This is the eighth part of a series I'll be doing on games played during my childhood. You can read the others below.

Part 1/ Part 2/ Part 3/ Part 4/ Part 5/ Part 6/ Part 7

I've never been a big fan of multiplayer or co-op gaming.

It's one of the few things that's really kind of created a rift between myself and my gamer peers, especially back between 2010-2013 when that was all the rage and all anyone wanted. Every single game that came out, whether it was warranted or even worked or not, had multiplayer attached to it. Sometimes it was decent enough to enjoy, Bioshock 2 was a surprising example of this, and other times it was so shoehorned in that it felt completely out of place, like literally almost any FPS from that time period with it. I can name a handful of games that had multiplayer that didn't need it, but Singularity is one of the first that comes to mind off the top of my head.

But even before all of that, I was just never a big multiplayer or co-op kind of gamer. Games, to me anyway, have always been a rather solitary experience. In fact, most media is in general, but especially to me. I prefer to watch things alone (unless I'm in a theater, but even then I am only there to see the film, not to see it with people), I read a ton and I listen to my music on my headphones because partaking in media, no matter what the medium, has always been a personal thing. But sometimes there were the exceptions. As a little girl in elementary school I can remember going to my friend Cordon's house and playing Sonic Adventure 2 on the Gamecube for literally hours. Those are fond memories, even if our friendship - like most of my friendships - ended in a blaze of abandonment.

But no game probably has more fond memories when it comes to playing it with someone else than Turok Evolution.

Turok Evolution, a game that really nobody seemed to enjoy and for understandable reasons, was a game that I played on the Gamecube. It was also a game that my best friend in school, Aaron, played on his Gamecube. Aaron and I met the end of 7th grade, he was new in town and to the school, and we loved all the same crap. For years after, we spent every waking moment together. I'm sure some people thought it was romantic, but he knew I was a giant queer and he was never interested in me, so what our friendship boiled down to in the end was what a lot of close adolescent friendships boiled down to: survival. You're friends because nobody else in school likes you, but thankfully you like one another enough to hang out. Every weekend we were at one anothers houses, we even went to Disneyland together one summer, and he came and spent a week at a beach house my family occasionally visited. Aaron was also one of the few people I'd bend my rules for when it came to enjoying media. We would watch things together, often running through entire seasons of TV shows on DVD back when they first started being released, or reading the same books and discussing them. We even liked a lot of the same music.

But one of the things we did more than anything was play games, and the game we played the absolute most together was Turok Evolution. To say we "played" Turok Evolution is probably an overstatement. We didn't so much "play" it as much as we partook in it while hanging out and talking. It's kind of like when you play music while doing some household chore. It's there to keep you company. Turok Evolution was a crutch designed to spur on the conversation while we threw black hole cubes at one another in the same level for hours upon hours. And please, don't mistake my nostalgia as recommendation, Turok Evolution is a PRETTY BAD GAME.

It has its good points; the weapons are awesome, and who doesn't want to fight gun toting dinosaur soldiers? But overall, it's....questionable, most of the time. As a story it's almost completely incoherent and devoid of any sort of sense whatsoever, and as far as gameplay goes it worked well enough to get the job done in the same way that you could theoretically grate cheese with an air vent if you were so determined to do so. Yeah, it works, but was it really worth it? Who's to say. Probably not the people eating air vent cheese, that's for sure. But it was a game that required very little concentration and could be played with just the two of us, so therefore we spent hours blasting one another apart in ridiculous over the top manners with weapons that honestly I still think are pretty damn cool. I should also probably state that perhaps my nostalgia of the game is tinted a bit rosier by the fact that it's one of the only Turok games I've ever played, so without the history of playing the others, I was by no means disappointed in it because I had nothing to compare it to when rating it amongst its predecessors.

Either way, Turok Evolution was our game, the way a couple has their song. And even though we weren't a couple, as I said, we were about as close as a gay girl and a young man could be. Our friendship benefited us in many ways; he protected me from the people at school who wanted to hurt me, and I gave him a place to come to when he didn't want to be home with his own abusive mother. My parents were never mean when friends were over, so this worked to both our advantage. And then, around 2007, Aaron met a girl on the internet, and everything changed. I can remember the last night that we spent together, in his bedroom of the back of the duplex his mother was renting (he essentially had his own apartment). We watched the final season of Arrested Development because it had just come out on DVD and we played a hell of a lot of Turok Evolution, and I knew it'd be the last time I'd ever play that game again.

I couldn't even really enjoy myself, because in the back of my head I knew that in just a few short hours, my best and only friend would be leaving to live with some girl in Washington, and we'd never play Turok Evolution again. I rarely played multiplayer and especially co-op again after that, and I think that has a lot to do with my avoidance of the two in general. People leave. No matter what they mean to you, they always find a way to leave, even if - as he himself had done - they've promised to stay with you. A few years after that, Aaron's relationship ended and he moved into my apartment in California on the beach, and we tried to play Turok Evolution again just like the old days...

...but you can never get the old days back again. That's why they're the old days. I haven't played that game since then, and Aaron and I completely stopped speaking once he moved out of there a few weeks later. I guess I don't do cooperative gaming because I don't believe enough in people to be cooperative. To be helpful, trustworthy and dependable. Aaron was my best friend, and I never really had a best friend after that. Sometimes I'd play through a campaign of something with my good friend Matt, but even that became rarer after 2013 and life started getting in the way. Turok Evolution now sits as a relic of not just a console generation gone by but a lost generation of my life. No matter how much I would love to wrap myself in the blanket of the memories it brings back to me, I know I can't live there, and that hurts more than acknowledging it happened in the first place.

Turok Evolution was one of the only games I ever played cooperatively.

And its association with the events that surrounded it forever killed my belief that people are worth working with.

This isn't a typical game review, which of mine have ever been really, but this is even less typical than I usually do. Turok Evolution is tied to the death of my attempts at friendship, communication and above all else cooperativeness. Now when I see anything about Turok as a franchise, it makes me incredibly sad and inexplicably angry. A character stuck fighting against things that wish to do them harm? That's not a game. That's just the story of my life. And for those of you who might be reading this and getting irritated that I didn't talk more about the game itself, let me just add, is Turok Evolution worth playing? No. It's not a good game. But if you want to do something to waste time, like playing a game or making friends, then by all means, sink your teeth into the carcass of Turok and friendship, because that's a guaranteed way to waste your life.

I'd like to state in hindsight after writing this piece for a few days that holy hell is it way more depressing than I originally intended, but I guess I'm still super upset about everything that's ever happened to me, so. Anyway, play Turok Evolution. It's dumb as dicks, it has cool ass weapons and dinosaurs, and it'll ruin your relationships.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like knowing I recently published a graphic novel here, I have a semi autobiographical book here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.