April 2, 2010 -
At IGN, we're a lot of things. Nerds, douches, Achievement whores, over-raters, under-raters, and so much more, but at our core, we are gamers. Each and every one of us has a brain filled with cherished memories that revolve around our hobby. Unwrapping a Nintendo Entertainment System on Christmas morning, beating Streets of Rage with a pal, desperately trying to get Lara Croft's nude code to work – you get the idea. Before all of us who lived the adventure drift into a senile state and forget, IGN thought it would assemble those stories in an ongoing feature called "Gamer Memories."
Here, an editor will walk you through one of his or her favorite memories involving a controller, some kind of dance pad, or (more generally) a memory that was a defining experience for the editor's time with games. On tap for this installment? Why, it's none other than Nicole Tanner, IGN associate editor and God of War fanatic.
We'd fly back and forth every couple of weeks or so, and that time was very precious to me, so I didn't really want to spend it all playing games. I had nothing against games at the time; I just didn't play very many of them. I had played games frequently as a kid on old systems like the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Vectrex, but like most girls, my interest in games waned as I entered my teenage years.
However, Isaac loved games, and it was obvious they were going to remain a huge part of his life whether I liked it or not. I learned in our very first conversation that his goal was to be a videogame programmer, and he's happily attained it. And since we were still in the very early stages of our relationship (you know, where you'll agree to do things you might not really want to because you want the other person to keep liking you), and because I really liked Isaac, I agreed to give this "girl-friendly" game a try.
Since the title contained the word, "Fighter," I immediately envisioned something like Mortal Kombat, and having never really gotten into those types of games, I was worried I was going to hate it. But then Isaac attempted to explain that you don't fight like a traditional fighting game; you fight by doing well on a puzzle board. I didn't quite understand it at first, but after playing it, I was immediately hooked.
It took a few games for me to understand exactly what I supposed to do. The only puzzle game I had played up to this point had been Tetris, and Puzzle Fighter worked pretty differently. Since I was just getting up to speed, Isaac went easy on me, but he didn't let me win. I was adamant about that.
Once I had the hang of it, Isaac started playing up to his real skill, and I got clobbered. His strategy has always been to simply drop the gems as quickly as possible, not paying too much attention to forming big gems in the beginning. And though that still seems counterintuitive to me, it has continued to work for him since 1998.
A match made in gamer heaven.
That time together really was quality time because we talked and laughed while playing, which were things we couldn't have done if we'd gone to see a movie, for example. We lost sleep, but we gained so much more. When I look back on those nights now, they're special to me for a number of reasons. First, because they really did help solidify the relationship that would eventually become my marriage. And second, because they marked my re-entry into videogames. Now I can't even imagine what my life would be like if I didn't play games, and Puzzle Fighter gets a decent amount of credit for that.
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