The joy that was interweaving your imagination with a video game as a child
SSX3 might seem like a strange choice for someone to pick as their favourite video game from their childhood. While most usually will go for one of the Final Fantasy series or a Pokemon game or something as equally as whimsical when asked this question, here I am getting sickly nostalgic over an arcade snowboarding game.
But it is, because, just like when a song you haven’t heard in a while causes you to catch your breath from the Proustian rush, simply thinking about the game causes something to leap inside of me with pure joy.
For those in the dark, SSX3 was released in 2003 by EA Sports as the third title in their already highly regarded SSX series: arcade snowboarding games that focused more on cartoonish tricks than the real snowboarding experience of, well, falling over constantly. SSX3 received high critical acclaim for its innovative open-world (which allowed you to board the whole way down a three-peak mountain without stopping), its visuals, sense of excitement and, well, just how damn fun it was to play.
To my 12-year-old self though, it wasn’t just a game. It was my playground, toy set and own narrative creator all rolled into one. It had quests and goals and missions and all that other stuff that we expect when it comes to a game, but as a pre-teen whose imagination was firing on all cylinders, and still of that age where fun didn’t come with the need for maturity or with the hanging background gloom of “real life” sticking in, the game became interwoven within my own imagination and I would found extra enjoyment in making up my own little stories and my own little world within the game.
Sometimes I pretended I was recording a documentary about snowboarding. Sometimes an epic survival story where I had to rescue someone at the top of the mountain and get them down as fast as possible. I expanded the game’s world with my own. Its gameplay with what I wanted it to be. The fictional snowboarding festival within the game, which only in reality provided a basic amount of narrative and context in the game, received its own subplots, tournament brackets in my mind — the characters their own expanded backstories and histories. A particular favourite thing to do was to pretend that I was racing a friend down the slopes who didn’t actually exist, and another was to pretend to have a hot chocolate when I reached the shelter halfway down the mountain.
With SSX3, both my imagination and the game itself intertwined perfectly to create what I still consider today to be my perfect ever gaming experience. My age at the time, with that wide-eyed childlike voyage of discovery plus a bit of early-teen world understanding, combined just at the right time with the release of a masterpiece title that provided in a hallucinogenic cocktail of creativity.
I didn’t just create my own worlds with SSX3 when I was a young gamer, The likes of WWE Smackdown, Premier Manager, Driver and a load of others also saw the ‘Nick Imagination Treatment’. But none of them quite melded with me as SSX3 did. It just clicked. Just the right balance of outlandishness and realism. Just the right amount of handholding. Just the right amount of things I could do myself. Just the perfect set-up, environment, feel and level design. Some might argue that, due to the graphical limitations of the time, I had to fill in the gaps myself and that was just part of what we did before true photorealistic graphic capability became more prominent — but I don’t think this is entirely correct. SSX3 had great graphics for the time, and it wasn’t as though ‘painting the picture yourself’ was ever required.
Open world games are now, twenty years on in 2022, far larger than SSX3 ever was. Their scope is so vast that the possibilities as a child for adding your own meta details to the game in your mind are almost limitless. Sometimes I wonder what my 12-year-old self would have made of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Forza Horizon. Evening after evening in my school uniform, bathed in the TV’s light staring in wonderment at the things I was creating in my head. It’s an experience I will never get to have. In playing RDR2 I still do catch myself forming little ‘exonarratives’ with myself, and it is probably the closest a game has come to allow me to do this again, but it is not at the scale that I used to as a child.
And it makes me feel quite sad that a part of something that meant so much to me, the way I used to enjoy video games, has been killed off in my head. As I turn 30, despite playing as many games as I ever did, all of life’s responsibilities such as a mortgage, a job and so on means that my brain no longer has the capacity or focus to keep up with making a game my own thing. As such, I am now finding that when I play games they just slide and pass me by. I play them. I enjoy them, sometimes immensely. But I can never quite recapture what games like SSX3 used to mean to me, and how I played them. My brain has shifted, and things are different. In the modern world, fan fiction is ubiquitous and perhaps could be a place to revisit this old way of my imagination as an adult, but it isn’t the same thing. Fanfiction is based on narrative, whereas my childhood imagination seemed to use the gameplay for myself as well. I was able to bend the gameplay to my own will, without actually breaking it completely. Pretending that I could do things that I, in actuality, wasn’t able to. I just don’t think it’s possible for me to do that anymore as an adult.
It’s a shame, that I will never get that back. Perhaps a new game will trigger it again one day? Maybe. Maybe not. But for now, at least I will always have the memories of that time I narrated my own nature documentary on SSX3, and the pleasure of knowing that a game once existed that allowed me to do it.
