![]() As a child of the late 90s and early 2000s, 3D video games were a uniquely prominent aspect of my cultural upbringing, preceded only by the Millennials in having this new digital frontier to explore as a mainstream domestic staple from birth. Like many of our forebears who have fallen to the temptations of getting nostalgic about the past, elders of Generation Z can now often be found engaging with touchstone early-years TV shows, music, and literature, in attempts to scale the walled garden of childhood innocence and evade adulthood’s inevitable victory for a brief time. The unrelenting forward march of time carried on, promising only extortionate rent, heartbreak, and death. It was at this point last September that I put on my rose-tinted glasses, gazed upon the utopian freedoms afforded by my white/middle-class/suburban childhood, and despaired. Whether their worries are exacerbated by a pandemic or not, every young generation becomes wracked with anxieties when the responsibilities of adulthood seem poised to ruin everything. This was the resurrection of a childhood dream, never realised, made possible again. But in the emulator, I was sailing free, my whole being dedicated to unlocking the robot skin for my Create-A-Skater, which had eluded me at the age of five. I was the Ever Given drifting up the Suez Canal, destined to strand. In the real world, I was depressed, missing work deadlines, and ignoring the doomed move to London which loomed over the next week. If they’d monitored my webcam at the times I was using it, they would have seen me standing in ripped pants at the raised white desk in my childhood bedroom, clammy palms sliding over the joysticks and buttons of a budget USB DualShock controller, face hollowed out by the pandemic, eyes unblinkingly focused on being somewhere else. Should they have sifted through the files, my employers would have assumed the PCSX2 emulator, the programme responsible for this trance-like nostalgia trip, to be a trojan horse for spyware, and had it deleted. ![]() A carefree time, revisited in a less comforting present. I don’t notice that it is an emulation of my favourite childhood video game, reproduced through my work laptop in September 2020, rather than the real thing, a scratched disk whirring in the PS2 at Cookham Road circa 2003. ![]() Even in motion, every aspect of this replicated game world is always already in its right place. Repeating skateboard wheel FX dislodge polygonal birds from invisible perches they scatter in pleasingly predictable, concentric patterns. The perfect place to listen to Basement Jaxx’s 2001 rave banger “Where’s Your Head At” while colliding with iridescent floating skill gems. I emerged from the darkness of the vines into the level’s lower section, a lush and crudely textured waterfall sanctuary coloured by brilliant blues and greens, set against a blushing pink sky. To score 784 points and absolutely rip the Human Camp level’s high score challenge, set by Tarzan’s arch-rival Clayton, rendered on Sony’s flagship turn-of-the-millennium console with as much menace as a balloon ready to fly over Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. ![]() It is quite some deal to speak of it, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, in which I executed this trick combo: Quarterway upon the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark forest, kickflipping a mirror as Jane from Tarzan in Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure (2003). – Allister, “Somewhere on Fullerton” (2002) “There’s a place we used to go to get away from it all” – William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (1863) Walled garden: a software suite or device where the services and information developers make available is only available to the software system or device’s users… exclusive content often gives users a sense of belonging and camaraderie with a company. ![]()
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