Sometimes art just stick with you, you know? Ingrains itself deep into your head, casts a shadow upon your life. You might not even know what it is, you have disconnected memories, visuals and audio that imprinted itself on the synapses of your brain. But it's always there, isn't it? Always waiting for you to reconnect the dissonant pieces, to form into a cohesive memory. There are entire corners of the internet devoted to this journey, to rediscovering the art that was once lost to us for one reason or another. And it's usually a fascinating journey, a look into the world of how our memories distort things, how it tells stories that were not told to fill in the gaps. I had a very similar journey. I've had multiple very similar journeys, actually, my memory is terrible. But we're talking about this one. There was a game that had existed entirely within my memory that I had carried with me since I was a literal child. A game that I played way too young to understand it and then carried with me for life, always searching for. It was a game I finally found, and then a game that was lost again. It was a game I finally did play at a certain point and found to be one of the most interesting works of art I think I've ever experienced. I am, of course, talking about Ecco the Dolphin.
So, as stated in the previous entry in this series, my very earliest gaming memories were spent at my cousin's house. They had a Sega Genesis and before I was even old enough to understand how to play a video game, I was playing around with whatever their library had in it. It mostly meant playing the Lion King, to my knowledge, I don't remember hitting up any of the other bangers in the Genesis library. Which tracks, I had a bad habit of hyperfixating on very specific games when I was a kid. In part, my normal Game Clearing projects are an attempt to force myself out of my comfort zone and not play Breath of the Wild again. Even if the temptation is STRONG. I digress, point is probably 80% of my time at that cousin's house was playing the Lion King. But there was that other 20%, those times they could tear me away from the Lion King and try something different. I don't remember all I would've played in those days of playing with my cousins, if I ever played, say, Sonic the Hedgehog the memory has long passed. But, there was one game that imprinted itself into my memory.
See, I love animals, always have, always will, but I was very obsessed with them as a wee little Ed. I remember when I was like four or five, my teacher did the kindergarten thing where she went through and asked kids what they wanted to be. And I said something to the effect of "I want to go into wild places and film animals" and they went "oh, like an animal cinematographer" and that was dangerous information to give me. That was a big word that I now knew what it meant, which is not what you want to give a child who already had a reputation for thinking he was smarter than everyone else. So, my cousins knowing this, they put in their most "animal" game, literally a game where you just play as a seemingly normal animal. A game that, from an outward glance, almost seems like an animal simulator, where you just play as an animal and exist within their world. A game that is hiding many, many, MANY secrets under its surface. That game is, of course, Ecco the Dolphin. And for many years I didn't know that.
As I alluded to at the start of this post, I didn't exactly remember what Ecco the Dolphin was. Like I could not tell you what the title of the "dolphin game" I played when I was like 4 was. It just existed in my mind for years, a provocative image that I could never shake. This is a pretty common occurrence, to those that played Ecco, it kind of sticks with you forever. It has such a distinctive look, with surprisingly realistic sprite work of bottlenose dolphins contrasting with these very artistic looking ocean environments. It has this incredible atmosphere to it, it really encapsulates how the ocean is equal parts beautiful and unsettling. A large part of it being the Genesis soundchip, which is famous for creating some very "dirty" sounds in comparison to how "clean" the SNES chip was. It gives Ecco a very unique soundscape which sucks you in. And then the big twist of the game that happens after you've been given some tutorials and believe this is likely just a game about playing as a dolphin and living life under the sea: aliens arrive and suck up every single other dolphin in the ocean. Ecco has one of the most unique openings in gaming history, something that can only be created during an exceptionally experimental era of gaming.
Unfortunately, that's kind of where the story of child me experiencing Ecco ends. Ecco is famously directionless, it tells you literally nothing and either expects you to figure out how to make progress on your own or buy a strategy guide. I played enough to have these images imprinted upon me and then not much more than that. Like I said, I originally didn't even remember the game's name, a common occurrence for me as a kid it turns out since I'm realizing this is a very similar story to the intro of "i don't like banjo-kazooie". All I had to go off was a vague memory of "the dolphin game", which I'm only just now realizing that I could've simply satisfied my curiosity by looking it up on Google. "Video game about dolphin" takes you to Ecco the Dolphin. Instead I had to wait for several years before I finally put the pieces together. We are actually skipping ahead to the age of the internet, to the era of Screwattack.
For those who weren't around during the age of early online gaming content, good for you. It was a bad time, we were all homophobic back then, a lot of it is better off in the past. Screwattack was a gaming news, commentary and retrospective website founded by gamers "Stuttering" Craig Skistimas and "Handsome" Tom Hanley. It was a website that was primarily devoted to retro game reviews and news recaps and also booked the Angry Video Game Nerd as a partner which is probably the only reason anyone knows who they are nowadays. A lot of old AVGN episodes begin and/or end with the Screwattack logo. Otherwise the only remaining piece of Screwattack still trudging on (that doesn't involve an alt right gaming podcast where none of the hosts seem to play games, instead viewing them through Twitter outrage) is Death Battle, which dares to ask "what if the dumbest arguments you had on Facebook with people 15 years ago could be someone's career". The relevant bit though is that Craig and Tom would review classic games in there "video game vault" series. A series that a much younger Ed basically stole the idea for when I did content creation, I had a series titled "Edzoologist's Video Game Vault".
It is here that the pieces finally fell into place. Craig and Tom covered a lot of old Nintendo and Sega games, in fact it's very likely that my earliest conscious knowledge of what a Genesis was came from their reviews. They did not cover Ecco the Dolphin in their earliest days, to be clear, but in those early days Ecco was a common request for them to review, it being one of the "best Genesis games of all time". It's very funny to actually think about that now, Ecco the Dolphin is largely considered a terrible video game in the modern era, but like. The 00s retro game scene was very kind to basically any halfway decent game on the NES/Genesis/SNES. Way more people will tell you nowadays that Secret of Mana sucks than would've in 2007, let me tell ya. Seeing all these comments mentioning a game about a dolphin made me go "...hold up, I know a game about a dolphin, could it be". And, indeed, it was. I had been reunited with Ecco the Dolphin. And I had the option to play it immediately. Ecco the Dolphin was one of the first Genesis games available on the Wii's virtual console service, which was the game console I was most interested in getting at the time.
Unfortunately the Wii was kind of out of my reach in 2006/2007. I actually ended up having to buy one of those retail bundles where they set aside Wiis to upcharge on them by including a bunch of games and accessories and stuff for a "discount" that is never actually a discount because you are buying a charging cradle that doesn't work and a bunch of plastic you're going to give to a Goodwill. You know the ones. So I did not have a Wii before 2008. But my need to play Ecco the Dolphin was strong. So I convinced my best friend at the time to purchase it on his Wii. And then, because these games were just data you know, we could put the game on an SD card, transfer it over to my Wii, and I would be able to play this childhood game I've wanted for so long. It didn't work like that. It's honestly very funny that I thought it would work like that, of course it wouldn't work like that, actually but like. It was the early days of digital gaming, how was I supposed to know what "DRM" was.
But like, no harm no foul, right? After all, this was my best friend, I could just... play the game over at this place? Well here's the thing, my best friend was one of those people who was always trading stuff in at GameStop to get new things, one of our biggest fights back then was over him letting me borrow Super Smash Bros. Brawl and me inviting some friends over for the weekend to play Smash because of that only for him to call me the morning of and say "hey, I need my copy back because I have to trade it in today". To be clear, we lived within walking distance of the GameStop we went to, it wasn't like he made a trip once a month and so needed to have his entire haul all at the same time. I digress, point is that my friend probably went through like 3 Wiis during that era, always trading them in and buying a new one to play a hot new title. So I lost access to Ecco over there pretty quickly. Not to mention that when I would hang out with him, playing "the dolphin game" over, like, Smash or Mario Kart or Tony Hawk was a hard sell anyways.
And when I got my own Wii, Ecco just unfortunately ended up falling to the wayside. I was very wrapped up in the retro gaming culture on YouTube, I was essentially learning about a new game I had never played on a daily basis. In particular, I grew an obsession with playing "the greats". It's funny I'm saying this because nowadays I spend a lot of time going through my backlog and finding games that were/are "the greatest of all time" and putting them on a list to fast track me playing them. So while Ecco was in the conversation, the limited money for Virtual Console games often went to games more openly discussed. This being the early internet gaming scene, what was discussed were primarily Nintendo games. Some might even say, exclusively Nintendo games. People like to pretend that there isn't a Nintendo bias in how we discuss gaming history and those people weren't at the advent of online gaming discussion when the only Genesis game that ever seemed to be talked about in serious conversation was Sonic and that's because of his relationship with Nintendo. As a result of this, I ended up mostly buying old NES, SNES, and N64 games and didn't really delve into the other consoles on offer. As is so often the case with these stories, I was reunited with the game from my childhood, only for it to slip through my grasp yet again.
And just like the other two times I told a story like this, we pick back up in 2023, with my first year of game clearing. I promise not all of these stories will end up in 2023, it was just apparently the year of tying up hanging threads in my life. Ecco the Dolphin popped up for game clearing in the middle of the year, not too long after Banjo-Kazooie I'd imagine. I might've played it like three games after. Now, at this point the wind had shifted on Ecco the Dolphin. I mentioned previously that during the big retro gaming boom online, Ecco ended up getting a lot of love from people as one of the greatest Genesis games. In the intervening almost 20 years though, opinions on retro games and especially on games like Ecco had radically shifted. Difficulty went from a badge of honor to a major critical focus. Very obtuse game design went from beloved to reviled. And just in general, let's be honest here, modern gamers are a bit spoiled by good signposting and they just think having to figure out what to do on your own is the mark of a bad game. Which especially hurts a game like Ecco, which is probably one of the most obtuse video games ever made.
I'm just going to get ahead of this: I think every criticism against Ecco is entirely valid. I adore this game, Ecco is one of my favorites of all time (#78 on my top 100 list at the time of this writing), but I absolutely understand why people hate it. It is, strictly speaking, not a very good video game. It gives the player no real direction, its hints are cryptic and often misleading, it's a very difficult game. Like, the entire game runs on a time limit, because Ecco is a dolphin. You are basically always counting down to your own demise as you play and you need to regularly refill your oxygen in order to survive, which becomes a more difficult task to accomplish as the game goes on. It is a harsh game, a game which I don't think I'd recommend anyone play without save states or rewinds and even then, you have to be a very particular kind of person to get something out of it. It is a game that a lot of people frankly mock, most playthroughs are built around someone going "isn't this game bizarre and bad" in a sort of pseudo-AVGN style, except without the irony that James injects in his videos. So more like a pseudo-JonTron, except without the racism. Usually.
To me though, Ecco doesn't work because it is a great game. It works because it is an amazing, unique work of art. The way Ecco feels to me is like the first time you listen to a prog rock album and you get it, you know. Like you actually engage with the album and its story and its feeling rather than just viewing it as a collection of very good songs. That's what Ecco feels like, it feels the most like a prog rock album of any game I've ever played. Which is fitting, because the creator was directly inspired by the works of Pink Floyd while making the game. It has such a brilliant atmosphere, I've mentioned previously how much it sticks with you. Ecco feels empty and full at the same time, it truly conveys the feeling of being in the ocean. Conveys existing within a wide expanse, never knowing if danger is near you or far away. Which is a very impressive theme to be able to communicate in a sidescrolling Genesis game. While I concur that the cryptic nature of Ecco does not make it a great game, I think the experience would be much worse without it. Ecco's cryptic nature is very intentional, the game wants you to be put into a specific headspace to "understand" it. Understand being in quotes because, well, you never really understand Ecco. And that's kind of the point.
Ecco is psychedelia in video game form. It is bizarre in such a compelling way. It's the kind of game where you never know where it's going, never know what the next idea it's going to have is, but not in a way that makes it a spectacle. You aren't in that space that you would be in say, a Kingdom Hearts game or a Metal Gear Solid game where the game is so insane that you are almost pushing through to see how dumb the next twist is. It's very deliberate in what it does, in how it evolves its story. It evokes such incredible imagery, underwater ruins, prehistoric oceans, alien spaceships. It's telling the kind of narrative that you might just not "get", and it's not necessarily your fault. It is a very weird game, it is a very strange story. It's something you may not find compelling even if you do understand it. It's kind of part of why Ecco is such a work of art, it's meaning does not land with people. It is so incredibly divisive. And that's beautiful.
But I think more than anything, outside of just being a game that was important to child me and created a hunt across my life to reconnect is that Ecco being so bizarre, so decisively itself, and asking the player to either engage with it at its level or leave has changed how I view games as a medium. Which I realize I'm saying this from like 3 years ago, but I like to think that the way one views art is an ongoing journey rather than a problem that can be definitively solved. Some friends of mine have recently been doing this trend of "9 games that shaped me" and like. I realized I don't think I could make a definitive statement on that for me personally, because I don't think I'm done being shaped. I don't think that the most important games to me as a child/teenager are all there is for me. And I think this late stage connection with Ecco the Dolphin really highlights that changing perspective.
Ecco really made me reconsider how I viewed gaming, how engaging with something on its own level rather than bringing my own baggage into it creates a more meaningful experience. It is so easy to look at a game and go "well, I don't like this normally so I'm not going to play it". I've done it my entire life. I've ignored first-person shooters, soulslikes, run-and-guns, real time strategy games, sports games. All genres, all styles I've told myself that I would never like without giving them a fair shot, just based on limited datasets. Ecco made me reevaluate this. Because Ecco made me realize that to honestly view a work of art, you need to want to build a relationship with it. And I wasn't doing that. I was letting myself miss out on the opportunity to engage with so many works just because of how I thought I would perceive them. I criticize people for this a lot and it's because I did it too, I know what it's like. I was viewing games as content and saying that I loved them as art. Ecco helped me understand this medium so much deeper than I could've ever hoped. Ecco is, truly, one of the most significant games of my entire life and even if it is objectively bad, I will always love it for that.