I got bitten by the nostalgia bug pretty bad tonight.
I was browsing reddit and somebody posted a little comment about the first Command And Conquer game, which came out almost exactly 15 years ago.
At 22, I'm a child of the Nintendo generation. I spent far to much time as a youngster playing Super Mario, and Zelda, and Megaman, and god knows what else. But Command and Conquer occupies a special place in my memory- it was the first real game I ever played on computer (math blaster doesn't count), and it was so different from anything else I'd played till that point.
For those that don't know, Command and Conquer is one of the best of the first 'RTS', or 'real-time strategy' games. They're old hat now, but then it was a pretty novel concept- place the player in control of a faction that can build buildings, create units (tanks, soldiers, helicopters), and then wage war against each other, all in real time.
A far cry from running around as a little Italian plumber correcting floating orbs, C&C pits you as an unseen military or terrorist leader, leading squads of men and vehicles into bloody battle. I played the hell out of this game, for probably months, getting roundly trounced by the single player campaign, and wholly slaughtered anytime I ventured onto the primitive online world.
And then my disk broke.
Which sucked for a while, but as happens, new bigger, better games come out, old ones get supplanted, and the slew of sequels to the Command and Conquer franchise, which are all basically the same game with slight updates, didn't really lead me to want to dig up a copy of the first one.
So tonight, with fond memories in my head, I googled it, downloaded it, went through the not-terribly complex compatibility process -most old games don't run well on new operating systems, and require extensive tinkering to get to work- and then fired it up.
Rarely do we get a chance to revisit something that has existed only in our memory for over a decade. Or perhaps I'm just young enough that this happened yet.
But all the usual nostalgia trips are closed to me- the houses and areas I've lived in I either visit enough to keep the memory fresh, or they've been torn down and radically altered. What books and movies I had as a kid have never left my collection, and only occasionally do I come across some old thing I wrote or made and not have a mostly clear memory of what my thought process (or lack thereof) was.
So the first thing I encountered was the installer- same breathy voice, same minimalist design, same silly atmosphere. One of the things about this game that was so great was that it really went to extra lengths to draw you into it's paper-thin world.
The intro movie- a collection of short bursts of different channels showing the state of the earth they'd created- was also exactly as I remembered. I was even calling the cuts and talking along to the dialogue.
Wow, I was thinking, my memory is spot on.
And then the actual game started, and I was a bit more iffy. Each mission is introduced with a Full-Motion-Video of some hammy actor/actors describing your mission and providing a slip of back story. Some of the actors I remembered, some of them, even very important ones, were totally foreign.
Graphically, it was about how I remember, and though it was old it aged well- many old games stand the test of time simply because they're graphics are simple and serviceable, whereas many games made during transitional periods- i.e, the switch to 3D- are so ugly to be almost unplayable because they were trying to hard to cash in on shaky new technology they didn't understand and couldn't make proper use of.
It was a bit though, like going to some place you thought was so huge as a kid, and releasing how small you actually were. The levels are tiny, designed well, but feel arbitrary. I remembered sprawling forests and fields dotted with rivers and cliffs, what I saw were little sections of maybe a few football fields with some terrain cribbed in for good measure.
One of the memories of this game, which has stuck with me for some reason, was of one of the early levels where you have to knock out the enemy's SAM anti-air missile installations so you can call in air support. I remember this level being so hard, me slowly creeping tiny groups of my men forward to wear them down before the enemy tanks swung around.
I beat this level in about 4 minutes, with a mass of units just running forth, doing whatever they pleased. Gone was the drama, the excitement, and I could only be puzzled as to why this had seemed so much larger a moment back then.
The answers are obvious- I'm smarter, years of playing games have led me to understand the mechanics and how to abuse them, at this point thousands of RTS games have been released so it doesn't feel so novel- but the memory still remains in my head. This new experience hasn't washed it out, or changed how feel about playing the game back then in any way.
All told, there were several of these moments, and similar ones- "Wow, this game is so much easier now" and "Fuck this, this is only hard because the computer is cheating," and " I remember thinking she was a lot hotter." I probably only played it for about an hour, had my fill, and removed it from my computer with nary a second thought.
But it got me thinking about much larger issues- if my memory could be both so right, and so wrong, so correct but then so warped, then what does that mean about the rest of it? What does that mean about my memories of ex-girlfriends, charged events, fights, trips, families? I've always known that memory is highly fallible and often self-creating, but I also feel like there are a lot of moments that I remember perfectly, and those are memories that I 'revisit' often, and they feel unchanged since the day and moment they were made.
This is news to probably no one, and I apologize if you've read this far expecting some big pay-off, some big insight to justify the several thousands of words it's taken me to get here. But it's just rare that you get the opportunity to pit yourself against your own memory in such a way where it's obvious how right, and how wrong, you are.
