National Video Game Day Prompts People To Share All-Time Favorite Games

July 8th is National Video Game Day, and gamers are taking the day to share their favorite games of all time with others on Twitter. National Video Game Day is actually one of two holidays meant to celebrate video games, the other being the ever so slightly different National Video Games Day, apparently observed on September 12th.

Maybe the most interesting thing about National Video Game Day is that its origins are completely shrouded in mystery, despite a solid theory about who actually instituted the day. As the story goes, National Video Game Day was started in 1991 by someone named David Earle. Earle is listed as the sponsor of National Video Game Day in a calendar, which also states that he is the president of Kid Vid Warriors. So that would more or less be case closed on where National Video Game Day comes from, except that no one seems to know who David Earle is, what Kid Vid Warriors is, or why Earle would want to create National Video Game Day in the first place. If that wasn’t complicated enough, National Video Game Day and National Video Games Day seem to actually be the same holiday started by Earle, despite their different spellings and dates.

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Putting aside its surprisingly mysterious origins, National Video Game Day seems to mostly be celebrated by players looking to spread a little love for their pastime of choice by sharing their favorite games. Looking at a selection of tweets about National Video Game Day shows a wide range of “favorite games ever,” including 16-bit classics like Final Fantasy 6, modern masterpieces like Red Dead Redemption 2, and everything in between. There are of course plenty of outliers as well, like the mostly forgotten Sonic Riders. Most importantly, though, it’s an excuse for fans to just share their unabashed enthusiasm for their favorite games.

National Video Game Day also gives developers a chance to tweet out an innocuous celebration of its own games, hopefully without unprovoked negativity in return. That’s the case with Capcom, which shared a great piece of art featuring characters from many of its beloved games (and inspired some love for Dragon’s Dogma, the actual best game of all time).

Sure, National Video Game Day may be a perplexing, mostly pointless holiday, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Despite being a source of entertainment, the conversation around video games so often turns toxic and harmful, it’s good to have one day that provokes little more than show-and-tell about people’s favorite games. That’s not to say that anyone should turn a blind eye to the problems in the gaming community, but a reminder that video games can actually bring people together is welcome once in a while.

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Source: JcDoesEdits/Twitter, hembob/Twitter, Blueknight_V2/Twitter, jo3buck/Twitter, L_cocoabutter/Twitter, trueLordOnion/Twitter, Capcom/Twitter

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July 09, 2020 at 05:35AM