Allow me to be a complete geek for a minute…

Like most 20-something males, I love playing video games.

Until the N64, my parents didnt let my brother or I have our own gaming system. We begged our parents to get one for us, and finally my dad relented and agreed to buy one. In truth, my father wanted it so he could play Goldeneye 007 himself, but he made a big thing about it, bribing my brother with it so he would go on a roller coaster with him at Knott’s Berry Farm. Looking back on it, my brother wanted to go on the ride anyway, but in the end we finally got our system.

I am always a few years behind on gaming. I know what is going on currently, the major titles up for release, the new gaming news, but my personal experience is delayed. Partly for financial reasons; I have a wife and daughter, and before that school/rent/food/books, so I can’t just be spending $300-$400 on a new system, or $60 for a new game whenever I feel. But mostly, it’s time that I am in wanting; school, job, family.

For my 13th birthday, my parents got me a PS2, and my best friend got me my first game for it, Metal Gear Solid 2. It was my first experience with the Metal Gear franchise, and the series became my all time favorite; the progenitor of the stealth/action genre, with a very off-beat, quirky, and incredibly Japanese sense of humor. The games themselves are highly cinematic, with incredibly well-rounded and deep characters.

The plots…well the plots are different. Basically, they revolve around memes, genetics, nano machines, warefare, human cloning, bi-pedal nuclear warheads, inter-generational political/economic conspiracies to control the population…yea, it gets a little crazy, but trust me, when you get into the games, it all makes sense.

After playing MGS2, I went out and used my birthday money to buy the third game in the series, Metal Gear Solid. It is one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed games of all time, and rightfully so. When you first begin the game, you make your way from an underground submarine dock, and sneak towards an elevator, which takes you up to a helicopter landing pad, where the real gameplay starts.

For Christmas this past year, my wife bought me a PS3, and with it Metal Gear Solid 4, which was released in 2009. I had played it before when it first came out, but since I never had a copy of my own, I was never able to progress far enough into the game.

MGS4 is separated into 5 chapters, and in the fourth, you begin out in a snowstorm. You sneak through frozen mountain passes, the screen obscured by an artificial blizzard. But eventually, the further you progress, a song begins to play. I immediately recognized it as the main theme to MGS, and suddenly I found myself on the same helicopter landing pad I first walked on ten years ago in MGS.

And something odd happened; I literally had the breath taken away from me. There was a sudden, and completely unexpected, feeling of nostalgia, as memories came flooding back.

I felt the same excitement, as a 23 year old man, as I first did when I was 13 playing the series for the first time. I realized that this part of my new game, was taking place in the same location as one of my favorite games from years ago. It was as though the first game was waiting for me to come back, and give it one more go in an updated setting.

But reflecting on it, it wasn’t just the game, and how it came full circle to the close of a story. It was the memories of how the game impacted my life. I remembered other kids at my school who loved the games as well, and how we formed friendships off of that similar interest. It made me look back on those friendships, how much they meant to me, how those kids got me through some troubled times, and then turned around to give me some of the best times of my childhood.

It was this feeling, a reminder, of how something so small, in this case a video game, can have a deep impact, a rippling effect through other areas of one’s life. It was a feeling I wish I could forget, that I could delete the memory of playing MGS4 from my memory, just so I could relive it when I played the game again, to recapture that feeling. It was a beautiful experience…

Albeit, a completely nerdy one.