There’s a picture of you in some scrapbook at your mom’s house, a bleary-eyed ten year old clutching a half-unwrapped PlayStation and screaming your head off. Is it a Mandela Effect, or does everyone somehow have the exact same picture, crouched on the floor by the tree, surrounded by shredded wrapping paper, trying to pull a video game box away from our greedy siblings? To this day it’s still one of my purest holiday memories. Christmas wasn’t always a magical time in my family, but this one moment of perfect childhood bliss has become a core memory. That video game box - a PlayStation 2 in my case - was the only thing that straw-haired little kid wanted in the entire world.
The PS2 I got for Christmas in 2001 came with two games. I’ve gotten at least a dozen more consoles in the years since and I couldn’t tell you what the first game I played was on any of them. But I’ll never forget the first two PS2 games I played because, until then, I didn’t know video games could be bad.
I’ve been playing games since before I could walk. I grew up on Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, and Freddi Fish. My childhood book shelves were full of edutainment titles like JumpStart Adventures, Zoombinis, and Mario Teaches Typing. I had a huge library of burned PS1 discs my dad copied from our local Blockbuster, and some of my favorites included Tomba, Ape Escape, and Disney’s Hercules. By the time I was ten I had played hundreds of terrible video games, but I had no concept of quality, no understanding of what made a game good or bad. If it was a video game, I liked it. It wasn’t until I played Batman: Vengeance that I realized how bad video games could be.
I remember it dawning on me slowly, starting out as confusion. I kept coming up with questions like, “Why doesn’t Batman move the direction I'm pressing?” and “Why did I just fall in an invisible hole for the 30th time?” When before I’d struggle through these kinds of issues with the understanding that that’s just the way games are, it suddenly occurred to me something was very wrong here.
Maybe if it wasn’t a Batman game, I wouldn’t have even realized it was bad. If I didn’t like a game when I was a kid, it was because I didn’t like the characters in it, not because it was a bad game. But this was Batman, and not just any Batman, it was my beloved Batman: The Animated Series. Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Tara Strong, and Gotham exactly as it looked in the show. The possibility that I wouldn’t like Vengeance never occurred to me. Yet there I was, playing a terrible video game about one of my favorite heroes. It’s happened many times since, but this was the first.
Luckily, the second thing I played was Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, a game so good it may have saved me from giving up gaming altogether. Suffering through Vengeance opened my eyes to everything that made Jak and Daxter so special. In contrast to every bland and frustrating thing about Vengeance, Jak and Daxter had tight controls, excellent platforming, cinematic cutscenes, and a beautiful world to explore. It made me think about the games I played before in a new way, and changed how I chose the games I wanted to play.
A passion for game criticism was born that Christmas. Looking back now, I realize that hating Batman: Vengeance led me to where I am today, writing my little opinions about new games, still trying to figure out what makes the good ones good and the bad ones bad. What a privilege, what a curse.