western

Red Dead Redemption was, as critics would call it "great"
My Dad plays videogames. He kind of always has - I remember growing up in a very small town with an old NES my parents bought. When I was old enough to start playing videogames rather then just watching my older brothers play them, they had a habit of standing over my shoulder and regaling me with stories about my mom being a waitress and staying up all night with my dad to play Super Mario Brothers before her first shift.

On the same token, my Dad and I never talked much about how he came to videogames. I always just assumed he kind of had an interest. As much as my Dad was always a cowboy - he'd also always been kind of a nerd. It was through my dad I would discover Conan the Barbarian and the artist Frank Frazetta. It was my Dad's taste in pop culture that first got me interested in things like sword and sorcery and indeed the archetypal western hero than any amount of cajoling to "read this!" or "play this!" that my brothers told me.

It was more about the casual references my Dad might drop. He might draw something and tell me it was inspired by something called Conan or even just say he took inspiration from Frank Frazetta's art. It's sort of what gave met he ability to seek out things on my own apart from what was popular for a little kid - or even just at the time.

I played a lot of videogames as a little kid, which is why I enjoy them now. There's still a small part of me that remembers watching my Dad saddle up and head into the desert on his horse, or how he'd disappear a couple of times a year for a weekend or two and come back covered in dust and dirt and tell my mom stories of his weekend spent on a ranch somewhere with his friends.

Eventually our fascination with videogames caught up with my dad sometime around my older brother somehow managing to con my parents into getting us a Playstation. Even though they were hella poor and maintained that the Sega Genesis was going to be the last console they bought for us.

(about every time one of us got a console for the next decade or so until we could work, my parents constantly maintained it all the way through getting a Wii, which was Very Definitely the last console they bought for anyone but themselves.)

Around this time I remember my older brother and my dad having a conversation about games about cowboys. The game they brainstormed never would come to be but it's still written down in a dusty old notebook in one of my parents closets.

A decade later and we'd see the release of Red Dead Redemption on the Playstation Three.


It's the game that makes me think of my Dad most of all, because it's a sometimes cynical look at the decline of the American Cowboy, when my dad is one of the people I think of when that phrase turns up. He's seen more dusty frontiers than I ever will, and I like to think he spends a lot of time remembering places he's been in life when he rides through a desert plain as John Marsten.

Videogames have a powerful ability to make us remember, not just people but places as well.
With a sad note The American Cowboy is now making the full turn into being just another piece of folklore, but there's still room in Videogames to let us experience that.