Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was one of the first M(ature)-rated video games that I played.
As a pre-teen who was just discovering the taboo thrill of violent video games, there was nothing as exciting as inviting my friends over and listening them howl in amazement as a gush of blood burst out of a raptoid’s head, courtesy of a well placed shotgun blast. Or how shocked they were when I showed them just what the Cerebral Bore does to enemies. Turok 2 became the game to bring to middle school sleepover parties. After my friends’ parents went to bed, I slid the black Nintendo 64 cartridge out of the bottom of my backpack and the real party began. Well, as much of a party as a handful of eleven year old boys high on Surge and Warheads can have while maintaining the faintest of sounds. Couldn’t wake the parents, after all, or it’d be lights out.
There was something special about having Turok 2. As I mentioned, even the cartridge was black, which elicited an essence of menace; it was, according to the Entertainment Software Rating Boards, a game that we shouldn’t even be playing. Luckily, to our parents, the E-T-M ratings were just another foreign symbol on a video game box littered with terminology that might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics. My mom, for example, literally bought me Turok 2’s sequel, Turok 3 for Easter.
Can you picture that? Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion nested atop bright green Easter basket grass, jellybeans sprinkled about, a chocolate rabbit wrapped in tin-foil leaning against the side of the game box. I still can’t believe it.
Turok 2, for me, was almost a rite of passage. Where other boys kissed girls in empty hallways, or snuck glances at porn magazines in the book store, my friends and I were giddy about pixelated blood pouring out of roughly-rendered, polygonal dinosaur men.
Hey, I never said I was one of the cool kids.
It didn’t matter to me or my friends how cool or un-cool it was. We were doing something we knew we shouldn’t (playing a super violent video game), and that meant we were breaking rules…we were rebelling, we were pushing the limits of what we could get away with. It wasn’t exactly stealing money from grandma’s purse or smoking pot behind Kmart with a friend’s older brother (I mean, that’s just where I heard that kids went to get high), but we were good kids, you know. Turok just provided us with a very definitive line that separated the kids and their E for Everyone games, with us….whatever we thought we were at the time.
For awhile there, my friends and I sought out the most violent video games we could find. It was almost a challenge for us to find the next thing to shock one another with.
Then, one day in middle school, we heard that terrorists attacked New York City and a lot of people died earlier that morning.
For weeks and weeks, everything was all about the Twin Towers collapsing. How many first-responders had died, how many people blew up in the planes, how many people jumped from the burning buildings; it was everywhere. It was, in one word: tragic.
In two words: eye opening.
Grand Theft Auto 3 came out a little over a month after September 11th. My friends and I had been looking forward to that game for a very long time. But when it came out, we played it differently, almost respectfully. I cringe to think of how we would have played GTA3 before September 11…I probably would have played it like how the news media so often portrays it: as a civilian/hooker/cop-killing game.
But I don’t remember playing it with that goal in mind. I remember having a fair number of shoot outs with cops, sure, that’s part of the game…but I don’t ever remember intentionally trying to kill anyone I didn’t need to. After September 11, in a matter of weeks, I had grown up.
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, was the starting point of the line that divided my childhood and my young-adult life, and it wasn’t the line that I thought it was at the time. It wasn’t the line that divided T-For-Teen and M-For-Mature, it was the line that separated “Lots of violence is awesome!”-Me, and “Okay, that’s a bit too much blood…”-Me.
Thankfully, I was able to grow to appreciate games for far more than their ability to shock me, or make my friends gasp in excited-disgust. I started noticing the graphics, the story, the design, everything that came together to make the wonderful form of art that is video games.
