#goodbye splatoon 1 you have changed my life forever

[sanghost]

it’s been a pleasure 🫡

[thembo-apocalypse]

Goodbye Splatoon 1

Splatoon 1 shutting down was completely unknown to me until just this morning. I had thought they'd already shuttered their online offerings for the Wii U some time ago. But now our officially licensed observation of Splatoon 1 has ended.

I'd like to think I changed a lot between when I first saw this screen and now. Around 10 years ago I was one of the many children and tweens waking up at ungodly hours of the night to play a demo for the soon-to-be fifth Wii U game in existence.

Back then I was a bright eyed, bushy tailed, and hopelessly enthralled Nintendo kid. I even dawned the fabled green triforce shirt and khaki short combo of legend, a platonic ideal of a dweeb. Although most of my memories are fuzzy of this period of my life, I still remember vividly how much the build-up to this game consumed my young life. I do have to thank it for a lot though. It was through this game that I made a lot of connections in childhood that helped me survive socially, even some of my earliest interactions with queer people my age. I definitely won't say Splatoon made me trans faster, but it was a lightning rod for kids that would become queer or already were. The temporal progression of the Splatoon world through the subsequent games makes the first one almost feel like a time capsule. Character and narrative events that would go on to foundationally shape the series are simply not present in the Inkopolis square of 2024 as they weren't in 2015. Seeing the last gameplay streams of Splatoon 1 uploaded today almost felt like peering back into a crystalized memory from my youth. It was like seeing squid-kids forever trapped in a time before the mammalians, the squid sister's breakup, the super retooling, or the abolition of gender and France in Splatoon 3.

While I opened this post with saying that we're ending our public observation of Splatoon 1, I almost feel like it's a game that's peering out at us. What did Splatoon observe in me from my intensely repressive, churchy childhood into being a weird, freaky, cool queer woman in my 20s?

It's bizarre to see your childhood console have this prolonged lifespan and belated death long after you've already moved on. Kind of like seeing a star in the sky long after it's already dead. Today the lights shone out on something that's been ambiently in the background of my life since 2015. But since then many more lights have entered my life, all shining so bright I hardly even noticed. In case you were wondering, I did outgrow a lot of the repressive stuff. I love boobs now.