Doing a lot of thinking about old games recently. Between 2002 and 2006 I was in High School and I discovered Super Nintendo emulators on my parent's still-dialup internet connection and wound up browsing a lot of websites trying to fill in gaps of SNES games I never got to play as a kid.
Mostly this meant that I got to finally play through Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but eventually I would just be at the whim of whatever random collections I stumbled across. Each ROM took up to a half-hour to download so I would always play each one at least a little while waiting for the next one to finish. I would download things that just had cool titles, knowing nothing about them. I remember downloading Smash TV because my friend had a game called Super Smash Bros Melee and I thought maybe it was the same thing. Smash TV absolutely rules (the arcade version is better) but this post is about Shadowrun.
I didn't know about the Shadowrun TTRPG, had not seen Blade Runner, hadn't read Neuromancer. To people familiar with those things, I assume this SNES game wasn't very memorable. The only time I hear anyone talk about old Shadowrun it's the Genesis one which was apparently a lot more open and had a ton going on.
For me, within this extremely specific context, Shadowrun completely enthralled me.
It was the first time I think that I ever played a video game that seemed actively hostile toward me. Some of the first NPC's you encounter in that game are just random salarymen on the street reading newspapers or walking to work. Trying to talk to them goes about as well as it would walking up to someone in a suit on 3rd & Pine: you are a transient stranger approaching them on the street, they do NOT have anything to say to you. This blew my mind.
It stood out to me coming from JRPG's and, like, Pokemon, where you are the main character of the world and everyone knows it and has things to tell you and stuff to give you. This game felt like the world already existed and was already functioning and you, poor soul, just happened to be in it.
Shadowrun dumps you into a morgue with nothing but the coat on your back. Your character has amnesia and effectively so do you. Everything in that game is familiar but alien. What's a decker? Stim? Nobody is going to explain any of this to you because you, Jake Armitage, are an adult and you should know all these things already. People are shooting at you from windows, now there's a giant green orc with a shotgun trying to kill you and then you walk into a bar and there's another one but you can hire him?
I would just meticulously trawl through every room, exhausting every dialog option, just desperately trying to scrape as much context or information I could from this grim, dark, dangerous world.
Consequently, it was just so incredibly compelling! I didn't know what games of that era were capable of; I had no preconceived notion of what all the game could do! My imagination went wild with the possibilities of what could be around the next corner. I just needed to find a cred stick to call my apartment and get into the night club.
I don't even know how much credit I can give to the creators of this game for it's effect on me. How much of the show-don't-tell-or-sometimes-don't-even-show had to do with getting a game to market from a huge established property? In the last few years I went back and played through it as an adult to see it with all the knowledge and cynicism. I don't know if I can exactly recommend it, but I did have a pretty great time! I recommend using a guide for the back half because it's just esoteric and the stat system is riddled with bugs.
However it came to be, that game has always stuck in my brain as a remembered feeling of awe, mystery, and hostility. A game that really just didn't care all that much about me until I proved myself relevant. A game who's complete disinterest in my presence drove me to completely lose myself in it's world. It's a feeling that I wouldn't feel again until Morrowind in college and then Dark Souls years after that.
That feeling is something I've wanted to bottle since I started making game.
If you liked this post, you may also like some similar vibes I wrote about Morrowind earlier this year.