Emmett Watkins Jr. – Another Holiday Surprise

I’ve lived through enough Christmas days to have a whole roster of big memories to share. But the memory I share today doesn’t have too much to do with the actual holiday. It’s the story of how my relationship with video games drastically changed over the course of one day, and the game that was responsible for that change.

It was Christmas 2011. I had a PS3 since 2008 and I was already pretty into games. I played whatever I could get my hands on at the time, which was often just one or two games for my birthday or the holidays and whatever latest releases had demos released for them, back when that was a thing more often. Take this and the fact that the only media I consumed about games was G4 and IGN, and you could probably assume that my taste in games was a bit basic. I played LittleBigPlanet, Warkhawk, and a few other games, but nearly my entire gaming diet of the time was comprised of shooters, action games, and the rare platformer.

So, this Christmas morning, I got loads of new games. I got Bioshock 2, I got Borderlands 2, I got Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. I even got a sick Gaming Rocking Chair that I sat in all day playing these games, and rarely sat in afterward. But there was one game I asked for that I had prioritized low on my list, yet received anyway: The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection. I had heard, for years at this point, that Shadow of the Colossus was one of the greatest games of all time, yet I never knew it existed the entire time I was primarily a PS2 player. Well, trailers for the game finally introduced me to the scale of its encounters, so I became interested, but it wasn’t the non-stop action fest I was used to, so I only planned to get to it eventually. But there it was, right there in my hands, so I…put it to the side to play Call of Duty.

Modern Warfare 3 was a great time, full of the setpieces and gunplay I’ve come to know and love from the franchise. But this entry was a bit shorter than earlier titles, and it took me only 6 hours to roll credits on its campaign. So, after that and Christmas dinner, I had more time to kill, so I figured I’d see what was up with this strange grey/green boss rusher. And, God damn, did it hook me. But it hooked me in a way I never really encountered before. It’s indirect storytelling, cryptic design, and grandiose presentation filled my brain with questions that had the potential to be so much more interesting than the answers that I usually received immediately when playing any other game. I played it late into the night that Christmas day, and I really never stopped playing it throughout the rest of my holiday break. I finally beat it right before going back to school, and I was blown away by the experience.

This is the moment that I started to discover I had taste beyond hack n slashers and shooters. Shortly after this, I fell in love with more “artsy” video games like Gone Home and Life is Strange. Now today, I’m partially defined by how often I love games with immaculate vibes and obscure narratives. Don’t get me wrong, I still love corny action games like The Club and Prototype 2 as much as I love Virginia and Nier Automata. But my time with Team Ico’s sophomore effort really did end up becoming one of those defending games of my adolescence, as it went on to define my taste in games as an adult. And honestly, it’s that a better gift than the year headshot simulator that I’ll forget about within a few months?