Advent Calendar 23: Home(screen) For The Holidays

Well, gang, this is our last video game entry for the Advent Calendar this year. Tomorrow and the next day are reserved for photos of food and rat cage decorations. I hope you've had fun with all of my nerdery. I actually specialized in this in college, not that anybody knew what I was talking about. My faculty advisor was the one dude who admitted to owning an Intellivision in the '70s. People study it now, but this was in the early Aughts, when video games were still a degenerate pastime that rotted your brain.

But what of the video games we leave behind? Do they, as the song asks, know it's Christmas?

It turns out that some of them do.

Big kid computers have had real-time clocks forever. There was a business need -- early mainframes were timeshare systems. You couldn't charge someone for their computer time if the computer didn't know what time it was to record the billing data. Home computers didn't get them until the PC and Macintosh came on the scene. The first console I ever had with a real-time clock in it was a Playstation, which used it to timestamp your saves and not much else. No, the first console game I can recall that knew or cared about the calendar was on the Saturn: A 1996 demo disc version of NiGHTS Into Dreams.

NiGHTS was an innovative... platformer? Flyer? An action game that took place in a full 3D environment that expected you to navigate in full 3D, to the point that there was an alternate controller that offered dual analog stick control, created to make it easier for the player to input concepts like "into the screen". It was the crazy inventive thing the Saturn was known for, for quite a while. The original game was released in July of 1996 in Japan, whereupon development of the shorter Christmas NiGHTS version was started. Christmas NiGHTS contained only a portion of the levels of the full game, but each level needed multiple sets of assets, because as the Saturns' internal calendar inched closer to December 25th, the scenery and creatures became progressively more Christmas-ified. 

Gamers of more recent vintage are probably more familiar with holiday bonuses of all sorts in franchises like Animal Crossing, all of whose installments run on consoles or handhelds with real-time clocks. The December holiday is called "Toy Day", and depending on the game, you may find new seasonal items in Tom Nook's store, be given tasks like crafting fancy wrapping paper or delivering packages, or even see Jingle, the reindeer who delivers holiday gifts to the world's animal folk. At least one of the Harvest Moon games has a Christmas party in it; other games eschew holidays altogether in favor of asking you what your birthday is when you start a game, and rewarding you when it comes around.

Other games only keep track of the time of day. Most frequently these are online games or collaborative MMOs with timed 'events', but I remember cracking up when I found out for myself that if you're still playing Dungeon Keeper after midnight, the game will start hinting that you should go to bed.

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