Ten formative games

Inspired by recent discussions in the Eggplant Show Discord community, here's a list of ten video games. Not my favorite games (though many of them are that too), but ones that had a notable influence on who I am today.

10. Star Wars: Battlefront 2§

(the 2005 original, not the new one)

My first shooter game. Untold afternoons were spent playing this with a friend on Xbox, dueling as jedis, making flick shots with sniper rifles, and scouring every map for cheesy hiding spots that could be reached with jetpack trickery or by clipping through a wall. This began a love for multiplayer shooters that would continue for many years with the Battlefield series, as well as a love for breaking games and finding the limits of their rules.

9. Not Another Needle Game§

My first I Wanna Be the Guy fangame, and probably still my favorite of them all. In the years to follow I played over a hundred more fangames and even made one of my own (still the only game project I've ever finished..). Many of my oldest and dearest online friends are from this community, and NANG was the perfect first impression to get me into it.

8. Guitar Hero: Metallica§

The rhythm game that made me lose interest in rhythm games.. by inspiring me to learn to play a real guitar instead. Metallica was my favorite band in my preteen years and this game came at the perfect time to have an impact on me.

7. League of Legends§

For better or for worse, I spent a year in high school doing very little with my free time besides playing LoL. It was a way to spend time with friends and learn communication skills, which was nice, but it also generated a burnout on competitive online games that I still haven't recovered from over a decade later. I don't particularly like this game or remember my time with it fondly, but it was certainly influential.

On a positive note, LoL and its spinoffs like Arcane have heaps of absolutely excellent visual art. I've found many great artists through their work on the game and learned a lot from studying how they do what they do.

6. Half-Life 2§

The first of several games in this list that I selected for their impact on my taste in tone and atmosphere. With its long continuous levels that never skip from place to place and an excellent sense of pacing, HL2 feels like a long and treacherous journey in a way that few games have been able to replicate. That sense of uneasy solitude in the quiet moments between encounters is one that I've craved all the time ever since I first played this game, often finding it in horror games like Darkwood and SOMA.

5. Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future§

This game lured my 8-year-old self in by being about dolphins, a topic of obsession at the time, but after the initial sunny ocean levels it takes quite a turn in tone. The dark caverns, massive underwater machinery, and surreal alien structures encountered later in the journey were like nothing young me had seen, terrifying and yet thrilling, surely laying the groundwork for my love of atmospheric horror games. Not understanding English and having my dad sit next to me translating the texts also contributed to the mysterious otherworldly vibes.

4. Sly 2: Band of Thieves§

Sly was all the rage among my peers in elementary school, and I loved it as much as the next kid. So much of it was new to me at the time — the freedom to explore, the expressive movement, the sneaky stealth gameplay, the stylized graphics, and the humorous characters all left permanent imprints on me. For my money this is still one of the best open-world games ever made, even if the openness is quite limited compared to most. I played through Sly 2 eight times, a record that would not be beaten until much later when I got into speedrunning.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass§

Phantom Hourglass isn't generally regarded as one of the better Zelda games, but it was my first experience with the series at a young age, and the feeling of grand adventure it inspired in me was far beyond anything I'd previously experienced. Getting your own ship that can go anywhere in a world that felt massive was exhilarating. And now that I think about it, this was my first gaming experience where a vehicle served as a place of safety and agency, a break in the tension; a particular fascination of mine that I've since found instances of e.g. in Half-Life 2's vehicle levels and the train in Metro Exodus.

2. Minecraft§

Yet another game that's all about vibes to me. The first night huddled in a little cave scared of what might be out there (not yet knowing the enemies are actually barely a threat at all), seeing my home base again after an hours-long expedition, looking out of my tower window into the rain outside, finding my way back to the surface after getting lost in a cave, stepping out of my boat on the shore of an uncharted island — these are vivid and cherished emotional memories that required no guidance or explicit goals from the game to create. Perhaps they're so powerful precisely because nobody told me to do these things.

Minecraft was also one of my earliest programming projects. I didn't know Java and I didn't know much about programming in general, but I had a vision of a Minecraft world covered by ocean where dry land only comes in small islands, and I'd be damned if I let being entirely clueless about what I was doing stop me from realizing it. Amazingly, despite lacking the years of education I'd need to actually understand what the heck Perlin noise even is, I was able to tweak the weights in the world generator and make this happen, which is to this day one of my favorite programming experiences.

1. N§

If you've known me for a while you probably knew this would be number 1. N by Metanet Software, also known as Way of the Ninja, is a classic platformer from the golden age of Flash games. My dad of all people (who plays some games but is far from a "gamer") showed it to me at the age of 12, and I kind of just never stopped playing it. I beat all 100 episodes, started playing for competitive scores, got involved in the community, made my first online friends. I got good enough to get top-20 scores, then good enough to occasionally get a world record, and that led to a still ongoing speedrunning hobby across a multitude of games.

Even more influential than mere video game skill and taste was the game's creative side. Making custom levels with N's level editor was my first touch into game design, and because N was made in Flash, which had a reputation for being something hobbyists could do, I was inspired to learn to program my own games. Prior to this I'd had no idea how games were made and it hadn't even occurred to me that I could do such a thing myself. Not just that, but N's smooth physics and the tutorials on its inner workings posted by Metanet made me want to learn more about game physics. A decade and a half later I'm a professional researcher in computational physics, so you could say that rabbit hole went quite deep.

So it's not an exaggeration to say N played a defining part in my taste in video games, my online friendships, and my entire professional life. Mare & Raigan, if you're reading this, you already know how much this game means to me but thank you once again :)

Honorable mentions§

Here's a list of names I wrote down but couldn't fit into the top 10:

• Beat Saber
• Spelunky HD
• SOMA
• Darkwood
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2
• Wings of Vi
• Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage
• Elasto Mania
• Outer Wilds
• Dark Souls