First time I played Final Fantasy VII was around 2012, when I was working my way through gaming history trying to understand what I’d missed. My daughter had been telling me for years that I needed to experience it, kept saying it would change how I thought about games. I figured she was being dramatic – it’s just a video game, right? How emotional could pixels and polygons really make a grown man?
Well, turns out a lot more than I expected. When Aerith died – and yeah, spoiler alert, but come on, it’s been like twenty-five years – I actually had to pause the game and take a break. Sat there in my living room, controller in my lap, genuinely upset about a character I’d only known for maybe thirty hours of gameplay. My buddies at work would’ve laughed their asses off if they’d seen me getting choked up over a video game. Hell, I was laughing at myself a little bit. But there it was.
That moment made me realize something about 90s games that I hadn’t expected when I started diving into retro gaming. These weren’t just improved versions of the simple arcade games and basic platformers I’d glimpsed as a kid. Something fundamental had shifted during that decade – games had started trying to tell real stories, not just give you excuses to jump on stuff or shoot things.
Coming at these games without nostalgia gave me a weird advantage, I think. I wasn’t remembering how mind-blowing they seemed at the time or how they compared to what came before. I was experiencing them cold, judging them purely on whether they could still engage someone who’d never played them when they were new. Some of the most praised games from that era… honestly, they didn’t hold up. But others? Man, they were still hitting just as hard twenty years later.
Take the original Legend of Zelda on NES, which I’d played briefly at a friend’s house way back when. That game barely had a story – link saves princess, the end. Most of what people considered “story” was actually in the instruction manual. Same with something like Contra. Aliens bad, shoot everything, roll credits. Nobody expected more because the technology couldn’t deliver more. You got your story from your imagination filling in the gaps.
But by the early 90s, you could see developers starting to push against those limitations. I played through Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy IV (the one that came out here as Final Fantasy II, which confused the hell out of me when I was trying to figure out the chronology), and even with minimal text and no voice acting, they were creating characters I actually cared about. The technology was still limited, but the ambition was clearly growing.
Then CD-ROMs changed everything. Suddenly games could store hundreds of times more data than cartridges. Developers went crazy with the possibilities. Full-motion video, actual recorded dialogue, cutscenes that looked like low-budget movies. I picked up some of these FMV games from the mid-90s – Phantasmagoria, Wing Commander III, The 7th Guest – and while they’re pretty cheesy by today’s standards, you can feel the excitement. Developers were like kids with new toys, throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck.
Some of it was genuinely painful. Early CD games often had voice acting that would make community theater look Oscar-worthy. I played the original Resident Evil and nearly turned it off after the infamous “master of unlocking” line. But you could see them getting better at it year by year. By the time Metal Gear Solid came out in 1998, they were hiring real voice actors and treating game dialogue like it mattered.
That Metal Gear Solid playthrough was something else. I’d bought a used PlayStation specifically to play the games I’d missed, and MGS was near the top of my list. Played through the whole thing over a weekend, barely stopping except to eat and sleep. The stealth gameplay was solid enough, but what kept me glued to the screen was the story unfolding between the action sequences. Conspiracy theories, philosophical discussions about war and genetics, characters who felt like real people with actual motivations. Plus weird meta stuff like Psycho Mantis reading your memory card and telling you to put the controller on the floor. I’d never experienced anything like it.
The Japanese RPGs from this era hit me particularly hard as someone experiencing them fresh. Final Fantasy VI (released here as III, because the numbering was all screwed up back then) was the first game that showed me digital characters could have genuine character development. The opera scene, the world literally ending halfway through the game, characters dealing with loss and depression and finding reasons to keep going – this wasn’t just “save the world” stuff, it was psychological.
Final Fantasy VII built on that foundation with Cloud, who starts out as the typical silent badass mercenary but gradually gets revealed as this broken, confused guy who doesn’t even know who he really is. The game deals with fake memories, corporate environmental destruction, identity crisis – heavy stuff wrapped up in a story about fighting a guy with a really long sword. Playing it as an adult, I could appreciate how the gameplay mechanics actually reinforced the storytelling. Cloud’s confusion about his past wasn’t just told to you, it was built into the unreliable narrator structure of the whole game.
I spent a lot of time during this period trying to figure out why some games worked for me without nostalgia while others didn’t. Games that relied purely on “remember how cool this was when you were twelve” often fell flat. But games that had solid storytelling fundamentals – interesting characters, meaningful choices, themes that resonated regardless of when you played them – those held up surprisingly well.
Planescape: Torment was probably the best example. Picked it up based on recommendations from RPG forums, went in knowing almost nothing about it. That game asks some genuinely deep philosophical questions about identity and mortality, but it doesn’t just lecture you about them. You explore these ideas through your choices and interactions. The whole “what can change the nature of a man” theme worked just as well for a middle-aged construction guy as it probably did for college students playing it when it came out.
Adventure games from LucasArts were another revelation. Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Sam & Max – these games were genuinely funny and clever in ways that most modern games still aren’t. Tim Schafer’s writing in particular showed me that games could be literary without being pretentious. Grim Fandango’s film noir story about afterlife bureaucracy shouldn’t work as a video game concept, but it absolutely does. Played through it twice just to catch all the references and jokes I’d missed the first time.
What struck me about all these games was how they were figuring out storytelling techniques that only worked in interactive media. Movies and books are passive – you experience the story the creator intended, in the order they intended. But games could let you make choices that affected the story, or reveal information at your own pace through exploration, or make you complicit in events by requiring your input to proceed.
Fallout was probably the best example of this. The post-apocalyptic setting could’ve been just another “kill mutants, save world” scenario, but the game actually let you define what kind of person you wanted to be in that world. I played through it three different times as three completely different characters – a diplomatic problem-solver, a sneaky thief, and a straight-up psychopath – and the game accommodated all three approaches while commenting on them through NPC reactions and ending slides.
That’s something you can’t do in a movie or book. The story changes based on your choices, but not in a shallow “pick door A or door B” way. The entire tone and meaning of the experience shifts depending on how you play. Coming at it as an adult, I could appreciate how sophisticated that storytelling approach really was.
Horror games benefited hugely from the improved storytelling capabilities. Resident Evil might have terrible dialogue, but its environmental storytelling – piecing together what happened in the mansion through scattered notes and visual clues – was genuinely effective. Silent Hill went even further, using psychological horror and symbolism to create something that worked on multiple levels. I’m not usually into horror anything, but Silent Hill got under my skin in ways that regular horror movies never have.
Not every experiment worked, obviously. The CD-ROM boom led to some truly awful FMV games where you’d watch bad actors for twenty minutes, then click a button, then watch more bad actors. Some games got so focused on telling their story that they forgot to be fun to play. And plenty of developers just tried to copy movie techniques instead of figuring out what worked specifically for games.
But even the failures were interesting from my perspective as someone experiencing this evolution all at once instead of living through it year by year. I could see developers trying different approaches, figuring out what worked and what didn’t, gradually developing a vocabulary for interactive storytelling that hadn’t existed before.
The games that worked best found ways to make the story and gameplay enhance each other instead of competing for attention. Half-Life was brilliant at this – Gordon Freeman never speaks, so you project yourself into the character, but the world tells its story through environmental details and scripted sequences that happen around you while you’re still in control. System Shock 2 used audio logs to tell a horror story about the gradual transformation of a spaceship’s crew, but you discover these logs through exploration that’s genuinely scary and tense.
Playing through all these games in the span of a few years instead of across a decade gave me a unique perspective on how quickly the medium evolved during the 90s. The difference between early 90s storytelling and late 90s storytelling is massive. From simple fairy tale setups to complex psychological narratives, from text boxes with basic dialogue to full voice acting with cinematic direction, from linear stories to branching narratives that responded to player choice.
My daughter gets a kick out of my reactions to these games because I’m experiencing them without the context of “this was amazing for its time” or “you had to be there.” I’m just judging them on whether they work as entertainment and art right now, today. Some games that are considered classics honestly don’t hold up without nostalgia. Others are still genuinely impressive pieces of interactive storytelling that feel ahead of their time even now.
The 90s basically taught games how to grow up. They went from being primarily skill tests and reaction challenges to being vehicles for emotional experiences and thought-provoking themes. They proved that interactivity didn’t prevent sophisticated storytelling – it enabled new forms of storytelling that couldn’t exist in passive media.
Playing Final Fantasy Tactics for the first time in 2013, I was blown away by its morally complex political narrative. This wasn’t good guys versus bad guys – it was various shades of gray fighting over power while common people suffered. The main character starts out idealistic and gradually becomes more pragmatic and morally compromised. That’s sophisticated storytelling in any medium, but the fact that you’re actively participating in these morally questionable decisions through gameplay makes it hit differently than just watching it happen in a movie.
What impressed me most about 90s games was their willingness to experiment. Developers were like “we can store more data now, we can include voice acting, we can have longer cutscenes – what should we do with these new capabilities?” Some of the experiments were disasters, but others created entirely new possibilities for interactive entertainment. They weren’t just making bigger, prettier versions of old games – they were inventing new forms of storytelling.
Coming to these games as an adult also made me appreciate their technical ambition. These developers were pushing hardware to its limits trying to realize their creative visions. The original PlayStation was not a powerful machine by today’s standards, but developers found ways to create cinematic experiences that still feel impressive. The voice acting in Metal Gear Solid, the FMV sequences in Final Fantasy VII and VIII, the real-time cutscenes in Half-Life – these were major technical achievements that served storytelling goals.
I think the 90s will be remembered as the decade when video games discovered they could be more than entertainment – they could be art, literature, cinema, all while remaining distinctly interactive. Not every game needed to tell a deep story, but the medium had proven it could when developers wanted to try. That opened doors that are still being walked through today.
Playing through Xenogears at age 45, I found myself genuinely engaged with its philosophical themes about religion, identity, and the cycle of violence. The game has serious pacing problems and the second disc basically falls apart, but the core story was asking questions that resonated with me as an adult in ways they probably wouldn’t have when I was younger. That’s the mark of storytelling that transcends its medium and its era – it works regardless of when you encounter it.
Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like to experience these storytelling breakthroughs as they happened, to feel that sense of “games can do this now?” in real time. But coming to them later gave me the ability to see the big picture, to understand how each innovation built on the last to create something that couldn’t have existed before. The 90s didn’t just improve video game stories – they invented video game stories as we understand them today. Everything since then has been refinement and evolution of concepts that were established during that crucial decade.
And yeah, occasionally I still get choked up during Aerith’s death scene, even though I know it’s coming. Good storytelling works regardless of how many polygons you’re using to tell it.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
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