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I rammed poor Ecco into rock walls and leapt onto the beach and fired myself back into the air again and again and again, hoping to find whatever pocket my family had been tucked into. I never figured out where I was supposed to go. I explored every pixelated reef and cove, holding down the C-button and singing out to no one. I restarted the game again and again, trying to avoid it, but eventually I accepted that to jump and lose everyone and everything was the only option the game had given me.Īnd after that, all there was to do was swim. The ocean was empty and I was alone.įor the longest time, I thought it was my fault, like maybe my jump had triggered the vortex, and I was responsible. You can imagine how I felt splashing back into the water as Ecco after the vortex had closed its mouth over my pod. I’d try to finish it before the garage door closed, so I could still see them in the car and trust that it wouldn’t be the last time I did. “Please, please, please, in Jesus’s name, Amen ,” I’d repeat in my head after Dad left for work or my sisters for school or Mom for the grocery store. So just to be safe, I started doing it anytime anyone left the house. I was convinced that if I didn’t do this exactly right, God would smite them on the spot. I’d mouth the words the same way each time, and would start all of it over again if I skipped anyone by mistake. I’d end every night and start every morning with a ritualistic prayer for the safekeeping of my mom, dad, sisters, dogs, grandparents, cats, aunts, uncles, and friends, in that order. Growing up, my biggest fear was the loss of a family member. Five-year-old me watched in mute horror as my dolphin friends and family were slurped into the black hole like long strands of spaghetti. While I was getting the sweetest dolphin air you could imagine, a huge vortex opened up in the water below. In that moment, my bottlenose body was like a missile, unstoppable, flying toward the heavens.īut like Icarus reaching for the sun, my joy was not to last. And Ecco launched high, high, high into the air, and I got a taste of what any shred of athletic ability must've felt like for other kids who actually went outside. So after a few failed skims of the surface, I did it. This was apparently the triple-dog dare of dolphins, because the game would not let me refuse on the principle of modesty or stage fright.
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One of them, clearly the pod's resident hotshot, challenged me to jump as high as I could out of the water. I was just a ‘lil dolphin, boppin’ around the ocean with all my dolphin buds.
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Unlike the shoot-em-up Sunset Riders or the blink-and-you-die classic Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco seemed like it’d be more in line with my five-year-old tastes and eye-hand coordination. Kids like dolphins, right?"Įcco was one of three Sega Genesis games I remember playing in my family's attic.
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In the case of Ecco the Dolphin, it’s because I never made it past the tutorial. In this special miniseries, I’ll be taking (quick) bites out of four prologues that I remember not as appetizers to a larger adventure, but as the main course itself. Prologues are the virtual wombs of video games, and I'm never fully ready to leave the relative safety of quirky, introductory mini-games for the unknown, outside world. I’m one of those babies who needs prologues (and walkthroughs, and mid-game snacks, and sometimes short pauses during scary parts), and I’ll admit that in all my years of gaming, I’ve spent far too long just existing in them.