I try not to recommend stuff to people all just willy-nilly. Some things though I am just a total little prick about, I will recommend them to you no matter what. Some things are easier than others. But then there is this one video game that I cannot help myself with. Even people that have only the faintest, most passing interest in games, if I talk to you long enough this game is coming out. I am gonna tell you to play it, I am not going to shut up about it. And yet, I think if I could somehow bust out the My Life Activity Log like you can load up on the 3DS, and if maybe I could see a record of every game I have ever recommended to somebody, and then magically I could see what my success rate was, like say "out of your 13 recommendations for Poop Escalator DX, 2 people have gone on to play the game," I think if I could do that, I am absolutely certain that this one game I always tell people they should play would be the most lopsided one on there, and not because people are playing it.
The game is Snatcher.
Snatcher stands virtually alone in my mind as the one game I recommend to almost everyone I know that plays games, universally, and the one I am absolutely sure that literally nobody I have ever mentioned it to has ever gone on to play. Almost universally they meet my suggestion with surprise. "SNATCHer? Oh ho, oho ho." Even my gamer friends, maybe ones that aren't quite as into useless old crap as I am but are still kind of into that old crap, have not played it even if they've sorta heard of it. Nobody knows what the hell Snatcher is, and that's weird to me, because Snatcher is a game that I can remember being interested in for almost as long as I can Solidly remember being more than just "interested" in video games, or at least in knowing about them. It just so happens that the game has quite a pedigree: it was one of Hideo Kojima's early games, a guy who's in the news most recently for being the giant famous creator of a little game series called Metal Gear.
My earliest exposure to Snatcher was in a copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly, just prior to the game's release in November of 1994, which was almost eighteen years ago now, "holy shit." These game magazines at the time were virtually the only way an eleven-year-old kid like I was at the time could find out about anything that wasn't Nintendo (we had Nintendo Power for that), and they were enormous, gigantic tomes. TOMES!! I didn't care that half of them were ads, I wanted ads goddammit, I was begging to be advertised to! When my family would make the rare trip to the city from our farmhouse isolatorium I'd always make it a point to plead with my parents for a copy of EGM, usually cause it was the biggest of the game magazines you could get (though I had quite a few copies of GamePro too). Over at the fantastic Junker HQ website I dug up a scan (page 1, page 2) of the exact review of Snatcher I remember reading in that fateful EGM, the one that got me into this game in the first place. If you look down there at the bottom you can see this review was on page 314 of this particular issue. Three hundred and fourteen pages!
For an eleven-year-old, what's not to love about this game? For starters, it was on the Sega CD, which had a sort of intrigue all of its own, being a brand new, impossibly expensive add-on that used fancy new CDs and just seemed like the bee's knees. It had that cool, Japanese anime look much the same as Akira, which I think I had also probably started hearing about for the first time around late 1994 through those Columbia House VHS club flyers. And look at that beautiful, full-color violence! This wasn't Nintendo stuff, though we in the Nintendo camp finally got the uncensored Mortal Kombat II in September of that same year on the SNES. Even still, how about that. A guy's head fully removed from his body! But what this game seemed to have that other beat-o-fests like MKII lacked was that beautiful flavor text, a quick way to my heart as an insatiable reading nerd, even then. A game that plays out primarily through text? Sounds good to me. And a hint at the terrors that awaited, from those cheesy EGM writers. "What could twist off a man's head?" they ask! Oh lord, what could indeed. I was sold.
But "ahaha," I had no money with which to be sold. I had no Sega CD, no Sega Genesis even, there were no commercials or videos or INTERNET REVIEWS back then, never even saw the game in a store. On our next trip back to the city I rifled through all of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks' game magazines and read all of them on the floor right there to find anything else about Snatcher.
It wasn't until much later in life—college!—that I had finally, via a box full of random game crap I bought off a guy for fifty bucks, acquired a Sega CD in the form of a used X'Eye, a third-party Genesis/Sega CD hybrid system manufactured by JVC (think Panasonic's Q GameCube for a similar kind of arrangement in the Nintendo realm). One of the first games I tried to find was Snatcher, which, as it turned out, time had made something of a cult hit. It's one of the only Sega CD titles that ever ended up being worth playing whatsoever, and ironically still one that has never been re-released in any form. What that meant is that even though it wasn't as expensive back then as it happens to be now (try $320, in the most recent eBay auction for it), it was still well outside my price range. The damned game had increased in price with my age! I'm not ashamed to admit that I was able to borrow the game from another person in my dorm who happened to have it for some godforsaken reason, and make my own copy with my brand new "CD burner." As it turned out, much to my delight, the Sega CD didn't utilize any kind of copy protection, so you can just straight up copy games for it like audio CDs.
And so, eight or nine years after first hearing about it, I started playing Snatcher for the first—and only—time. I can come up with reasons why the experience of playing through that game has stuck with me so specifically, though it's hard to narrow it down to a single one. I had a small television on my desk next to my computer monitor that I used for console games, and I started playing the thing in the afternoon one day, maybe four or something. I remember that my roommate was out of town visiting his parents, and I was there sitting at my little desk under my loft bed in this ridiculous cube of a room. And from then on I was just getting lost in the game, going in completely blind except for my memories of that magazine.
I was Gillian Seed, part of this detective agency in 2047 in Neo Kobe City, and it was just how it was! The intro was this awesome future-noir trip with this slammin' jazzy sax soundtrack like every buddy cop movie from the late 80s. And then things started to get creepy. I saw the head twist-off part, it was really close to the beginning. I remember thinking that if that was the beginning I couldn't know what else was coming at all. Then I'm in this warehouse and I heard something really quiet. All the sounds disappeared. My little robot companion he was like, "hey, do you hear that? Turn your sound up." My sound? I turned the sound all the way up. Yeah, I can hear it now. Like a ticking or something. Maybe it's a bomb? I walk back out of the warehouse. OH SHIT THE BOMB EXPLODED and my volume was turned all the way up. I died in real life. But I think from there I knew I was in for a special game. KOJIMA!!!
Part of the reason it was so immersive to me is that I was the one picking the commands. Yeah, it's Gillian in the game, but I'm saying "investigate" and "look" and "examine." In a way it felt like I was the one who was personally conducting my own actions through the game, different from just moving an avatar. It sounds obvious and maybe a little stupid now, and I suppose you could chalk that up to any kind of game that was a visual novel, but I think these kind of games just have more impact because most of us haven't played a million of them like platformers or adventure games already, and we aren't as used to their tricks, or at least I wasn't. I was forging my own experience, even if it was planned.
I remember playing it and then light outside was gone, and it had been like eight hours and I hadn't moved, I was just transfixed. I had this investment in the narrative, it felt intense, I didn't know what was going to happen at all. I couldn't stop playing it, because each mystery was mine, each piece of evidence was something I discovered. There were twists and turns! I went through the entire game, start to finish, all in one shot. It was just one of those games that got to me, that I felt had really GAMED on me in the same way that something like Mother 3 does. It played with the fourth wall, it felt real-time, like you were part of this impossible fantasy world. It had that pervy but innocent Kojima sense of humor. You can "examine" your secretary and sneak in on your boss' daughter taking a shower. You can make prank phone calls to a sex hotline using phone numbers you see briefly on some billboard. Your little robot companion that follows you around is a miniature version of Metal Gear! He holds your evidence for you. And the localization, the spirit of the entire game, especially considering when the game was made, is completely outstanding. I read some interviews with the guy who did it, Jeremy Blaustein, who went on to be the main localizer for the Metal Gear Solid series, and his work on Snatcher is easily just as good. By the time I finished it was after midnight, maybe two in the morning, and I remember pushing through the finale, completely oblivious, absolutely unable to stop because I needed to know what would happen to me next, what this experience would ultimately become. I knew it was something important even as I was going, but tried not to think too hard about it, tried not to let those things take me out, and then it was over. I haven't played the game since then cause it's still so good up there in my head and I kinda don't wanna ruin it yet.
Maybe when it comes down to me trying to convince people to play Snatcher I can't do much of a good job cause I'm too focused on what my own experience was like and it was too impactful for me to be able to look back on it objectively. I suppose in a lot of ways that's the real pain of making "recommendations," they are so tied into our own personal experiences. I think that the most powerful ones are the ones that we as people can get enjoyment from sharing with others, only games are weird because it's not the same, it's not like hey, sit down and watch this YouTube video. What am I asking of someone when I ask them to play Snatcher? Please buy two pieces of negligibly reliable gaming hardware from twenty years ago, one of which is a laser-based CD add-on, and then either spend $300 on this rare copy of Snatcher, or else go through the trouble of setting up and configuring a Sega CD emulator on your computer and finding all the BIOS files and hooking up a controller and finding a CD image from the net and burning a copy and then get it all going and clear your schedule for eight hours straight.
And I wanna tell them you know, it is not enough to just play it, you gotta play it like I played it, so we have the same experience. Make sure you investigate Mika periodically to get all the dialog! Try to take the towel from Katrina after you sneak in on her in the shower, and answer the birthmark question wrong just for fun then reload your save! Be sure to call the phone number you see on that billboard so you can hear the funny conversation! It just doesn't work the same way, no matter how bad I want it. This pain is special for gamers, I think we all know it. Because some of those most powerful, memorable experiences in our lives are ones that we absolutely cannot share with others, they cannot be passed along the same way. We are trying to resonate but we're only vibrating! Here in front of the television, alone. I just want to know that someone else felt the same as me once, which is maybe pretty sad. But also... not?
Maybe it never could be the same for someone else, you know, maybe I should take comfort in the fact that because my activity log conversation rate for Snatcher is 0 in 350 it means that the experience I had was unique, all mine. Maybe even if someone else played it they wouldn't really have played it like I did. That's the beautiful and horrible thing about games that really get to you, that you just wanna share with everyone. They get to you.
BOOM!