The year is 2007. My grandmother has recently died, my first serious girlfriend has dumped me and my parents are on the verge of divorcing, something that will be a finalized decision shortly after. My stepfather has already moved out of the house, and taken one of the dogs with him. It is just myself and my mother and her Great Dane now, and when I'm not at film school, I spend most of my free time playing video games in my bedroom.
Lately, I've been heavily into Rainbow Six Vegas.
I've always had a weird relationship with the franchise. The first time I ever saw OG Rainbow Six was at my cousins mcmansion, where he showed it to myself and my stepbrother late at night. Something about the terrorist hunt in that game - in empty ceilingless buildings where the sky could be seen overhead and everything was bright - only served to make the game all that much more unnerving. Walking down hallways that entire summer gave me the creeps. It wasn't until much later that my stepbrother and I played it again on my Dreamcast, and beat it together, that I realized how much fun it actually could be.
Rainbow Six Vegas is NOT the original game, to put it bluntly. It's a fairly standard FPS, especially for its time, and yet the familiarity gave me comfort. It's a pretty run of the mill shooter, but it has its charm, but perhaps the most important thing about Rainbow Six Vegas was that it was there. At a time when I desperately needed to escape from the turmoil that was upending the life I'd come to know for so long, Rainbow Six Vegas was there to distract me.
But even then, it was a double sided distraction, as my stepfather had been for years a longtime reader of Tom Clancy novels, so playing one of the games almost felt like I was still wishing he would come home, even though he was a heartless monster. I suppose, in the end, I simply wanted things to go back to how they'd been. Sure, they were bad, but I knew they could - and would - get worse if the house was broken apart. And it was broken apart. And things did indeed get worse.
A few years later I finally picked up the sequel and found it incredibly underwhelming, and while a part of that is me genuinely thinking the sequel is a piss poor follow up, I also can't help but wonder if I actually genuinely liked RSV or if I simply liked what it offered me at the time. I'd like to say that I liked it. I mean, I beat it, after all, and got quite a bit of the achievement list finished on it, and even now and then still get the urge to go back...and yet...
...do I want to revisit it because I enjoyed it, or because it would take me back to that moment in time? And why would I want to go back to that moment anyway? Wasn't the whole point of the games distraction to take me away from what was happening around me at the time of playing? I don't have any real understanding of the world, nor how things work in it, but I do understand how entertainment works, and, yes, I can wholeheartedly say with confidence that I did actually enjoy RSV. It's a pretty solid - albeit standard - shooter with a somewhat flimsy plot and still surprisingly a lot of fun. It plays well, it looked pretty decent, and I really did appreciate the game for what it was, and not simply what it represented at the moment in my life.
But try as I might to separate it, it is inextricably tied to that moment in my life, and there's no untying it from that. That makes liking it hurt a little, because it's almost as if I'm saying I liked what was happening to my life at the time I played it, simply because I played it when those things were happening, even if I know full well the two have absolutely nothing beyond surface level connection to one another.
A major plot point in the second half and endgame of RSV is that a bomb has been placed on the Nevada Dam. For those who are unaware how dams work, if they break, all that water spills out and will demolish everything below it. The dam is essentially what's holding back the inevitable dread, and the bomb is what's ready to unleash it. Perhaps a bit allegorical to a fault, but it really did feel like this was what my life was at the moment of playing. My stepfather had left, thusly activating the bomb in our lives that would ultimately unleash the water behind the dam that would destroy our family. Do I read too much into things? Perhaps. Do I relate media far too much to my own life? Perhaps. Do I care? Not at all. It's the only way I can communicate with the world, for better or worse.
The life I'd come to know, the last nearly two decades, were about to be blown apart, all because of one man's fragile ego in being unable to communicate with his wife, after driving her to become addicted to pain medication. He always said his childrens mother had a crippling drug addiction as well, and while I was never a fan of the woman the few times I met her, I did have to wonder whether she had that habit beforehand or simply developed it while dealing with him, because this was twice now he'd made a marriage fail. My mother was no saint either, lord knows, but this was entirely on him.
...you guys wanna hear a story?
The last day my stepfather and I ever saw one another, he was coming over to the house to pick up the last of his things. I remember it vividly. My bedroom was at the front of the hall, closest to the front door of the house, and he was standing there waiting for my mother to bring him something. Neither one of us said a word, we just stared at one another before what felt like ages, and then I thought about how his parents had been murdered when I was in elementary school. His parents were also awful human beings, which may or may explain his behavior, not that it excuses it one iota. As soon as he was about to leave, he looked at me, almost as if he expected me to say goodbye or beg him not to go.
Instead, I simply told him "Your parents deserved to die and I'm glad they were murdered."
This was the last thing ever spoken between us, and he didn't even respond. I relayed this story to a friend a few years ago at lunch, and she looked me dead in the eye and quietly said, "Remind me never to piss you off, jesus."
So sure, you can blow up my family with your actions, your emotionless suburbanite terrorist...
...but don't expect me not to have a bomb of my own at the ready. Rainbow Six taught me, if nothing else, to always be prepared for the worst.
My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like my newest novel here, reading my media blog here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.
