My nans are the reason I got into gaming. Travelling to see my nan on my mother’s side meant I’d get to spend the day playing Jak & Daxter while my parents gossiped over coffee. Sometimes she’d let me borrow a game to take home and play, and I’d always race to complete it before we visited again. I find myself with a strange muscle memory for those games now: I could probably recite off the top of my head where every collectible is hidden in Ratchet & Clank. (If only I retained knowledge from my degree as easily as I did those games.) The Jak & Daxter nan is still around – her most frequented game these days is Skyrim, which is a popular one amongst gaming grandmas it seems.
But this piece isn’t really about her. As awesome as she is, it was my nan on my father’s side who spent hours and hours of her time entertaining me with the PlayStation 2 as a kid. She looked after me a lot while my parents worked, and a lot of that looking after involved teaching me how to play my very first RPG.
Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 came out in 2004, when I was eight years old. It wasn’t my first game by a long shot (that honour belongs to the first SSX title for PS2), but it was my first experience with any sort of role-playing hack-and-slash game, and it’s inspired a lot of my interest in games since. You can imagine my surprise when I got into Mass Effect and Dragon Age later in life, only to discover that Baldur’s Gate had essentially come from BioWare itself. There’s a large part of me that wishes my nan was still around to play those games – she would’ve bloody loved Dragon Age: Origins.
Source: Eurogamer My nan taught me how to play Baldur's Gate