LEGO ISLAND

One of my first encounters with video games was on a big fat Compaq desktop computer that ran Windows Millennium. A game that probably had the most impact on me as a kid was the original Lego Island game. This videogame was a piece of art. After experiencing a bit before with games, this was the Lego company's first real serious attempt at making it in the videogame industry. And it worked.

The game is a 3D free-roaming experience mixed with point and click elements. You could use the arrows on the old clunky keyboard to move around the island in the first-person view. The game didn't have that much action. It was more something of an experience. All the magic was in the little things: the personality of the characters, the fact that you could click on almost anything and something unexpected would happen, roaming around the island itself, building your own vehicles, etc. At the time it felt like there was so much to do.

The magic in this game also lies in the music. When you search on YouTube for "Lego Island soundtrack" you can see in the comments that a lot of people compare the music to what we now call "Vaporwave", a music genre that you have to Google yourself to listen to it because I can't explain it in just 1 sentence. Besides, it's a genre that deserves an entire blog post for itself.
In the comments, you can also read by the way sometimes that the game, in reality, wasn't that great. It's just great because everyone that grew up with it has so much nostalgia for it. I'm also probably guilty of that.

During the time (1997 - 2000), videogames weren't always localized for different countries, and definitely not for a small country like the Netherlands. So I was confronted with a game that was completely in English. This turned out to be a great way to learn the language really fast as a young child. I could see what the eccentric lego characters were trying to say, and at the same time, I could hear them speak. Words like: jail, island, racetrack, hospital, car, I learned thanks to this game. So I'm happy my parents bought it for me. I still have the physical copy, but sadly you can't play it on modern computers anymore.