We recently did an old school game night that turned out to be pretty fun. We discovered a lot of things that night. We learned that we didn’t just suck at video games as kids, but that they were just really damn hard (I’m looking at you Castlevania). Dan and Duane found out that Gyromite is actually a good game, contrary to popular reviews. And I discovered that Eggnog and Butterscotch Schnapps go really well together.

All these old video games were in the era of quarter arcades and when you get down to it, they took about an hour to beat. The way they made their gameplay time increase was to make the games incredibly difficult. There are so many games out there that I think of playing as a child that still frustrate me and nowadays I’ve left my playing games as escapism for playing games as narrative and a communal activity.

In one sense I felt nostalgic for the good ol’ days but in another sense I was really glad those days are behind us.

-Sean