I’m realizing as I type that this post is inevitably and irreversibly going to date me. That’s okay. I’m not ashamed of being a millennial. It meant I got to grow up in the golden age of 2D Disney animated films, grunge music, and the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch TV show. Honestly, I’m cool with that.

As for the video games that I played as a kid, I’m grateful for those, too—in some ways, they made me who and what I am today.

Generational Gaming

I wasn’t what I would call a “serious” ‘90s gamer kid. Nintendo, Playstation, Sega—I’d heard of them, maybe, but barely paid them any attention. I didn’t own any consoles to speak of until the late 2000s. When I was a kid, my family had one computer that sat on a desk in the garage, right next to my dad’s dusty old ham radio.

The first video games I “played” (if you want to be generous enough to call it that) were PC games like Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D—games I mostly watched my father and big brother play while sitting on their laps or (more often) cowering behind the computer chair. Now and then, I got to participate by hitting the “fire” button whenever enemies appeared on screen, and then squealing in delighted terror when we either beat the bad guys or died trying.

Lode Runner is perhaps the most nostalgic game for me. It was the game we played with my grandfather, who we used to visit every summer. He passed away when I was fairly young, but I can still hear his voice every time I see that little white silhouette chasing after those elusive gold bars.

I’m not sure what the first video game that I played as a kid (on my own) actually was. I owned several Disney’s Animated Storybook point-and-click games. I dimly recall playing a copy of Putt Putt Saves the Zoo that I think came free with some sort of educational activity book. And I vividly remember being terrorized and devoured by sharks in Odell Down Under during “computer time” in school.

These were the games that introduced me to gaming, and for that, I will be forever thankful. But it wasn’t until I started playing “big kid” games that I began to realize just how exciting the virtual world really was.

Memorable Video Games That I Played as a Kid

Of the games that I played as a kid, these are the ones that I remember the most clearly—and had the greatest impact on me, both then and now.

‘Princess Maker 2’ (Gainax, 1993)

Although I’m not sure when I played this one (possibly not until the 2000s), I’m including it since it technically came out in the ‘90s and I did play it as a kid. When I came across Princess Maker 2, I didn’t know what a visual novel was—just like I didn’t know what anime was when I would come home to watch Sailor Moon after school. (And even though it’s not typically categorized as a VN specifically, there’s certainly a lot of overlap there.)

It sparked an interest in Japanese-style simulation games that would eventually inspire me to create The Dragon’s Last Flight. But at the time, I just enjoyed discovering how different choices led to different narrative outcomes (my favorite being the “artist” ending).

‘Catz’ (Powerhead Games, 1996)

I was one of those people that was obsessed with the Catz games. (I think I owned Dogz too, but clearly I was already picking favorites.) I knew all the tricks about how to cheat the clock and get kittenz quicker, and I was a master of getting my catz to pose for screenshots to enter them into online “catz shows.” I even still remember the name of one of my catz—a Siamese named Pantalaimon, after a character from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books.

Catz, much like the early Sims games (which I also became obsessed with later on), had no plot but the one you gave it. It taught me that games don’t have to be complicated or challenging to be good; sometimes, it’s enough just to have a good time.

‘The 7th Guest’/‘The 11th Hour’ (Trilobyte, 1993/1995)

Today, I have little patience for overly puzzly games. But back then, I had all the time in the world to try and solve every riddle The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour threw at me. Did I actually solve them all? Probably not; I don’t recall. The puzzles themselves didn’t stick with me―but the wicked humor and the intensely spooky atmosphere definitely did.

These may have been the very first horror games I ever played. They were just gentle enough to suit my sensitive little scaredy-cat soul, but creepy enough to haunt the back of my mind even decades later. Little did I know, I would one day go out of my way to face some of the scariest games ever made just for fun.

‘Oregon Trail II’ (MECC, 1995)

We all have an Oregon Trail story, I think—and almost every one of them involves someone dying of dysentery. I’m not sure my party ever made it to Oregon in one piece, but man, was it fun naming people after your friends and then seeing what terrible fates the trail had in store for them. (Or was that just me…?)

Oregon Trail II taught me how to spell dysentery. But it also made me interested in learning more about plants and their uses (especially how to avoid accidentally eating poisonous ones). Recently, I’ve found my way back to this interest and have begun casually learning a bit about gardening and herbalism—and my life has become so much richer for it.

‘Creatures’ (Creature Labs, 1996)

Creatures taught me about life long before The Sims taught me how to die in creative ways. I walked into it thinking it would be just like Catz, where the worst thing that could happen was that one of my beloved catz could run away—and if you knew how to get around it, even this wasn’t irreversible.

Imagine my shock the first time one of my Norns in Creatures actually died. I remember finding the tombstone and just breaking down; the brilliant thing about Creatures was always how responsible you felt for your weird little creations. To watch them be born, grow, learn, age, and eventually die was one heck of an emotional rollercoaster—one that, in retrospect, was good practice for real life.

‘90s Gaming Nostalgia

It’s natural, for those of us with happy childhood memories, to miss being kids. To miss the relative freedom of it (or at least the free time), experiencing things for the first time, and playing the games that got us into gaming.

Unfortunately, games of all things tend to age the least gracefully, and even if you can still revisit your favorite video games that you played as a kid, it will never be the same. You’re not the person you were back then, and graphics have advanced so far beyond anything even the most cutting edge tech could manage in the 1990s.

I remember the shock of seeing a screenshot of Heretic after decades of relying on memory alone. In my mind, the game looked almost photorealistic. The reality was… a little more pixelated, to say the least.

In a way, the games we played as kids only exist now in our minds. But even so, it’s fun—and more than a little nostalgic—to look back and remember what was, and see just how far we’ve come since.

Kim Berkley is a gamer who grew up to write books and make games of her own. Her first interactive fiction game, The Harbinger’s Head, was published by Hosted Games in 2018. Her next IF project, chiaroscuro, is slated for release on January 13, 2022.