When I was about 9 years old, we used to have a sort of make-shift video game arcade in my town, where you could pay about £4.50 and try out playstation games for an hour and Abe's Oddysee was one of those games. It was the first playstation game I ever laid eyes on and it instantly terrified and excited me all at once.
During infancy, I used to own a Sinclair Spectrum, where games ran on cassettes, it took 15 minutes of mad scramblng noises to load a game and I had to use my imagination a bit more as most characters were just a few coloured lines or a dot, so to be able to control a fully animated computer character was "odd" to say the least.
Seeing Abe's head pop out and say "...Hello" made made me grin like I had the keys to a candy shop.
"The alien spoke to me, mommy!" I said to my mom, attentive to my new video experience, knowing she'll have to buy me a Playstation soon (Thanks mom
)
After pressing "Begin", I knew from the sound that this wasn't going to be an up-beat or "friendly game". Rupture Farms fades in as a Security Orb glides past the logo and through the factory with all those Worker Mudokons pulling levers as the unsettling music played.
Even though I was young, I knew this game was going to be in a cold and uncaring universe.
Upon seeing Abe tied up and said he was "dead meat", it really hit my heart. This thin little green/blue alien was going to die for crossing his boss? What could he have done in one day that made him worthy of dying? Was he gonna be beat up? Or Worse? Why Do I suddenly care? It was my first instance of caring about a pixelated character.
After seeing Abe peek at the Mudokon Meeting Door and saying "This new kind of meat....It was US!", my eyes had never been so wide and full of tears.
As the game started, this where I thought "Now, this must be where I play as a cool super-alien-warrior-thingy with 50 million guns and swords that stops Rupture Farms and saves Abe, right!? ^__^ "
...And then...*BUMP*. Abe lands on the steel floor in front of me as I press Right on the controller, he goes right.
"Wait, I've gotta PLAY as him?!" I'm playing a character with no weapons, no life bar, no attacks and just runs, jumps and ducks. This felt really alien to me (no pun intended).
After dying frequently after forgetting to run, from saying "Hello" to a Slig (which genuingly terrified me at the time, hearing its mechanical legs get closer and closer still makes my heart race), or maybe jumping into a minepit, I accidently rested my fingers on two shoulder buttons at once as I went to pick up my drink.
"Yoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy..."
"HEEALP...HEEALP...*wwwwwwhh*....Hi"
Sadly my hour was up and I had to go home and lie in bed and think about what I just experienced.
The next morning, I told all my friends in school about Abe, Rupture Farms, Mullock The Glukkon, The Sligs, The Plan, The Meech Munchies, The Paramite Pies, The Scrab Cakes, The Chanting, etc.....No-one took notice.
Losers.
About 2 months later, My mom and dad surprised me with an early birthday present:- A Playstation with 3 games.
Sadly, Abe's Oddysee was not one of those games.
Luckily, my cousin had a copy of it and let me have it for as long as I wanted, he said it was too hard and that it "didn't feel cool" to be Abe, (He'd rather be Solid Snake)
I popped the disc in my Old Grey Playstation with the Simpsons stickers all over it and it didn't leave my Disc Tray until I finished saving all 99 Mudokons.
Lots of homework went undone, oddworld sketches in my notebooks of made-up characters (Zuggs, Boggaboos and Flanzels to name a few), and school was the Rapture Farms of my life, thinking "When do I get to leave this place and save my mudokon brothers?!"
Years later, the original Xbox comes out and I see "Munch's Oddysee". Unfortunately, I had a PS2 due to natural progression and comfortably as a playstation gamer (ZOMG, SONY FANBOY, OMG FAIL!!!) and I couldn't afford both systems, but looking on the internet I see a video for "Abes Exoddus".
.....there was
ANOTHER ODDWORLD GAME?!
Tracking down a copy was near enough impossible now. I eventually put it in the back of my mind and got on with my boring life of no girlfriend and my life being pissed away under fluorescent tubes.
Even MORE years later, I purchased myself a PS3. I spy that theres both Abe's Oddysee AND Abe's Exoddus in the Playstation Store.
Seeing that Exoddus menu screen brought me right back to childhood. Surprisingly nearly twice as big as the first, Oddworld was now my place of escape. I imitated the voices to near-perfection and drove my friends insane, made a college project on consumerism and product addiction, using Oddworld Product Placement posters and FMV's from the games, and I even have a recipe for "Meech Munchies"!
Now at 23, the Oddworld Universe has stayed with me all my life. I'm currently playing Strangers Wrath HD right now and I'm loving it!
The Oddworld characters, stories, the atmosphere, the life lessons, it's all really un-comparable to anything out there these days.
There's something about the atmosphere of these games that makes it so damn special and original! They still makes my chest tight, in a good way.
They taught me about consumerism, mysticism, sadism, nature, trust, but most of all, how every person, no matter how insignificant (or gassy) can make a difference in the world and touch people in a way they never knew possible.
Oddworld is my StarWars. It was my specialist topic growing up and it's a universe I want future generations to embrace.
In Odd We Trust =)
