Still Riding

I got hooked on video games at six and have been watching them evolve since then. Used to try to imagine what they’d look like in the future and always landed on the same thing: perfect cartoons, slicker, more intricate, basically animation you could control.

Super Mario Bros. 3 was the pinnacle for me as a kid. Those bright colors and the goofy little enemies just worked. At twelve, going through a rough time, my mom painted my room the same blue as Mario 64’s sky. That’s the kind of thing you remember forever. After that I got into Mario Kart because it didn’t demand your whole evening and it actually worked with other people around. Nintendo games stayed at the top for me because they just looked and felt right. They still do.

Red Dead Redemption is my favorite game right now. It came out this year and it’s set in 1911 in the American West just as the frontier mythology is falling apart. Rockstar’s been circling around similar themes for a while now but Red Dead finally nails it. The story moves at a good pace. The characters feel like real people—the writing and acting are better than anything I’ve seen in a game—and everyone matters to the story, not just the leads. Nico Belic was a great character but in GTA IV he was surrounded by people you wanted to skip entirely. Here it’s different.

What makes it work is that everything fits together. The game’s about good and evil, freedom, redemption—all the big philosophical stuff—but you don’t sit around thinking about it while you’re playing. You’re riding across these plains on horseback and it just feels like somewhere real. Not like wow look at the graphics but more like this is something, I’m in this. You hunt, you find treasure, you help people. Some people play online. I just want to keep riding.

Want to play it right now.