In a very Slumdog Millionaire kind of way, Destiny might have changed my life.
For all my talk about a lifelong love of video games, I spent the vast majority of that time and energy in shooters.
Over the last 20 years I've obsessed over 3 Quake games, 3 Halo games, and a smattering of others in between. I consistently made it my culture, whether it was high school spent "antisocially" making friends over IRC, or watching Red vs Blue with my Halo clanmates (who doubled as college roommates), turning the show's dialogue and our own badly executed plays into inside jokes.
But after about 2010 that all went quiet.
While the industry obsessed over Facebook games and avoiding competing with Call of Duty, my beloved genre went into a major slump. I slumped with it.
2011, 2012 and 2013 were challenging. Years of failure and opportunities gone awry. I barely played any games during the time, either. Any time I tried shopping for them, there was nothing that grabbed me. Starting a game usually instantly led to a disinterest and a desire to do something else. I can't talk about causation and mild depression, but I can talk about correlation and mild depression.
Destiny brought my love of games back to life. Other games have become the base of internet culture (see also: Overwatch), but the arrival of Destiny was like a violent gasp of air after finally surfacing from underwater.
I started launched it only to see what my shiny new PS4 could do. You know when you get a new console, but you don't have any new games, so you go looking for demos, just anything to show off the system?
The Destiny demo had no more obligation than that. But the demo may have been the only one ever to convert me from a skeptic to a buyer. And it did it after just two levels.
I had never seen an FPS level so stunning as the moon. The game went on to tantalizingly borrow elements of MMO design: inventories, upgrades, subclasses, elemental items, and gorgeous, epic level design.
And brought best-in-class FPS gameplay: fantastic, natural controls. Solid, predictable guns and satisfying sounds. A soundtrack worthy of thousands of hours of repeated listens.
What a game. I'm sure there's some API out there that can tell me how long I spent in the game. But I happily came out of the slump. All those hours got all my brain chemicals back in their normal, happy balance.
Destiny took me back from "almost non-gamer" to "PS4 is the center of my household." Had that not happened, I'm sure I wouldn't have paid attention when a job opening appeared at Sony PlayStation.
Bungie, you did me a solid. Thanks for an excellent game.
Today, Destiny 2 releases. And I'm online with my crew. This is going to be great.