(this is the final post in the blogagauntlet. see history here.)
Ryan, thanks. This was a fun one to think about. How does one define the best video game character of all time? One has to think about the history of characters.
- so at first there were the Froggers, the Pacmans, the Donkey Kong (original), the dude-who-flies-the-spaceship-and-takes-on-the-Invaders. They were cool, since they
created characters, but lacked a depth, and became boring to play over time.
- Then there was the age of the rock-star characters. Mario, Mega Man, Sonic, Link, pretty much everybody in Super Smash Bros. Very cool, and branded out to campaigns on TV and lunchboxes and all that. All cool, but all operating at more or less the same level, and all restricted to the platforms in which they jumped and ran and fought bad guys.
- It took a special kind of game to take the character traits established by the wave-1ers, the personalities and plots of wave-2ers, and create a video game environment where pretty much all you have is a character and the world in which to explore. These are the so-called “Sandbox” games. And there may have been others before this one, but the best character to embody the sandbox game is none other than this man:
who later became this guy
who later became this man:
That’s right. That guy. Who is he? He is Tommy, or CJ, or he doesn’t have a name. He is Ryan; he is Taylor; he is me. It doesn’t matter. He is the High Evolutionary of video game characters. He is whomever you want him to be. And that is beautiful. He can go walk the “straight and narrow” more or less, become a vigilante and help aid the crime problem of the city, he can drive an ambulance for the entire game, he can follow the plots presented before him, or he can just go out and shoot up a city until the cops come. He is the first character to have free will. This is 1700s France and he’s Locke, Decartes, and Jefferson all rolled into one. Free will makes him the greatest.
Now, while I have already posted a version of the Mario theme here, I found a cooler one. First one that I know I will get disqualified for (or at least a post on which I shall receive complaints). Here’s a brilliant remix of the Mario 64 music (and for the record, the poster says this is the source video. I’m skeptical).
But here’s a dude playing more or less awesomely on a Balalaika. As a fellow Balalaikalier, I gotta respect the man’s chops.
[...] in these past few days, I have the benefit of knowing that Andy made the excellent choice of the Grand Theft Auto avatar. I was already weighing my two aforementioned options when I learned this fact, and even though [...]
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