Significant gaming memories made in adulthood

[Plumpodrome]

What the title says.

We all have a gazillion memories that we like to talk about regarding childhood games. However, I'd like to hear another side of the story from a lot of you.

Let's talk about significant gaming memories we made in our 20s, 30s, 40s, etc.

One of the warmest experiences while playing something in my recent years was being stuck in the hospital with my old macbook air. It couldn't handle a lot of things, but I happened to pick up a desire to play Ocarina of Time for the first time through mupen64.

I have to say, I'm glad it didn't let me down. The feeling of adventure that the title brings about is timeless, and I was 25 at the time. It made me feel younger, and it helped me cope with some pretty bad times in there. The bad times aren't over yet, but we're moving forward slowly, bit by bit. Almost ritualistically, for the first time in almost 3 years, I restarted Ocarina of Time yesterday through Ship of Harkinian, and I'm glad that eternal childlike charm of the game is still there. Glad I can restart the experience despite losing a few hours of progress - as I almost never restart games if I happen to drop them for one reason or another.

 

[Yousef's iconYousef]

Oh yeah I’m all about this, since I missed many childhood classics due to not growing up with Nintendo
Ocarina of time comes to mind, played it with zero nostalgia and still loved it to bits (which would likely rile up some feathers, but that’s on brand for me)
I was never a big Metroidvania fan so I only played the NES games growing up, but trying to Symphony has actually gave me a larger appreciation for the genre!

 

[RanmyakuIchi's iconRanmyakuIchi]

I've always loved Fighting Games but didn't get into competitive play until around 19-20, so almost all of my memories of going to tournaments and competing are from adulthood.

 

[UnDubious]

I remember being so mindblown by Xenogears when I was in my early 20s (this was already many years after it had come out), I was excited to get up every morning just to play it more. I hadn't felt that way since I was a child. I hated that damn sewer dungeon that wouldn't end, in fact most dungeons in the game felt a little too long, but even that couldn't stop me from loving it.

 

[pr0xy]

I recently played Hi-Fi RUSH and it was one of the best gaming experiences I've had in many years.
It made me feel great. The characters, dialogue, music, and the way everything ties to the rhythm... It was so much fun.
It kinda made me feel like I was watching FLCL again for the first time. Such an amazing time. Pure, genuine happiness.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

I guess the fact that I can play the entire Xenoblade franchise on one console is one. I plan to ask for X on my birthday, two months after release so just in time.

Playing Pokemon Emerald for the first time also counts since I first played it at 19, while still in high school. I got into gaming when Pokemon Black and White were the most recent games and as a result got the other DS games (Diamond & Pearl really are as shit as they say, get Platinum). I never had anything made before DS, so I was walled from the majority of games until I started emulating thanks to the pandemic.

Of course there's finding out about the hidden gems and forgotten games via this site

Playing a lot of the games I could only watch was a bonus too. Too young to play MadWorld, too Nintendo-centric to get Sony, too tech illiterate to figure out how to play RPGMaker games, computer was a Dell which barely could run Minecraft and that walled me too, too broke to get a lot of Switch games I wanted. That last one is actually why I still haven't played Legends Arceus. Feels great to say that I finished Gunvolt's first 3 games (not iX 2 or Gunvolt 3), nearly every mainline Mega Man except 7, 8, & Bass plus some Gameboy titles, a couple obscure titles (I'll get to you one day Rockman Strategy), and that one WS game. Also feels good to actually play Mogeko Castle and say "wow! this is shit!" Among other things because I 100% would've loved the Etrian Odyssey games if I had known they existed. I never saw a single EO at Target, or even a single SMT minus Soul Hackers and one day I saw SMT IV.

 

[Bonkers225]

As an adult? None whatsoever.

 

[HawkR]

Playing Minish Cap as a depressed adult (in my 20s) with everything going wrong in my life, and watching the little Minish creatures trying to help humans, just because they could.

Right in the feels, dude, right in the feels.

 

[ATenderLad]

Significant would be a stretch, but there was the first time I got to Nergigante in Monster Hunter World. I took a call for a minute, muted the sound, and after a few minutes forgot I had Spotify going through a playlist on the console.

I sit back down, turn the volume up, and reach the designated spot for the fight. Suddenly, this big-ass dragon with bone spikes comes smashing through a wall in tune with The Chain, and I was losing my mind thinking they'd licensed Fleetwood Mac for this fucking game. (Really added something to the battle, too; breaking his face with a SnS shield slam while Stevie Nicks is wailing "And if you don't love me now" was invigorating).

 

[Gorse]

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• Playing through the entirety of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link completely legitimately – no guides, cheats, or any form of extra-game help – and completing it on a sunny Easter day in April 2021. Discovering all that game's nooks and crannies on my own was a complete joy. Zelda 2 is a phenomenal game, and easily my favourite of the series.
• Beating Mega Mans 1 to 6 over a successive series of weekends in college. I never really liked Mega Man before that, but working my way through the Classic collection – seeing all the various character artwork and profiles between each game – was just a ton of fun. Again, excellent games.
• Completing a fully-translated version of Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos in January 2023. It brought me back to being a teenager again, and reminded me of how much I loved that world and those characters. That game, and the franchise it belongs to, has so much detail and effort put into every single piece of it that I can't help but adore it as much as I did when I was 12.
• Finally being able to play a translated version of Garage: Bad Dream Adventure on my iPhone, the day it came out. I followed that game throughout pretty much all of my adolescence, and never dreamed in a million years that I would actually be able to play an officially-released English version. Yes, past Gorse: it is a real game, not just a bunch of edited Myst screenshots.

As per usual, there are probably way more, but these are the first that came to mind. All of them are from games released several decades ago.

 

[CargoRoms]

Never cared for old school shooters. Only wasted my good chunk of lifetime in TF2 and other online FPS games. During my teenage years, and early to mid 20's.

But once I got gifted DOOM 2016, back in early 2020's, I got through an avalanche of old school shoooter + mods + indies that are still coming out.

 

[Cu-Neo]

A good memory that I have is when I became a legal adult with 18 years and went to buy my first mature game without the need of a identification .

 

[UnDubious]

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• Playing through the entirety of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link completely legitimately – no guides, cheats, or any form of extra-game help – and completing it on a sunny Easter day in April 2021. Discovering all that game's nooks and crannies on my own was a complete joy. Zelda 2 is a phenomenal game.

I had the same experience in maybe 2022 or 2023. Played Zelda 2 for the first time, also beat it legit. It was really rough in the beginning and I struggled with getting started, but after getting used to combat and getting a little stronger I got into the rhythm of it. Solid game.

 

[ATenderLad]

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• Playing through the entirety of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link completely legitimately – no guides, cheats, or any form of extra-game help – and completing it on a sunny Easter day in April 2021. Discovering all that game's nooks and crannies on my own was a complete joy. Zelda 2 is a phenomenal game, and easily my favourite of the series.

I genuinely will never know if I could have done that. I spent a couple weeks as a kid trying to figure out where to go after the second palace, and my older cousins had to show me where Bagu was.

 

[Gorse]

I genuinely will never know if I could have done that. I spent a couple weeks as a kid trying to figure out where to go after the second palace, and my older cousins had to show me where Bagu was.

I don't fault micro-ATenderLad for that at all, because Zelda 2 is a very cryptic game that demands patience, a willingness to explore and experiment, and measurable skill during action segments. You can be good at the overworld exploration part of the game but fall down during the very difficult platforming bits, or you can be a whiz at platforming but get frustrated by a lot of what the game makes you do to progress the plot. I don't know if I would have had the patience or ability for it under the age of 18, either.

If you're ever interested, I would 100% recommend trying it again as an adult. Zelda 2, taken on its own terms... which is a challenge, I'll grant you that... is an excellent game that rewards curiosity, the willingness to tackle difficulty, and stone-cold grit in spades. Be patient with it and go with the flow it sets, and I think you'll really like it. The ending scene in particular is just a beautiful piece of 8-bit bliss.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Never played GTAV until a few years ago when they gave it away on Epic, so I decided to mod it for VR with LukeRoss REALVR mod.

And let me tell you that this night at the Vanilla Unicorn was really something else...

 

[HawkR]

Impossible games taken on as an adult, with more info available than whatever printed matter happened to be miraculously available to you, was some sort of silent advent in the gaming community I don't feel anyone could describe with an appropriate amount of significance.

People used to beg Stephen King to finish his Dark Tower series, they wrote him for DECADES, sending encouragement, and some of them died before he did.
That was us, as kids, getting stuck on some BS or another. Sometimes you just didn't see endings or final stages, or second halves of the games, no matter how hard you tried.

 

[ATenderLad]

I don't fault micro-ATenderLad for that at all, because Zelda 2 is a very cryptic game that demands patience, a willingness to explore and experiment, and measurable skill during action segments. You can be good at the overworld exploration part of the game but fall down during the very difficult platforming bits, or you can be a whiz at platforming but get frustrated by a lot of what the game makes you do to progress the plot. I don't know if I would have had the patience or ability for it under the age of 18, either.

If you're ever interested, I would 100% recommend trying it again as an adult. Zelda 2, taken on its own terms... which is a challenge, I'll grant you that... is an excellent game that rewards curiosity, the willingness to tackle difficulty, and stone-cold grit in spades. Be patient with it and go with the flow it sets, and I think you'll really like it. The ending scene in particular is just a beautiful piece of 8-bit bliss.

It was definitely one of the first games I remember expecting more from me than jumping over pits and...whatever the hell a Goomba is. I wasn't sure video games were "supposed" to have talking back then, I definitely wasn't reading closely.

Yeah, why not? Loaded it on the Steam Deck, I'll see if I can manage in small chunks before sleep.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Every time I played something with my kids, I felt a connection so great and so pure as to send shivers down my spine.

Watching my little girl grab a controller a little too big for her hand and twist her head around just to smile at me as something moved on the TV after she had pressed the buttons felt like sorcery for the both of us.

 

[pr0xy]

Playing a lot of the games I could only watch was a bonus too.

Truer words have never been spoken.

 

[ATenderLad]

Every time I played something with my kids, I felt a connection so great and so pure as to send shivers down my spine.

Watching my little girl grab a controller a little too big for her hand and twist her head around just to smile at me as something moved on the TV after she had pressed the buttons felt like sorcery for the both of us.

WELL THATS ACTUALLY INCREDIBLY SWEET

It is a good time though, I watched a nephew playing a VR game where he rode a roller-coaster through Jurassic Park. He barely noticed the dinosaurs, since my brother had set Santa Claus to sit in the cart with the player. He kept trying to sidle over to Claus's lap and tell him what he wanted for Christmas, and probably fell over a half-dozen times trying to sit down on empty space.

 

[ciro64]

• Hat in Time lifted my spirit when I was going through a break up
• Finally beating Kid Icarus for the NES felt special, the last level is very iconic and makes you feel rewarded for your hard work, including the song
• Luigi Mansion 3 is a down to earth quality Nintendo title, but beating it with a close friend turned the experience into a adventure of a lifetime
• Smash Ultimate tournaments and meet ups were quite the experience, even though I'm not that good at the game
• Castlevania 64 became my favorite game ever despite discovering it not even 3 years ago
• I played Rhythm Heaven Megamix for the first time a while ago and it was one of my biggest bursts of joy in gaming

Every time I played something with my kids, I felt a connection so great and so pure as to send shivers down my spine.

Watching my little girl grab a controller a little too big for her hand and twist her head around just to smile at me as something moved on the TV after she had pressed the buttons felt like sorcery for the both of us.

I have two little cousins (well, one of them is a preteen already) who I introduced videogames to and connected with them in that way.

I don't have kids of my own, nor I plan to, so they are probably the closest I'll get to having a paternal instinct. Would jump in front of a bullet for them without a second thought.

 

[GatoAnimico]

Oh i have a good one. A friend of mine had in his steam library Sekiro: Shadows die Twice, by that time i was just accepted in college and was pretty let down because i had to leave my family and friends on a far away state after many fights and terrible times through sickness and loss. For me it was a personal challenge, i was dying and dying a lot, playing with an xbox 360 controller on my pc.
I got so frustrated i tossed the controller and the bumpers broke, that affected me because it made me realize i was actually mad with life, so i changed to mouse and keyboard. I tried and tried, telling myself i would never give up no matter what, either in the game and in my personal life and eventually started seeing the game as some way of fighting with my feelings til' i finished the game, it was like i actually achieved something. Like an internal change that told me: "if you can beat this you can beat anything".
Sort of dumb but sometimes, the feel of achievement you get from a videogame can be greater than the ones you can get from actual day to day if you really pour your soul on it.

 

[TrousersnekDaInfinit]

Actually being able to play all these cool games everyone was talking about on the internet, since I got a laptop that could play games past 2004 only when I started college, that was in 2017, and now, honestly, I continue making memories with each game I try, I guess being cut off from most gaming experiences until later in your life makes you enjoy games for a bit longer than most people, the first game I played on that laptop was Fallout New Vegas, it was an experience I wont forget

 

[RedNin3]

Getting to play Racing Lagoon with understandable English. Being born in 1995, I grew up one (almost 2) console generations behind, my dad had a copy of this game mixed with all the other games (we had a chipped PSX in the 2000s) and I never understood anything about the game until I saw the Translation on CDRomance. And oh man, I already felt euphoric without even having to play it.

What a uniquely, over-the-top serious, almost psychotic ride that was.
10/10, would slap a "Diablo" kit on a Civic again.