The year 2005 was full of world-impacting events, such as the NASA Deep Impact mission, Hurricane Katrina, and the official launch of YouTube. Nothing a nine-year-old truly cares about, maybe except YouTube, though. Hurricane Katrina was the only event I can recall from my life that year that had any impact, and being a Michigan child meant the storm never actually affected my life in a meaningful way I could comprehend back then. Having severe ADHD as I do can really ruin an attention span, especially for a nine-year-old boy. My brain always needs a thoughtful challenge and something that’s not mundane. Video games quickly became that outlet that met all the needs of a chaotic, ADHD-riddled child like me. I started playing video games five years prior, when I got my first Game Boy Color, the see-through purple one. I had recently gotten into computer strategy games like Age of Empires and Anno 1602 when I would visit my Grandma’s house, so my Aunt Denise bought the Game Boy for my fifth birthday. Most of the first five years of gaming were games that had no lasting impact on me, until one came out from the shadows.
The cover art at Family Video had been calling to me to rent it out for a few weeks. The massive Colossus, wielding a huge stone hammer, juxtaposed by the puny human on a horse, seemed like a challenge I wanted to take on. If any of you remember the days of the video store titans, you also remember what it felt like when something you wanted was rented out completely. The first thing you do after that realization is go to the front counter to see if somebody returned it just now, and when it’s supposed to be due back. That was my story for a few weeks after Shadow of the Colossus piqued my interest. I was actually in the middle of paying for a different game at the front counter when somebody returned a copy of Shadow of the Colossus, so the fact I got it that day was pure happenstance. My dad was so excited for me since he knew I had been wanting to play this one for a few weeks. He made it extra special by getting me some Mike & Ike’s, my favorite candy. So with my new bounty in tow, little nine-year-old me had no clue he was about to embark on a journey that still impacts my thoughts twenty years later.
This game will be the furthest back I dig into my memory, as the rest of the games I will look at are mostly after I went through puberty, not this game, though. Shadow of the Colossus is minimalistic in its storytelling with very few characters, which makes it ironic that it still has a lasting impact on me at twenty-nine now. The box of Mike & Ike’s is a wonderful juxtaposition for the game’s lasting effect on me. I eat them by the handful, more as a flavor bomb than to enjoy one flavor at a time. One by one, I felled each Colossus like the puzzle they are. Not until ascending the final one did I realize what I was doing. That was when I started to realize I may have been the villain of this story all along. I did not want to believe it at first, trying to justify how no game before has made me feel like the villain. Even in Sly Cooper, where you are a thief, you are the good guy in a more Robin Hood role. I was glued to my little eighteen-inch RCA television, and like all good pictures of those days, comically too close to the TV. After I slayed the final Colossus and a cinematic took place, I suddenly heard footsteps and pawsteps coming down the stairs. I panicked. I could not have just pulled an all-nighter trying to beat this game. I snuck to the buttons on the TV to turn to channel 98, the TV guide. The only clock I possessed in that playroom. 5:54 A.M. Yes, indeed, I did stay up all night. I quickly snuggled into my makeshift bed I had made in the playroom that night, and went to bed contemplating what had just transpired before me heavily. I would wake a few hours later when everyone else in the house was up and finish it after breakfast again.
However, the philosophical and emotional impact of the story’s narrative had already set in before the ending cutscene was abruptly cut short. That is what I will mainly be focusing on in this blog: the underlying questions these games posed to me, and that still make me think critically about them to this day. Writing this post today has made me reflect more on video games and their influence on me as a whole. It made me realize video games embody the literal definition of empathy, putting another’s shoes on and walking in them. Some politicians may say, video games cause violence, and I say they are wrong for the vast majority. I only realized today that video games have helped me hone my own empathy towards others, even when the game itself lacked empathy and had a brutal or dark story. Shadow of the Colossus left a nine-year-old wondering, would you sacrifice your own values and morals to kill beautiful and innocent beings to bring back a dead loved one? Whether you take it literally or figuratively, I would have to love them a lot to do that, because even then, I still do not think I could kill the Colossi at the end of the day.
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