10 Games You Just Had To Be There For

There’s a pretty high chance that you’ve gone to your parents, begging and pleading for them to let you be included in some sort of cool event. “Everyone who’s everyone is going to be there, Mom.” I didn’t do that often. I was the weird kid in school who now has a job writing about video games. Who’s the weird one now? The truth is, no one is, because we’re all the same in the end.

For every school dance and party we weren’t invited to, we’ve stayed at home for parties of our own. You don’t want to skip the must-plays and summer sales because everybody’s doing it. Live-service games fight for our attention with the latest updates and limited-time events that you don’t want to miss! Whether it’s to protect our social standing in the real world, or to try our best to support a game before it gets ripped away from us because of shareholders, we just don’t want to miss out on anything important either way.

Sometimes, it really is important that you’re there for things, even if Mom doesn’t think it’s a big deal. Because good or bad, it’s all part of living, and some video game experiences are just as important as a big party at school.

10

Concord

There It Goes, There It Goes Again

I hate to start this list with some bad memories, but Concord is a game that has layers to it. You either heard about it in passing, saw what happened to it and held your live-service darlings tightly, or you were there for its fall as a player. No matter what you thought of Concord, the small window of time it had in the spotlight is a cautionary tale for all parties.

Concord was in development for eight years and belonged to Sony through a merger that happened near the end of development. Because of that, Concord’s bland surface-level designs typically got written off an obvious industry plant, and very few copies of the game sold. Sony, meanwhile, had other ideas. Concord wasn’t marketed very much, yet Concord had an entire prequel Secret Level episode through a collaboration with Amazon Prime. It was a big deal to some, but its commercial failure led to it being taken down two weeks later.

Now, the only thing that you can experience from its blip in the word is that same Secret Level episode. You just had to be there to understand.

9

Minecraft

2012 is Long Behind Us

Everyone knows Minecraft. It’d be hard to find someone who hasn’t played it, let alone not seen it with how huge it’s become. Minecraft has joined Fortnite in the category of games that might be too big these days. Minecraft has been getting consistent updates since 2023, with at least one every year before that. There’s a lot of fatigue regarding Minecraft these days, but it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when Minecraft was one of gaming’s biggest darlings, back when it first started.

Back in 2012, Minecraft was still growing its huge playerbase, and I joined in the fun around here thanks to a friend who liked modding custom servers. It was definitely a much more humble game back then, with far fewer items but an adventurous vibe that was incredibly contagious. It was hard to put it down thanks to how limitless it felt back then, but now it keeps growing, and many old players feel like it’s overstayed its welcome. I miss the days when Minecraft wasn’t so huge culturally and literally, at least.

8

Cyberpunk 2077

The At-Launch Nightmare

Launch day is an important moment for any video game. It’s the special moment when players can finally actually experience the title they’ve been looking forward to. Sales are heavily monitored to gauge the game’s commercial success, and most of the time, it’s a great moment for developers and gamers alike. In cases like Cyberpunk 2077, though, it’s chaos all the way down.

Cyberpunk 2077 might be a generally good game to play these days, but when it first launched on consoles, it was abysmal. Character’s legs wouldn’t work, it was possible to be sent flying by trying to enter broken windows, and everyone’s experience with 2077 was personalized by the bugs they’d encountered.

It was so bad that Cyberpunk 2077 was removed from the PlayStation Store until the issues were resolved. Thankfully, Cyberpunk 2077 rose from the ashes, as demonstrated by its 4.5-star review scores on the same storefront it was yanked off of, but it really was a sight to behold back in the day.

7

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Perfect For Living Vicariously During Lockdown

Two of the biggest games that came out at the best time in the worst year of 2020 were Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. How very fitting that both of these games could easily be 30 to 40+ hour time sinks, and they came out at a time when that length was the least of everyone’s problems.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons definitely came out at the right time because it allowed us to go shopping, talk to neighbors, and enjoy the wonders of the outside world without actually having to leave our homes. With online multiplayer as well, anyone who wanted to gather together could. One school held their graduation ceremony in New Horizons to get around COVID-19 restrictions.

My friends from around the world were closer to me than the people living in my apartment complex, and I think it says a lot that I remember my time on Animal Crossing more in detail than I do about the panic of the pandemic. That says a lot about the comfort that game brought us back then that has always remained as New Horizon’s peak.

6

Final Fantasy XIV Online

No, Not That One. The Other One.

Via LlenCoram on the Final Fantasy XIV Forums

Final Fantasy XIV Online is one of the very big darlings of MMORPGs. Depending on how much you know about XIV, you might be surprised when I tell you it wasn’t always that way.

When Final Fantasy XIV was first launched in 2010, it was reviewed so poorly by fans and critics that Square Enix refused to take subscription fees for it, cut development for a PS3 version, and dramatically change the development team. Enter Naoki Yoshida, affectionately called Yoshi-P by future FFXIV players, who had the brilliant idea to fix the game by literally razing it to the ground.

This started an entire plot in Final Fantasy XIV about the Garleans dropping a moon down on Eorzea to cleanse it. In a fierce battle between the Eorzean Alliance and the Garlean Empire, the moon was found to be a prison for Bahamut. The primal destroyed the land in a reawoken rage, and that shut down the servers to make way for A Realm Reborn.

If you’re saying that’s just the prelude of A Realm Reborn, you’d be correct! The battle at the Carteneau Flats was a real, playable event that destroyed the old game. If you were subscribed at the time and present, you’d get special bonuses that carried over into ARR. I adopted the game in-between Shadowbringers and Endwalker, so I share your wonder in wishing I got to see this awesome in-game event for myself. But as Warriors of Light, we must move onward.

5

Sonic Frontiers

Jumping in Now Wouldn’t Feel the Same

Spoiler alert, but Sonic Frontiers ends with the death of Sage, Dr. Eggman’s AI daughter. If you beat the final boss on hard mode, and complete the extra shoot ’em up section at the end, you’d get a special cutscene revealing that Eggman managed to back up her data.

Almost a year after the game launched, the Final Horizon DLC released. After you played through an entire alternate Ouranos Island featuring Tails, Knuckles, and Amy alongside Sonic, you could get an alternate ending. Earning it wasn’t easy, especially when it first launched. The game’s been patched to be a bit easier since.

If you managed to get through Final Horizon’s challenges, you’d change the story to where Sage never died, and she could go home with her father in a cutscene that paralleled the one representing Eggman’s grief in the base game.

As someone who played Frontiers from launch and put up with the DLC’s brutal difficulty, I cried when I saw this new ending. It really struck me after I sat with the ending of the game for 11 months. Getting to reunite them was cathartic, especially since Sega spent all those months being vague about Sage’s future appearances.

If you picked up Sonic Frontiers now and played through everything, there’d be nothing to leave you with the same impact that both the game and the DLC had when they first arrived. Sage is a prominent supporting character in comics and other games now, and as great as that is, it serves as an example of how adopting a game early can completely change the impact it has on the player compared to picking it up later.

4

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Taken From Us Twice Over

World of Warcraft has been going steady for over twenty years now. Players are still being treated to frequent events and updates even now, and the latest change finally turns auto-loot on for new characters in the next patch, among other, more important things.

Anyone aiming to get you into WoW would tell you any time is a great time to start. The truth is, the game is far from its peak according to many, many players. Its real peak was back in 2008, when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion first launched. It marked a radical change in the game, adding the Death Knight class and bringing in new story elements to leveling zones that made the entire journey feel so immersive.

Patches and expansions have tried to capture the same feeling of Wrath of the Lich King and have failed, or have even altered WotLK’s content to where you really can’t experience it like it was at launch. Even the Classic servers have moved past WotLK now, and that itself made long-term fans sad that they had to watch the best expansion leave them all over again.

3

Counter-Strike 1.6

Pour One Out For LAN Parties

Online multiplayer gaming has been an incredible innovation. Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ help with the pandemic was a great example of how internet-based gaming helps close worldwide gaps, as we discussed earlier. Still, the way online multiplayer has changed the environment has unfortunately made it hard to gather people in one place to play games together. It specifically marked the death kneel for LAN parties.

Back in the day, people would host LAN parties for all sorts of games, but Counter-Strike 1.6 was by far the best one for the event. If you’ve seen a photo of someone held aloft on a support beam by duct tape and cushions, that was indeed a CS 1.6 LAN party.

These parties were breeding grounds for stupidity and mayhem, especially since they definitely brought out at least one mountain dew-drinking obsessive player to the function. If you’re reading this entry and getting nostalgic for LAN parties, you’ve been to at least one where something crazy and stupid happened. You have. I know you have. But that was all part of the fun, wasn’t it?

2

Deltarune

Or Should I Say Survey_Program?

You’re probably no stranger to Toby Fox and his quirky, yet undeniable masterpiece JRPGs. After Undertale, he took to Twitter on Halloween in 2018 and vaguely spoke about some sort of program. Trusting this developer, we all gathered onto the page and downloaded a “Survey_Progam” with the promise that we wouldn’t speak about it for 24 hours.

I very vividly remember starting this program, making my vessel, and watching it be discarded. As soon as I took control of Kris, I understood what this was. A tease for the next Undertale, right? Well. Technically.

This “tease” just kept going. And going. I met Susie. I fell into the Dark World. I met Ralsei, and it kept going. Every section of this game had me questioning when it’d end, and it ended with a boss. It was a full game just given away as a nice holiday treat known as Deltarune.

A lot of things have changed since that Halloween. We’re getting the next Deltarune chapters at such a fast rate now that I feel like people have almost forgotten how special the start of Deltarune was on its own, or what it was like when it first released. If you were there with me, I feel like we need veteran discounts at this point.

1

The Legend of Zelda

The World We Knew is Gone

The internet has given us plenty of good things in life. (And bad, but that’s another matter entirely. Let’s be a bit positive here.) For every game that gets to live a year beyond its launch with updates, moments where you can play with someone from Scotland while you’re in Australia, and for every Deltarune, there’s something taken away from it all.

Namely, no one experiences The Legend of Zelda: Breath the Wild the same way they did The Legend of Zelda. The rollout of the internet missed Zelda’s debut by four years at the earliest. So, if you wanted to enjoy the game with anyone, your best bet was with your next-door neighbors and friends at school.

Things were just far different back then. Strategy guides could be found wherever books were sold, and there was something special in making time to talk to your friends about the discoveries you’ve made in Zelda. This could apply to a number of games. We’ve all got one game that checked these boxes in our childhood, but The Legend of Zelda was purposefully made to encourage players to come together, share secrets, and help each other progress.

You can still share your video games with friends, but there will always be an element missing from how things used to be.