Stumbled across an interesting site today, “My 9 Games”, which is a site where you go and choose the 9 most influential video games in your life.  I’d seen the output from it on X a bunch of times but hadn’t ever clicked through to find out that I could set my own up before.

This isn’t intended to be a list of your 9 favorites, but rather ones that affected you most, so mine skews a little old.  These aren’t in any particular order.

Let’s break it down!

Everquest (1999): This is probably third most influential if I had to pick an order.  Actually if we look at the top three we should probably read it right to left.

You know, I’m just not going to order these at all.

Anyway.  I don’t want to think about the number of hours I sank into Everquest, and then World of Warcraft, Everquest II, TERA, Final Fantasy XIV, Rift, Dark age of Camelot, Lord of the Rings Online… but I do have fond memories of the people I met in them.

The fact that this is still online and still getting new content drops 27 years later says a lot about it as well.  While I’ve moved away from it, there are a lot of people who still love its take on the MMO treadmill.

Ms. Pac-Man (1982): As a young lad, I was consumed by Pac-Man Fever… and then I moved to a small town with no Pac-Man machine but that did have a Ms. Pac-Man machine, and at first I didn’t want to play it because you had to play as a girl.  I got over that, though it did take a while, and soon realized that it was much more fun than the Mr. version.  Call it a very young and very small step towards being a slightly better person.

Shining Force (1992): This wasn’t exactly my first JRPG, but it is the one that made me actually start to like the genre.  More importantly, this (maybe Shining Force II?) was the first game that I played together with my now-wife, and after three decades of genuinely good times together I think this one can’t be beaten as most influential.

Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai Special (1995): I think anyone who spends a few minutes going through the archives here will realize that I am a generally decent person but also a little bit of a degenerate, and this game probably started me down that path AND forced me to learn mahjong.

Sonic the Hedgehog (1991): My family never owned any of the Atari/Coleco/Mattel consoles when I was very young, and the first things I owned that could play games were all computers – a Vic 20, Atari 130XE and a hand-scrabbled-together PC XT clone.  I knew that the NES existed but considered it a pretty shallow thing and saw no reason to buy a console when computer games existed.

Seeing Sonic playing on a TV at the local Software, Etc absolutely broke me of that and I have owned just about everything with a gamepad and/or a screen since.

Doom II (1994):  Oddly, not the original Doom.  I didn’t feel comfortable sending money away to iD for the rest of the game back when it was distributed as Shareware, but Doom II could be bought in a store.  Also I was working a boring midnight to 8 shift at work with very little work to do and no oversight so I spent hours and hours of my employer’s time blasting through this.

Dark Souls (2011): Technically I would not have tried this without having played Demon’s Souls, but while I liked that to a surprising extent, this was the game that taught me a lot about patience and getting satisfaction out of doing something that I hadn’t considered possible.

It also made me realize that labeling something as too hard for myself without even trying it was a horrible habit to have and a trap that I was very prone to falling in to.

Genshin Impact (2020): “Wait, this is a phone game? Well, I’ll play it but I don’t expect much” and six years later I’m eagerly anticipating every story drop and logging in for at least a few minutes daily to get the drip feed of resources and keep building out my army of virtual waifus.

I like it when numbers go up and having like 70 characters who all need levels and equipment and skills and friendship means that there are always numbers to go up.

We will not discuss my lifetime spend on this as we are all friends here, but it’s probably more than I should have spent while also not excessive when you look at it on a per-hour-played basis.

Finally, Skyrim (2011).  It’s a very normie game and also ridiculously popular, which is the point.  It made me break out of a kind of hipster attitude and accept that some things that are popular are popular because they are good.  This, Dark Souls, and Ms. Pac-Man are all games that are on this list because they made me examine myself and realize that I needed to change.

Look, some people read self-help books.  Whatever works for you.

It’s also one of those games that is basically a template for modern open world games, and I think that so many new games are modeled after it that you’re doing yourself a disservice trying to get into them without trying Skyrim first.  Kind of like the way that 25 years after Halo launched with the original Xbox you can still pick up the vast majority of first-person shooters and your Halo muscle memory will get you through the basic controls, trying to play through the Skyrim main story and winding up getting distracted by a million side quests will prepare you for an innumerable number of newer titles.

Anyway, that’s my “nine”, and if you want the chance to think about this for yourself you can find the site here.