as the “saviours of rock.” Bands come and bands go and we’re always urged to care about whatever new band the big labels are pushing - and they’re bands that, hello - usually look and sound just like the previous fucking bands.

This is directly comparable to how the gaming industry treats itself. How many games do we need to have with a space marine as the main character? And considering what has happened to the once-mighty music industry – one that can very easily be likened to mafia operations – should gamers be wary of the future of gaming? I think so.

When Killer Instinct was released for Super Nintendo, I was too unaware of the world around me to even begin thinking about the way the games business worked. In fact, I was too naïve at the time to notice it at all. The only think I cared about was that I was playing games I loved.

Now, with the hype machine in full effect, I’m constantly reminded that there are more games that I don’t have and that I apparently need to love. And with video games being more affordable than ever before (such as recent Blockbuster, EB, and Zellers sales where new-ish titles have been reduced to $10), it’s that much easier to give in to the desire to own every game that I want to play – even if I’m only interested in “trying it out.” After all, when it costs $7 to rent a game, buying it for $10 really seems like an awesome deal.

In fact, last weekend, I had to restrain myself from going crazy and buying seven games. And I’m still holding myself back. With all these new, affordable games tempting me, my attention span for what I’m currently playing – what I’m currently into – diminishes to next to nothing.

Which makes me think: Do I even like video games, or do I just like the fact that they exist?

Posted in Editorial |