There are two video games that have delivered moments of pure, unrestrained joy for me, but that I never bothered to finish. To be clear, I don’t finish the majority of games I play, but I usually at least play enough of them to feel that I’ve gotten the bulk of what they’re trying to deliver. With these two, though, I stopped early on, partly out of a desire to preserve my memory of that one moment where I laughed out loud from sheer delight, as if I were in an advertisement, or an early 80s Spielberg movie.
One of those was Super Mario Galaxy, which I stopped playing not long after the first time seeing Mario getting launched gleefully from a volcano, shooting through stars along the way. The other was the original Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64.
As somebody with a long-running obsession with Disney parks, I tried just about every Disney-published game that promised to deliver the experience of their best dark rides. It seems like it would be a natural. Put the player in a ride vehicle, set it off through the level, give the characters more freedom of movement than would be possible with an animatronic, boom, you’ve got a best-seller.
But Disney Interactive never seemed particularly interested in recreating the theme park experience — probably a good thing, actually, since it likely would’ve felt like an unimaginative retread. Of the few Disney-licensed games I know of that are actually set in the parks, the most interesting was probably the cart-racing game through Walt Disney World, and still the novelty wore off fairly quickly.
So I was surprised that the game that best captured the feeling of being on the best of the Disney dark rides wasn’t a Disney-licensed game at all, but Pokémon Snap. The first time I set out on a photo safari, riding the vehicle along a preset path while creatures jumped out from all sides to have their pictures taken, took me right back to being a little kid at the Magic Kingdom.
It also bears pointing out that the creators of Pokémon Snap did a better job of creating an interactive dark ride than any of the actual interactive dark rides that have come out in the 22 years since. Not just because even a Nintendo 64-era virtual environment is capable of being more fantastic and dynamic than a physical one, but because the interaction itself is more interesting. You’re taking photos instead of shooting. I haven’t seen or heard of a single actual ride with an interactive element1Maybe the Mario Kart ride at Universal in Osaka? I still don’t have a clear idea of how “interactive” that ride is. that isn’t built around shooting at a target in some form or another.
Whenever you complain about games — and entertainment in general — being over-reliant on guns and shooting, it’s always interpreted as some kind of scolding, liberal pacifist agenda. As if you’re being too uptight to just let people have the kind of fun that everybody knows they really want to have. And while I do in fact believe that the pathological obsession with guns as entertainment is a significant part of what keeps America’s epidemic of gun violence alive, that’s not even my main objection to guns in interactive fiction. My main objection is that it’s boring. It just shows a lack of imagination.
Obviously, there are some great games that are based on shooting as their primary mechanic2And rides, too. I’m a fan of Toy Story Midway Mania, for instance. But when you have a game like Pokémon Snap (or Fatal Frame, or Portal, or Luigi’s Mansion) that’s giving you a template for how to design an experience that lets the player interact with the world in a new way, it seems like a shame to keep going back to the same old thing.
I’ve always meant to get back into Pokémon Snap and play more than just the first set of levels, but then they released New Pokémon Snap for the Switch. I figured I’d enjoy playing the 20-years-newer version with all the various improvements on the basic formula. I’ve still only played the first set of levels.
But I still feel like I got my money’s worth! It’s not as much of a novelty as the original was, obviously, but it’s still a uniquely satisfying experience, with a gameplay loop not like anything else I’ve played. And now that Universal’s building Super Mario Lands all over the world, maybe one day there’ll be an actual dark ride version of the best dark ride video game?