Before anyone runs to Jack Thompson to use me as an example of games being a bad influence, allow me to explain. Gaming has been a staple of my life since childhood. Back in the days of blips and bleeps and tiny little pixelated characters, I was an unusually impressionable child. I watched movies like The Changeling and The Amityville Horror, and attempted to play some of the more grisly games that were allowed at the time. Like a suicidal moth to a particularly hot flame, I would just keep going back without realizing the potential long-term damage I was doing to my overtly fragile psyche.

Now don’t get me wrong, please. I’m not blaming any of my irrational fears on games, movies, or any facet of pop-culture. I’m just pointing out a potential reason why, when I feel a particular way or in a certain mood, I think back to certain games of my youth and wonder “What if?”

Most of us can recall the old platformers of yore. Back in the original Sonic the Hedgehog days, most games either didn’t bother to add water levels or didn’t have the space to add any sort of swimming failsafe. Because of that - most of the levels that did have water in them had it as a tiny pool that would somehow instantly drown your character if they touched it. “Hm, yeah, gonna take a dip to cool myse-OH GOD WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING!”

As more designers made games with a little more depth to the water (pun intended) the swimming system went from instant death via poison water absorbed through the character’s pores to you better freakin’ find a way to breathe underwater or you are going to watch your character die a slow, agonized death due to lack of air. Games like Ecco the Dolphin brought the needing air thing to a whole new level due to the way the entire freakin’ game was underwater and yet they gave you one of the few sea creatures that doesn’t have gills. It was a fun game for sure, but many a level was spent with me cursing the fact that Ecco was dead just a few scant inches from the surface of the water because I hadn’t made it in time.

Admittedly I’m not scared of water. Really, I’m not. However, I am quite afraid of the deeper parts of the ocean. Common sense tells any intelligent human without scuba gear to not go near water when you can’t see the bottom, but oddly when I play World of Warcraft and get close to the edge of the really deep water, I start to feel my heart beat more frantically as well. I petitioned to get them to add a set of water wings or floaties to the game, but to no avail.

So when I do see those pictures of the depths of the sea, where the fish have strange growths and you can’t see anything but black pitch in all directions, I tend to think back to those days of watching Sonic frantically flailing in the water as his lungs filled with fluid.

Everyone has their one or two completely irrational and incredibly powerful fears. The biggest of mine would be dolls. I don’t mean those hideously grotesque and malformed things that pass as the most popular toys right now (Ugh, Bratz). I mean the oldschool porcelain dolls with the haunting glass eyes and creepy features. The kind of dolls that you look at and just know that they’re stealing your soul as you do.

A while ago I thought back to what could have possibly caused such a bizarre fear. After all, some people love those types of dolls and actually collect rooms full of them without a second thought. After a couple of days I realized that my love of the old computer game The 7th Guest may provide the missing clue that I was looking for.

Back in the day I would go over to my best friend’s house after school and we would giddily sneak into her parent’s room to play The 7th guest on their computer. That game may not seem very intimidating to an adult, but to an eight or nine year old it was scary as Hell, especially because they used real actors and very realistic graphics at a time when I was used to seeing Mario hopping around on a 2-D screen.

Several points in the game had us actually shrieking and running from the room. Specifically I can recall the cut-scene with one of the guys melting, which caused us to leave and not return for at least an hour.

The main plot point of the game was that crazy toymaker Stauf made his dolls with a powerful biological agent in them. Eventually the girls who got them would die, clutching their dolls, and their souls would become trapped in the doll and subsequently in Stauf’s mansion. The opening cut-scene along with another cut-scene explains the full story in detail. The second cut-scene involves two of the characters stumbling into Stauf’s doll room and hearing, much to their horror, the cries of the children coming from the dolls.

Quick reminder. My friend and I are eight and nine years old. Yeah. We pretty much ran screaming into the night.

In the end I love all the games dearly. Quirky fears are just quirky fears and are better left unexplained. Though it is fun to think back to my childhood and wonder, “What if?”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Classic Gaming, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.