Entry 6: The Video Games – The Sorcerer’s Stone

            Moving on from books and film, I’m ready to move onto a different piece of Harry Potter media, the video games. Now, not every video game entry is going to get its own blog entry, but the first one specifically is going to get one for a reason I’ll get into in a minute.

At the age of 5 I started playing video games, my first being Crash Bandicoot for the Playstation 1. I really got into gaming, which became a regular hobby for me alongside reading, so when I heard that a Harry Potter video game was coming out after the release of the movie, I was very excited. Games based on licensed products nowadays are typically frowned upon, namely games based on movies rather than original ideas. They usually have a budget used to get the game done quick and really cash in on the name while it’s still hot and popular in theaters, and doesn’t usually add up to a rewarding experience. Veteran gamers will typically stray away from these games, leaving a more casual audience to pick these up and feed the frenzy.

My young self knew nothing about this though, and I was all over the idea of a Harry Potter video game. My mom got me the game for Christmas for my Playstation, and I loved every second of it. It wasn’t all about being cinematic or eye popping action, it was more about solvling puzzles and using your mind as you made your way through the Harry Potter story. It wasn’t like the games you normally see based on a movie today. I believe that this may be due to the fact that the game was perhaps released based on the popularity of the movie, but was not released as an adaptation of the movie, but rather the source material itself.

Now I want to dig a bit deeper into the first game specifically due to the fact that I owned and played four copies of it: A copy for Playstation, for PS2, for Gameboy Advance, and for PC. And all of these games were completely different! They followed the same story, sure, but the gameplay was different, adapted to suit whatever system you were playing on, and the puzzles and overall experience was different. I could literally buy the same game four times and get four different experiences?! That is something that is unheard of today, and something that made me believe that they took extra care into actually making a good, fun game for everybody to enjoy.