Video Game Critics Admit Which Classic Titles They've Never Played

Do you know how many games come out every year? I'm not even talking about the ones that make the App Store every single day—well over 400, since you asked. I mean titles for home consoles and computers, sometimes heavily marketed affairs that you might see an advert for on late-night TV, or perhaps even an Underground poster in support of; and indie releases that tend to come out through strictly digital distribution means. Bloody loads, is the answer. Too many. Wikipedia reckons there are already over 700 games available to play on the PlayStation 4 alone. That's a console that launched in November 2013. Get your head around that. Nobody can play all of those games.

Not even professionals.

And professionals are guilty—if guilty is quite the right word—of missing out on what the wider industry, players and programmers and publishers alike, considers to be "the classics." As the words below, from a clutch of confessional critics, will imminently make crystal.

Keza MacDonald, editor of Kotaku UK and once of IGN, has never played Final Fantasy VII (1997)

This is because in the 1990s, when it came out, I was a Nintendo kid and my parents thought the PlayStation was for adults, which says a lot about the success of Sony's mid 90s marketing campaign. Whilst others had their formative gaming experiences racing Chocobos and weeping over the death of [redacted], I was collecting Stars and Jiggies and injuring my hand from button bashing in Mario Party. (Seriously, I still have a small, visible piece of grey plastic from an N64 analogue stick embedded in my palm.)

I feel like I know everything that actually happens in Final Fantasy VII, just through osmosis. I've tried to play it probably ten times and there's a single reason why I never succeed: random battles. I cannot stand random battles. I played Skies of Arcadia for 65 hours in about 2002 and by the end of that I never wanted to see a random battle again. Apparently, the director Tetsuya Nomura is considering ditching them for the game's upcoming PS4 remake, as was the case for the iOS release. When that comes out, I really will have no excuse.

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Chris Schilling, a freelance writer for VICE, Edge, the Telegraph, Eurogamer, and more, has never played Dark Souls (2011)

The vagaries of life as a freelance critic can mean you end up reviewing game after game without much of a break in between. And the need to keep money rolling in means it's often hard to justify time spent on games you're not getting paid to write about—at least not without being permanently nagged by guilt. And when you've got a kid in the house who enjoys watching you play games—or, preferably, playing alongside you—then a dark, violent fantasy action-RPG renowned for making its players invent fantastic new compound swear words isn't exactly the most feasible leisure time option. Not least when everyone keeps telling you to set aside 60 hours plus to play it.

That's one of the two main reasons I haven't played Dark Souls. The other is Dark Souls fans. Now, don't get me wrong: It's great to see people passionate about the things they love. But Dark Souls fans take it to another level of evangelism. I've rarely encountered a fan base that so regularly and delightedly informs you that Dark Souls will ruin other games for you; that once you've played it you'll immediately think less of anything else that isn't Dark Souls. I quite like other games, as it happens, and the idea of playing something that will cause me to drastically reconfigure my opinions of my personal favorites puts me off. Unless someone fancies paying my mortgage and utility bills for the next couple of months, of course.

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Carolyn Petit, formerly an editor at Gamespot and now a contributor to VICE and co-writer of Feminist Frequency's Tropes vs Women series, has never played Super Mario 64 (1996)

I remember standing in a video game retailer in a mall in the summer of 1996, watching demo footage of Super Mario 64. To see that footage at that moment in time was to understand that video games were about to change forever. And I yearned to go along for the ride, to explore Peach's castle and wander around its worlds in every direction, where previously I'd been stuck moving left to right.

I was a broke college student then, though, and a few years later, when I was scrounging by working in video stores and coffee shops, it was the real racing simulators, epic JRPGs and tactical espionage action games of the PlayStation that won my hard-earned money. When the DS launched in 2004, I picked up Super Mario 64 DS hoping to finally go on that journey I'd once viewed with such wide-eyed wonder. But after spending a little time with the game, I felt like it was too late to go back to that moment in time. Early 3D games haven't aged well in my eyes; where their worlds once seemed full of possibility, they now look stark and simple.

So today, Super Mario 64 is a game that I can love more in the act of not playing than in the act of playing. I can remember how magical it looked to me all those summers ago, and appreciate what a huge leap forward for video games it will always represent.

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Ed Smith, columnist at Kill Screen and contributor to VICE, has never played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)

I resist the word boring because I like to think that every experience, no matter how seemingly mundane, is enriching, but when I played parts of Ocarina of Time on a friend's N64 back at university, boring was all I found it. I haven't returned to the game, let alone made an effort to finish it since then, because Nintendo's style of simplistic, childish wonder is patronizing and insincere. Unlike the majority of the gaming industry, I don't wish to return to childhood, nor do I believe that the perspective of a child, or any appropriation of childlike innocence or naiveté, can provide valuable insight into adult lives or emotions.

The fairy tale aesthetic, like in Ocarina of Time, allows game-makers to do their favorite thing, tell an insouciant story then claim it valuable because it gives players access to cheap, temporary, and vaguely pleasant feelings. I'm baffled by the thought that any adult who's read books, or lived a day in his life, could play Ocarina of Time and consider it substantive enough to be called "classic." I haven't finished it because I consider it a waste of time, a response I don't have even to the worst of video games.

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Steve Burns, deputy editor at VideoGamer.com, has never played NiGHTS Into Dreams (1996)

Growing up, I never knew anybody who had a Saturn. Every single person I hung around with or borrowed games from or thought was a colossal dickhead but quite enjoyed swapping Resident Evil strategies with had a PlayStation, and rightly so. There was one guy I went to school with who had one, but I didn't know him that well, and it should also be noted he got his accidentally, after his mom ordered a kettle from Littlewoods and they sent a Saturn instead. Still, he never played it, which tells you about as much as you need to know about the perception of SEGA's machine back in the mid-90s.

Anyway, despite its unpopularity the console did have some good games, and I'm reliably informed that NiGHTS is one of them. The Saturn press of the day loved it, of course, and even the multi-format boys thought it lovely. I recall looking at screenshots of it and thinking, "Yeah, looks kinda cool, but where is the new Sonic?" To me the Saturn seemed utterly exotic, an oddity with weird games (like this one) and weird pads (the "fat controller") and weird ads (but then all ads were weird then). In a way, it still does: I've never owned one. When people ask me why I've never played NiGHTS, I shrug and say it just passed me by. A fitting epitaph for the Saturn as a whole, thinking about it.

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Mike Diver, editor of VICE's video game section, has never played Half-Life (1998)

When this first came out, I didn't own a PC, because PCs were incredibly expensive and I worked a part-time job in a bakery paying somewhere around the £3-per-hour mark and all of that money needed spending on two-for-one bottled beers and compact discs. A computer was not on the cards (at least, a new one, as the family had an Amiga which mostly had a Sensible Soccer disc wedged into it). When Half-Life was ported to the PlayStation 2, three years later, I didn't own a PlayStation 2, because… Well, again, did you see what those things cost back then? By the time I did have a PS2 to call my own, several years later, all I wanted to play was Resident Evil 4, Ōkami, and GTA: San Andreas. I eventually bought Half-Life from the little games shop up the road that probably still flogs PS2 titles at four for a tenner, when they're halfway decent. I think I picked up Tomb Raider: Anniversary in the same transaction, and that disc has never been snapped free from its box either.

Time's moved on, opportunities to look back have closed, and here I am: in 2015, with a copy of one of the most celebrated video games of all time (which still rated highly in its lesser-revered PS2 form) collecting dust because I'd rather play the new Mad Max and satisfy my reduced retro-gaming wants with Super Mario Maker. What can I say? I am a sucker for the pretty shit, the shiny and new high-definition things, and Valve's supposedly seminal first-person shooter is just so… square. Time is incredibly unkind to video game visuals, unless they're Tetris, and I fear that if I started Half-Life right now I'd only wind up writing an article about the minor flaws it inevitably has, completely forgivable in the bigger-picture appraisal (and probably fewer than most new games), and enraging a community of die-hards. Not that I've done that before.

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