by Candria Slamin
Going against my mother’s firm “no guns” rule, my dad would pull me, aged 5, up into his lap as he played Unreal Tournament ‘99, letting me click the shoot button while he aimed. It was how we’d bond— his hands guiding me to deliver a sick headshot, and me filling the room with a loud “BOOM,” much to my mother’s horror. When I got old enough to control a mouse and use a keyboard simultaneously, my dad and I graduated to LAN party matches. Just us against the AI, but we’d play like that for a few rounds. When my parents divorced and my mother moved my sister and I away from our family home, my dad sent two home built PCs with us. Mine had Unreal preloaded. I found that playing by myself was hard (I learned quickly that my dad had set the difficulty to something much easier than the default), but I’d launch the game whenever I missed him. And when my sister and I would go see my dad every other weekend, me and him would play together just like old times.
I never graduated to the other games in the series. I dabbled in UT ‘04. Never touched UT ‘03. I never really played any other first-person shooters for that matter. As I grew into my own, the types of games I liked to play morphed from Unreal to platformers like Crash Bandicoot or Mario. The time I spent playing Unreal with my father dwindled. As I grew into my teenage years, I found myself knee deep in Legend of Zelda, Kingdom Hearts, and anime-based fighting games (think Naruto Ultimate Ninja, not Granblue Versus). Unreal Tournament ‘99 was still there, in the background. When my old PC inevitably died and I was given the clunkiest laptop imaginable, I could still boot the game up. By then, my dad had given up his first-person shooter days for games like Candy Crush and Bejeweled 2. And while I found a friend in high school who knew what Unreal was and had been itching to play, I found my fingers too clumsy to be as good as I had been before. Time had passed, and in its passage, Unreal Tournament became more memory than fact.
After a while, I lost access to the old game file I had been using to play Unreal. I finished high school, entered college. Picked up other games along the way. By the time I realized it, it had been years since I had last launched Unreal Tournament ‘99. My father barely dabbled with Candy Crush. When I graduated college, the memory of sitting in his lap and clicking heads had faded. Nowadays, it’s just a story I bring up to make my mother laugh and roll her eyes. As an adult gamer, I’ve been sinking hours into Destiny 2, learning how to play first person shooters on console after a decade of being awful at it. I have a remake of Unreal Tournament ‘99 pinned on my wish-list on Steam, but I haven’t had the courage to buy it just yet. I’m waiting for something. I keep telling myself I’m waiting for the perfect custom built PC to play it on. Or the perfect friend group. But, maybe I’m waiting for the perfect moment to sit my niece or my nephew down to show them the game. Or maybe I’m still waiting for my dad to come down the hall (or now, call from across the country) and ask if I want to play again.
For now, I’ll keep the game close by. It’ll be there whenever I find what I’m waiting for. Even after all this time, it always has been.
Candria Slamin (she/they) is shaking and baking from Virginia, USA. When she’s not being a poet, they’re busy being a giant nerd on the Internet. Find them on Twitter at @candyslam_.
