This is a retrospect blog post, if you don’t like to read about other peoples old game experiences - GTFO. :)

Without putting words in other peoples mouths I am quite sure that many of us here at some time, got a game, of some kind, at Christmas.

So I thought that I could chronicle my experience of the past, the present and the future of this said event and maybe conclude something about how things have changed.

One of my strongest memories is of the Christmas 2000, when I got, burned and obviously pirated, a copy of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for the PC. Here in Sweden we get our presents on the eve of Christmas eve, however my parents thought it was a good move to give us something to shut me and my sisters up during the day. So on that morning I got myself this wonderful game.

Like most things, when view in a more sensible retrospect know that experiences of the past is likely best to be an experiences of the past, not replaying old games, watching movies of questionable quality and so on.

But for me, being in the seventh grade, deprived of games, this was awesome. For once my father’s PC, equipped with a Voodoo 2 PCI card with 12 megs of VRAM, strangled under the load of the game, and my thumbs - rooted to plastic of a crappy gamepad that was jacked up to PC, cramped from time to time as I strained to get Obi-wan's and Qui-gon's jumps correct.

I think it was the same year I saw Star Wars Episode I at the cinemas, walking out hailing it as the best thing since caffeine in soda. So it was only natural that I would enjoy the experience of running around jabbing a badly modeled lightsabre at droids. I realize now that what was thoroughly enjoyable was not the game in it self, but how close I came to being the same heroes I watched on the screen.

Games do need a specific amount of personal imagination so that you may emerge yourself in the experience - even more importantly, the suspension of belief - to ignore bad design and technical glitches. I’d say that some of this have got itself a bit of a beating during the years as one finally got a broadband connection and devoured games like nothing.

I have the same disc, stored into a battered jewel case, lying in a box in my parents basement (“The Graveyard of Children's Memories”) and I can say that I will never play it again. Somethings, like games, are probably best to be kept stored in a box, in your memory so that you one night, may sit and reminisce about a time that in some ways formed you and that you love.

This is a call to all of you, better keep those memories then try to, after so many years, to enjoy games of your youth and past like you did then. I know that some of your already know this and take it to heart, but on the other hand - many judge old games by the criteria of the present.