Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer (or Ripto’s Rage, if you prefer) turns the ripe old age of 25 this month. Usually, when I hear how old a video game is, it makes me feel quite old myself. Red Dead Redemption 2? Six years old. The Last of Us? 11. Borderlands? 15. This is not helped by my younger colleagues chirping up that games I remember playing at launch while well into adulthood came out when they were at school. But Spyro feels a little different.
Hearing that Spyro 2 is 25 actually makes me feel young and spry. I’ll be 32 by the end of the year, and while I haven’t had any sort of emotional terror at the prospect of being in my 30s, I do feel like an adult. Despite being a Millenial and probably very cringe to said younger colleagues in a plethora of other ways (do kids still say cringe?), I have never thought of myself as ‘adulting’ – that is, pretending to be a grown-up while really being just a wittle baby.
Spyro The Dragon Was Definitive For My Childhood
So, I’m 30. So what. Early 30s. By the end of next year, that early could be interchanged with ‘mid’, and the year after that, the ‘early’ will dissolve completely. And then I’ll be 40, and then 50, and then all of the other numbers until one of them gets replaced with ‘dead’. It’s not a concept that bothers me, at least not yet. But Spyro makes me feel young.
I think it’s because I consider the game to be basically as old as I am. Spyro the Dragon (the first game), along with Crash Bandicoot and Tekken 3, were the first games I played after getting a PS1 for Christmas. Spyro is part of my childhood, part of my formative memories on this planet. I suppose it would not be too dramatic to say that I don’t remember much of my life before Spyro. Thus, if Spyro is 25, I am 25. I feel the need to twerk, to whip, to nae nae. Kids still do that, right? Nae nae?
Spyro the Dragon, this game I’m talking about, is actually 26, but since sequels used to launch yearly way back then, the Spyro trilogy all blurs into one. It is a single entity, a series of games made by the same people for the same players during the same chunk of time. They mostly look the same and largely play the same, despite minor technical improvements and some aesthetic or thematic changes. If one game in the Spyro trilogy is 25, then they are all 25. And by extension, if Spyro is 25, I am 25 too.
You’re Young Forever With Spyro
Though some gaps in my memory were coloured in by, or have even been replaced by, 2018’s Reignited Trilogy, it still transports me back to my youth. In fact, even that sentence makes me feel old. 2018. It feels like that trilogy just came out a year or so ago, and yet six of them have swept by in the blink of an eye. It’s the newer memories that make me feel old.
The groan when younger colleagues recall running home from school to play Red Dead Redemption 2 is not just disgruntlement at the youth of today. It’s a reminder that their life was markedly different when they played those games. Things have changed for them. Life has changed. I was an adult when I played Red Dead Redemption 2. I was paying rent, I was buying groceries, I was considering the calorific content of various alcoholic beverages. Life was the same. 30 and the 40 and the 50 until the number gets replaced by ‘dead’. At a certain age, we’re more ghosts than people.
Spyro 2’s 25th birthday is different because I remember it differently. I remember being a kid, I remember that time has changed, I have changed. I have changed in a multitude of ways since RDR2 as well (changed gender changed job changed house gotten married et cetera), but I don’t think of it that way. It was still a version of me playing that game. The kid who played Spyro was not me. They were a kid. And remembering them, that I was them once upon a time, makes me feel young. 25 years is not such a long time ago, and I remember it vividly. I remember it as a child. I am so young that 25 years ago I was a mere child.
I could have written about how great Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer is, and I truly do believe that. It’s the best Spyro game and the only major contender to Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped for the epitome of that era of platformer domination. It’s a good game. This is a calendarifically appropriate time to tell you that. But more than that, Spyro 2 (or whatever your Spyro 2 is) is a reminder that time marches forward and it’s important to remember the good times. The ones that keep you young, and the ones that make you feel old.
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
81/100
- Released
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November 13, 2018