It's September, which means the streets dance with the flutter of turning leaves, the sun dips quietly toward the night earlier and that guttural, paranoid fear of being back within the terrifying clutches of school has officially returned. Between the nightmare that is day to day academic judgment and the very feasible worry that you'll never live up to the lofty dreams and ambitions created by teachers, parental units and your own spiraling inertia as you careen towards the real world, where will you find the time to play video games? Well luckily, you're young and the world isn't as tiny as you think it is. And growing up is tough! You have to do real things with your time, like go to IKEA and meet your significant other's parents every year when you screw things up with the last because they're like "why do you have a Super Mario action figure in your bedroom?" and you get really defensive and accidentally yell at them and they realizes they can do better. So many real world responsibilities!
But remember, you're not alone. In your school right now are a bunch of gamers just like you who can't wait to get home or head back to the dorms and play video games. And who can blame them? Back in high school and college, gaming was a great escape from what we thought was an all-consuming world of tests and lectures. So great that I gathered some of my friends here to reminisce about some of their favorite multiplayer gaming moments. These are the stories of friendship, of heroes working in unison or battling against each other for a greater cause: that video games are awesome and that school isn't. Here are the tales from IGN's vintage vaults. We hope you enjoy them, and if they're written terribly, maybe we should have paid more attention in school.
Ryan Clements, Features Editor - My sophomore year of college, I hungered for Devil May Cry 3 like a stumbling party-goer hungers for late-night burritos. Eager. Desperate. One of my best friends from down the hall, Hilario, wanted Gran Turismo 4 with the same level of anticipation. It had launched just a week or so earlier. We decided to make an event of our purchases. We carved out a huge chunk of time between classes and homework to play the games in my room. We would alternate between them in dizzying succession. We dubbed this great day in gaming history “Gran Devil Turismo May 4 Cry 3 Day.” After sitting patiently through a few laps in Gran Turismo 4, we switched to Dante and all his pizza-eating antics. We didn’t switch back for the next 24 hours. Hopefully Hilario forgives me.
Nic Vargus, IGN Tech Editor - After my high school friends had graduated and dispersed to colleges, jobs, and unemployment lines across the country, we pledged to meet up once a year over the only thing we had in common: sports. Just kidding, I mean video games, obviously. We called these rendezvous "H24," and every year we'd cart our original Xboxes, 30 bombs of Mountain Dew, and ethernet cables to my friend Mike's basement and play Halo 2 for 24 hours straight.
We did this every January 1st for years. I can't tell you how many absolutely epic games of Capture the Flag, Tower of Power, and Rumble Pit happened in those 24 hour segments, but I can tell you each year we rekindled our friendship over that game. While we don't still meet up and LAN each year, Xbox Live has made it so many of us have never lost contact.
Anthony Gallegos, PC Editor - It wasn’t uncommon for me and my friends to ditch class in high school so we could play Bushido Blade II. At the time we all had a mild obsession with Asian martial arts, so Bushido Blade scratched an itch most other fighting games didn’t with its one-hit kills. Of course fast food binges went hand-in-hand with these epic matches, and countless Taco Bell burritos fell alongside the bodies of our opponents. I still see the disc in my game binder now and again, but, just like a powerful doomsday weapon, I don’t pull it out lest I face the onslaught of burritos that comes with this awesome, often overlooked, fighter.
Ryan McCaffrey, Xbox Executive Editor - I roomed with my best friend for freshman year of college, and all we did when we didn’t live in the same tiny dorm room was play video games, so you can imagine how that first year of higher-education went. We had our respective high-end gaming PCs set up on opposite walls, so we sat back-to-back and did almost nothing but game…when we weren’t in class, of course (*cough*). Given that our freshman year was fall of 1998, a metric sh*t-ton of amazing games came out. We went one-on-one in Half-Life deathmatch (crossbow, how I love thee…) on a near-daily basis. We passed the controls back and forth playing Carmageddon II, laughing hysterically at each new pedestrian-exploding crash. It was an amazing time in my life…until the spring semester, when EverQuest released and took over my best friend’s soul. Still, if I had a time machine, I’d love to go back to that dorm room, just for a day. No responsibilities (uh, besides my studies, I mean…), just my best friend for life and round-the-clock video games.
Colin Campbell, Features Editor - Moosehead, the Lavers twins and me used to bunk off school to go down the launderette and smoke ciggies. I was running a nice little earner at the time, buying chocolate boxes from a clearing warehouse and selling them to other kids on the bus and to teachers outside the staff room. They were great ugly things with gaudy Victorian pictures of flowers. I guess it must have been around Mother's Day at the time, because I was marking up by 100%. Anyway, I had some spare cash so we played a bunch of Frogger and we smoked a lot of Benson & Hedges and we enjoyed it. In this way, I kept the Lavers twins from killing me, because they were naturally that way inclined, and Moosehead from killing himself, because only arcade games and fruit machines and maybe saveloy-and-chips kept him from the brink of despair. I suppose, on the downside, I avoided hearing about Chiang-Kai-Shek and plate tectonics for at least a decade, but, in retrospect, it was a good trade.
Mike Drucker, Lead Writer, IGN - When I was in high school, I really wanted to make video games, so I took a lot of computer programming classes. Luckily, those machines could run Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament so we learned absolutely nothing. None of us. Not a person. Thirty people and zero knowledge of programming. Oh, we could shoot each other in the face – we learned that just fine. And putting Bill Clinton and Simpsons characters in Quake 3? Yeah, we were on board. But when it came time to take the actual AP test for computer programming, we all opened our test books, stared at the questions, and then went outside to play kick ball. Because we knew nothing but how to slaughter each other on the virtual battlefield. And you know what? I never did learn programming. But our teacher was soon fired after that. I like to think it was because of that beautiful school year when he totally failed to do his job.
Brian Altano, Executive Editor of News & Features - During college I think I spent more time in Mario Kart 64's Block Fort than I did in the actual college parts of college. I've spent so much time in Block Fort that if Block Fort was a place on Foursquare I would be the Mayor of Block Fort if I ever used Foursquare. I spent so much time in Block Fort that if Block Fort had a phone number all of the numbers in Block Fort's phone number would be kind of worn out and yellowish on my phone from all the times I called up Block Fort like "YO, BLOCK FORT, LET'S HANG OUT!" I spent so much time in Block Fort that I can't even play multiplayer modes in other Mario Kart games because they're not as fun as playing in Block Fort.
Block Fort is like my one that got away. When I'm like 85 years old and I'm making the world's saddest whiskey face at a bar by myself and the young, lively bartender asks me what my one regret in life is, I'll say I wish I could have spent more time in Block Fort. Over the years the Block Fort multiplayer matches went from four players to three to two, to just me sitting alone in Block Fort remembering all of the good times, but that's the thing about Block Fort: it just totally encapsulates exactly what makes real life so great. Four equally colored, interconnected towers covered in banana peels and dead turtle shells populated by kart riding dinosaurs and stereotyped Italians under a ticking clock. Actually, that's nothing like real life, but Block Fort is still the most magical place in the world. Block Fort.
Casey Lynch, Editor-in-Chief -- Week nights during my college career were spent listening to Slayer and NOFX, playing Magic: The Gathering, and on the really good nights, assembling an army of friends and gear to play Doom deathmatch. Saying “playing” Doom puts it mildly. Doom deathmatch was my introduction to LAN parties, and by LAN parties, I mean kids stampeding into each other’s houses with a mess of cables, power strips, card tables and icy cold beverages, racking up frags and blowing each other to bits into the wee hours of the morning. This inevitably resulted in spirited but friendly yelling matches, and the occasional outrageous wager, but when we were hunched over in the flickering glow of our boxy CRT monitors, we were alive. I can’t tell you how many classes I missed the morning after Doom nights. Other than Halo LAN parties years later, no single gaming experience has come close to those early deathmatch days. I really miss it.
What games got you (or are still getting you) through school's most stressful days? Let us know in the comments below, and remember, no matter what you'll always be MY favorite commenter.
Brian Altano is IGN's Executive Editor of News & Features. Follow him on Twitter. He's really happy he doesn't have to go to school anymore.
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