Baldur's Gate 2

In 1999 I bought my first Mac. I had no money, just out of college, and wanted to make a career as a print designer. It was the closest thing I found to my passions, so seemed like a reasonable choice.

I recall a friend who worked in IT at the company I was at recommending I polish up familiarity with Macs because "designers use Macs." Not having one, I squeezed every last dollar together and got myself a top of the line G4 tower and massive 22 inch CRT monitor.

When I say massive, I mean the thing weight 80lbs.

When I say top of the line, we are talking the brand new, still using OS9, AGP sawtooth G4.

Armed with these tools, and pirated copies of Quark and Photoshop, I began my career. I also needed games, and back then, Mac was a desert when it came to games.

As luck would have it, my second favorite game on my aging Pentium Compaq, Baldur's Gate, came out with a version that ran on OS9 the following year. It was fun, but somewhat forgettable. I think that if Baldur's Gate 2 hadn't come out, it would sit in the same hazy space as Curse of the Azure Bonds.

Remembered and forgotten at the same time.

Fast forward a year and a bit. I have a new job with a little more money in my pocket. I am working as both a print designer and web developer. And Baldur's Gate 2 is released as an install for OS9 that could run inside of the sparkly new OSX.

It's kismet!

Or it would be eventually after hours of installing across multiple discs. Of hunting through Mac forums to understand errors on the install process. Running OS9 apps inside of OSX was a nightmare...

And yet, once I got it going, I was enraptured.

Unlike a lot of games, things kick off in media res. You are in a prison with your friends being tortured by a son of a bitch you have never met. The menace he exudes fully carried by the late, great, David Warner's intonations.

When he leaves, you are trapped with your friends and instead of picking a lock or bashing a door down in rote manner like the previous game, you have to convince Minsc to bend the bars by pissing him off.

Is this? Did they? This can't be a role playing game, can it?

Well no. It isn't. But man, did it have a whole lot of the trappings of an AD&D campaign. Even the railroad-esque plot that creates the illusion of choice as was the fashion at the time.

And it was fun. Enough fun that you wanted to play it more than once. You wanted to try different character combinations. Different parties. Focus on different stories before the rush to the finish of the overarching plot.

And all of this stayed with me for years. It sat in my head and kindled thoughts on table top game design. I had a fire inside again, after years of smolder, to make my own table top game. To solve the problems I saw at the table and with D&D.

That was the wrong lesson to learn...

In my defense, I didn't know any better. Most of us that walked into the game design scene at the start of the century didn't have any clue what we were doing.

Like many others, I was trying to create something I thought I wanted with the wrong tools and the wrong answers to questions. It would take me over a decade to learn this, and by that time, I had walked away from game design.

That doesn't diminish the importance of this game to me. Without it I don't think I rekindle my interest in table top games in the same way. I also, in a weird way, don't think my career unfolds in the same way.

It helped me find a hunger I had let go fallow. A drive that needs to be replenished from time to time. The Tree of Me needs to be replenished with the blood of stuff like this apparently.

That hunger isn't for games per se. More a hunger to create. To be adaptable rather than rigid. A need for a specific kind of emotional resonance with what I do and who I do it with.

That is probably why the Enhanced Edition from a few years ago didn't work for me. Too much nostalgia. Too little of the magic that made the game special for me.

The game wasn't a game to me. It was a vehicle to a moment. And that moment had passed.

But that is ok. There are new moments all the time. I just got to look to see them.

If anything, that is the lesson I got out of all of this. To not settle. To keep looking even though I know I will never, ever find the platonic ideal of what I am looking for.

I find comfort in that.