Passing the Controller
The PlayStation 4 was bigger than a hand-me-down: it was a passing of years’ worth of memories, years’ worth of labor, and years’ worth of growing up.
I hate using the word “inherited” — it always sounds like somebody died. So when I say I inherited my older brother’s PlayStation 4, know that I am saying it with some certainty that he is, in fact, not dead. There’s always “hand-me-down,” but I have only ever used that phrase to refer to clothes I have swapped with my cousins and roommates. The PlayStation is bigger than a hand-me-down: it’s a passing of years’ worth of memories, years’ worth of labor, and years’ worth of growing up. So, for lack of a better term, I inherited my older brother’s PS4.
I couldn’t tell you exactly how this came about. All I know is that when I was talking to my brother this past winter, I must have brought up a video game I wanted to play but couldn’t without the console, and suddenly he was offering me his (he had recently acquired a PlayStation 5). I was surprised and thrilled, and offered to pay him, but he wouldn’t let me. My parents visited me in February, so he sent it up from Tennessee with them. I assumed I would only get the bare console, but then my parents walked through my door with the PS4 in its original box, two controllers, a hard drive with instructions for how to set up extended storage, and a Trader Joe’s bag full of games.
The PS4 took root on my TV stand, standing proudly against unused board games and spare batteries. I have stolen clothes and books and records from my brother over the years, but owning something so substantial of his — something he spent so many hours on, something to which he devoted so much of his growing up and learning — feels entirely different. It feels like when we were kids and he gave me his Nintendo DS after he got a 3DS: a passing of the torch, an almost forced sharing of interests. Every time I turn on the PS4 after work, he is present in the games he gave me, each reminding me of his interests and how I saw them evolve and change as we grew up together. Some purely reflect him — Sniper Elite 4 and Mafia III — while others reek of the passions he passed on to me — Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection.
Before the age of ten, I only played games with my brother. Sometimes he forced me to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl, so I would unenthusiastically hammer the B-button on a Wii Remote to endlessly trigger Zelda’s Nayru’s Love shield, making her impervious to attack and producing the same grating twinkling sound over and over. Other times, I begged him to let me pilot the pirate ship in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag until he begrudgingly handed me the controller and let me listen to sea shanties. No matter how poorly I piloted the ship or how desperately my unbroken voice tried to sing along with those of grown men, my brother only snatched the controller back when I threatened his progress in the game. Our relationship is colored by video games, our growing up chronicled by each console that came in and out of our childhood home.
Sometimes I feel like what I remember the most about our shared youth is the consoles. I remember how the Game Boy Advance SP was ignored in favor of the newer GameCube, which became the even newer Nintendo DS. Then, by the time our parents agreed with my brother that he was apparently too old for Super Mario games, there was some catching up to do. The DS graduated into the sleeker, more powerful PlayStation, which evolved into the PlayStation 2, which rapidly devolved into the PlayStation Portable. My brother’s gaming habits became more refined and high-tech around this time, which then demanded the PS3, then the PS4, back to Nintendo with the Switch, and then the PS5, which all finally culminated, for me, back into the PS4. Before I could conceptualize that games were improving over the years, that how a game looked or told a story really mattered, Mario Kart: Double Dash was about equivalent to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. The hardware itself, however, created a clear timeline. Consoles got bigger over the years, their designs changing into something more modern, their technological capabilities advancing with each iteration, but a physical game would always be a cartridge or a disk. And because of that substantiality, consoles seemed to represent a real progression, a new beginning in the progress of gaming and my relationship to it.
In the early days, consoles were fairly unforgiving: NES games didn't work on the SNES didn't work on the Nintendo 64 didn't work on the GameCube. While my brother and I could swap Game Boy and DS cartridges or play Double Dash on the Wii, most consoles didn't allow for any type of backward compatibility. Every console had to be a restart, had to occupy the physical space of the old one. This almost always meant buying a new batch of games, new controllers, and a new setup. New games were like add-ons to the gaming culture already cultivated between my brother and me, but a new PlayStation 2 had the power to entirely change the fabric of how we played.
In the early days, I was used to restarting new consoles with my brother. I didn’t know how to restart without him on an old console. The only piece of gaming hardware I had ever set up on my own was my Nintendo Switch, so my brother’s old PS4 didn’t feel like mine to touch or start up. I was familiar with it as a relic — as an artifact in a museum only to be handled by a seasoned curator — not as something I own and now have full agency over. I was worried I wouldn’t do it justice. That, on my own, I would set it up incorrectly or play a game as poorly as I had 15 years ago, or ignore the PS4 altogether because of these fears. I wasn’t letting myself fully adopt that video game culture my brother brought me up in or letting myself take ownership of what he had gifted me.
My brother let me start over a thousand times. Hell, he probably let me start over a million times. When I struggled through LEGO Star Wars levels or chickened out on Luigi’s Mansion, he may have been frustrated with me, but he was also the first to reload the game from the beginning. When my small hands couldn’t completely hold the controller, he let me fruitlessly attack enemy pirate ships over and over in a valiant effort to reach the L and R bumpers.
Giving me his PlayStation 4 was my brother’s latest effort in letting me start over with games. The last year of my life has been, put simply, difficult, so he reintroduced me to one of the things that helped him through so many difficult days. He erased any data on the PS4 and wiped the external hard drive he gave me. The used slate was wiped clean, but how do you restart with something old? And how do you do it alone?
Well, within a week of owning the PS4, I was playing games I had always wanted access to but had never had the hardware for. I managed to play enough Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune that I started having dreams inspired by it. A month later, a coworker loaned me Horizon: Zero Dawn, and I finally laid hands on God of War. My relationship with gaming had been milquetoast for years, weakened by starting college, no longer living under the same roof as my brother, struggling to find a true gaming community on campus, and starting a full-time job that consumed most of my time and energy. But suddenly gaming was once again made imaginative and diverse by the new console in my grasp that I could experiment with and take ownership of.
Even my relationship to being a “gamer” was reshaped, kicked back into gear. I wanted to explore gaming with the PS4 in ways I hadn’t been able to when it belonged to my brother — I was playing titles that I had wanted to play on my own for years, playing them at my skill level, and traversing their landscapes at my leisure. I ignored pirate missions until forced back to them, in my empty apartment I yelled and swore at Nathan Drake as he came under a hail of bullets (clearly not my fault), and now that my hands are big enough to hold a PS4 controller, I’m able to be bad at games all on my own. At least I’m curious about them again. I have a new batch of games, new controllers, a new setup. And it isn’t limited to the inherited PS4: my Switch is seeing heavy use for the first time since I got it, with hours upon hours devoted to Spiritfarer and other, newer indie games, and I’m staging accidental Library of Alexandrias in Minecraft again.
In many ways, the PlayStation 4 is completely new and unfamiliar to me. I didn’t have much access to it as a kid, since most of the titles my brother played were too mature for me. But playing it now as a 23 year old, I feel like a little sister again. Like my brother is letting me watch a violent movie as long as I don’t tell Mom and Dad. But I’m also acutely aware of the fact that that world has always been there, just out of reach. It’s only now that I’m allowed uninhibited access to it that it feels new, not used or worn, like it has been hidden away and kept safe for me.
I am often alone in my gaming now. When my roommate is out of town or I try to explain God of War to my non-gaming friends, that’s when I’m doing it alone. Then I see my brother’s handwriting on the sticky note he attached to the hard drive explaining how to use it, and I know I’m not alone, I’m just learning. My brother gave me his console so I could restart knowing what he had already learned.