battlefield 1942 came out in 2002. i remember playing it as soon as it was available (pirated it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
crysis came out in 2007. i remember playing it some time after it came out (pirated it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
the witcher 3 came out in 2015. i remember playing it two years after it came out (bought it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
looking back, i now think that battlefield 1942 looks like an atari 2600 game. and i knew that, at the time; i knew it looked Like A Videogame. i knew what a polygon was in 2002, and i knew it didn't have a lot of them, but fuck, it just felt so organic and big and real. now it would feel like i'm walking around inside a portapotty; for christ's sake, i've played Open World Games, wake island is a postage stamp.
crysis... feels like a 1991 honda accord. dated, sure, but honestly still pretty solid. a looker, even, and that was 17 years ago. people played that game on fucking radeon x1350s. and the witcher 3, which is coming up on a decade old, looks breathtaking. it's been patched, sure, but the original still looks great. i don't look at it and go "lol, old." yet in 2012, BF1942 already looked like an atari 2600 game.
i realize it's just a nonlinear curve of improving quality made even more nonlinear by comparison to Real Life. but the thing that always weirds me out is this: i was there for all of it.
i know that I - the entity with this name and unique identity - was there in 2002, yet the past is a foreign country; 2002 feels impossibly far away. i know that i used daemon tools to install battlefield_1942.mds in 2002, but it might as well have been some jerk on reddit talking about it. it's not any more actionable. i can't reach back there and go "self, take notice of this thing, and this one. look at it from this point of view. stand up and look around, compare to other things. notice, observe, remember."
i was just doing what i was doing. it was not important that i was playing a game that would someday seem incomprehensibly old fashioned, and thus fascinating; it's just what was on the docket, what was on the table, what was next. it was the next thing to do. so i did it. and it feels like i did it about six hours ago. it feels no more distant than what i did last weekend, except that i had learned to pay attention to what was going on around me last weekend. i hadn't in 2002, and there's nothing i can do about it. i am someone i wish i could interview about a place i was and a thing i did, except that, being me, i know that i wouldn't have anything to say about it. it didn't matter enough to notice when i was doing it.
every time jeff gerstmann or jeremy parish talk about getting excited about seeing like megaman 4 or M.U.S.C.L.E. at the store i think about this. it's impossible for me to imagine someone remembering super mario brothers 3 coming out. but i'm someone who remembers battlefield 1942 coming out; i'm someone who remembers picking it up at fry's electronics and asking my parents to buy it; i'm someone who remembers excitedly inserting each disc, but it doesn't feel that way. it feels like it happened to someone else, even though the memories are there. i have them, i'm recalling them right now, i can see through my own two eyes, yet a forum post or a magazine article feel more real
how will i feel about 2024 in 2046? will it be any more real in retrospect?
i am watching a 30fps gopro video in my head of a hand inserting the doom shareware disc into a CDROM caddy, i had to put it in a caddy because our CDROM didn't have a drawer, and then i push it into the drive, and then i start doom and i am playing doom and i am scared of doom. and yet when i play doom it feels like something i got off homeoftheunderdogs 30 years after the fact, as distant as anything else that predates me. i've been continuously playing doom since it came out. why aren't these my memories? or maybe it's just that memories don't count for much.
I think the issue is that we (people who were alive in the 80s-90s-00s) lived through the singly most sudden, thorough, global restructuring of everyday life in human history — there have been many occasions where one culture suddenly came into close contact with another and life changed a lot for some specific city or province, but this was everyone, everywhere, at roughly the same time. If you’re young enough that you can’t remember before “internet on my phone, which fits in my pocket” then you really have no idea how much things have changed even if you can contemplate the idea in the abstract.
The only way to emotionally keep up with such profound changes is to mentally box off the past as a thing that’s over, done with and not relevant. Nobody remembers the nineties even though we’re all pretty sure it happened.
I don’t feel my age. I don’t act my age. But I’m old enough for my first music album to have been on cassette tape. I’m old enough for my first television to have had a dial on it. I couldn’t play Duck Hunt on the old TV I was profoundly lucky to have in my room because it was black and white. My first computer was, by today’s standards, barely better than a word processor, but it was everything to me. When the internet became a thing that we could have in our homes, I couldn’t go online in the evening because the line was busy and the modem would wake up my parents.
I should act like an adult. I should by all rights be old now. But I’m not. How do I keep all of it straight in my mind?
When I transitioned, it was like a life lived on pause could finally resume. I became an adolescent again, even though it really felt like the first time. When was I a young adult? It was when I spent hours online on IRC roleplaying with friends. But it was also when I went shopping for my first feminine clothes. It was when I moved in with my second girlfriend in an apartment in the suburbs, struggling to find a job. But it was also when I moved out to the big city, freshly divorced, to start my career as an indie game developer.
Multiple lives overlap in my memory and sometimes it’s so difficult to make sense of it all. How can anyone cope with so much change over time? How can I have been so many different people at so many different times and yet be me, now?
I’m writing my eighth book but it might as well be my second. I’m several decades old but it only feels like a couple. But that’s impossible, right?
How do I reconcile being here, now, after all this time, yet no time at all?
I don’t know how people do it.
