Growing up with games meant growing up with some incredible rituals. Things I waited for. Things I shared. Things that felt communal, physical, and fleeting in the best possible way. The industry and this medium we all love have changed significantly over the years, but somewhere between faster internet and infinite content, plenty of traditions have quietly gone off into the sunset.

I'm not saying gaming has "gotten worse" — far from it — but the way we experience it has fundamentally changed. This is not a "back in my day" rant, but rather a love letter to moments, habits, and feelings that shaped how I, along with millions of others, fell in love with games in the first place, and why it genuinely hurts knowing they're never coming back.

Watching E3 and dreaming of being there one day

E3 has given an entire generation memories to cherish forever

Watching E3 was a ritual every year growing up. One of the first times in my entire life that my parents allowed me to have friends over was when we streamed E3 together. Naturally, "I'll visit E3 when I grow up" was something I said to my friends every single year. The LA Convention Center sat at the very top of my "when I get old enough and can travel internationally" list, and it stayed there all the way until 2019. Not because I finally got to go, but because E3 died an ignominious death when the pandemic hit, splintering into a hundred smaller showcases that just don't quite hit the same.

E3 used to be one week when every single company showed up to fight for attention, gasps, and cheers. One week. Multiple auditoriums. Physical demo booths. Huge reveals and revivals. Everyone in the same place. Now, it's all broken down into Xbox Dev Directs, PS State of Plays, Summer Games Fest, Indie showcases, and, of course, The Game Awards, all spread thin across the year. I'd happily watch all of those disappear if it meant E3, in its original form, could come back. Back then, skipping E3 used to be unthinkable for any AAA dev, and now, companies just drop a YouTube livestream whenever they feel like it.

E3 gave us the moment where Kratos was revived in a new world, it gave us a global jaw-dropping moment with 2012's showcase of Watch Dogs (we know how that went but still), and in its last outing, it gave us the breathtaking moment where Keanu Reeves was revealed to be Johnny Silverhand. Those moments are burned into my memory and always will be. E3 is gone, and it hurts more than I expected. That imaginary flight to LA in June some year will never take off.

Internet café tournaments that felt bigger than they were

Both cultures are long gone by now

I grew up in internet cafés. Dimly lit rooms, mismatched chairs, ceiling fans holding on for dear life, and PCs that had seen better decades. There were tournaments, too. Not global, sponsored, or streamed, but completely local. Pac-Man competitions, Tekken 3 brackets on the one PC in the café that could run it. And every once in a while, Counter-Strike 1.6 LAN tournaments were played through Hamachi because half the copies weren't exactly... legitimate.

Those CS tournaments were definitely special. The guy who brought his own headset from home almost always won, since that also meant that he actually practiced at home. This was before the era of ELO or Twitch chats. We just trash talked, collected bragging rights, and one team got to walk back home knowing they were the kings of the café for a month. Today, esports is gigantic, cleaner, and infinitely more professional, and internet café culture is all but extinct. Still, nothing will ever replace the magic of those tiny, scrappy LAN tournaments that made gaming feel more personal and local.

Reading physical gaming magazines cover to cover

The first weekend of each month was the most exciting

The two magazines I grew up with were Digit and Chip. The former came from my father's office every month, and it genuinely shaped my interest in tech as a whole, even if I always skipped straight to the gaming section first before bothering to explore other sections. What I remember (and miss) most from that magazine, however, was the disc they gave out each month. One demo a month — that's what those discs had, and that's how I discovered Max Payne 2 and MGS2: Sons of Liberty, which, inarguably, is also one of the greatest game demos of all time.

Chip magazine, on the other hand, was a pure gaming magazine, and the best part was always the poster inside. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that my room's walls were overflowing with posters, to the point that I had to stack some on top of others. It was chaotic, but beautiful, and many of those posters led me to explore new games. Today, only a few good ones are left in print, and the culture itself is gone. Sure, a game is always one-click away, be it a trailer, a demo, or a full release, but nothing feels as special as flipping through pages, circling games you wanted, and pinning a poster to your wall like it meant something.

Discovering secrets in games without the internet ruining them

A time before everyone immediately hopped on to the "meta"

There was a time when secrets in games were genuinely just that — secrets. You didn't Google them, and you definitely didn't watch a YouTube video explaining "five things you missed" or "ENDING EXPLAINED." You stumbled into these secrets, and you pressed dumb button combos because a friend's cousin swore it worked. You found a hidden room and suddenly, you felt like you'd broken the game in half and entered a secret exclusive club.

Today, however, discovery is optimized out of existence. Datamines, guides, and algorithm-fed spoilers make sure you never sit with mystery for too long. Back then, not knowing was half the fun, and games felt bigger because you yourself didn't know their limits. There's no denying that modern games are a lot better-designed, but they will never recreate that feeling of genuine wonder when you found something no one else around you had seen yet. Now, all your friends will discover a secret room when the similarly tailored algorithm on Instagram tells each one of you about the room you can dodge-roll your way into.

Writing cheat codes on paper and sharing them at school

The legendary cheat sheets that were passed on the playground

Cheat codes used to be sacred knowledge. They were written down on scraps of paper, and passed around during lunch breaks. Or during PE sessions around the court. This was before accessibility sliders and modifiers in menus. This was when typing certain phrases in could let you have just raw, unapologetic, game-breaking fun. Infinite ammo. Big head mode. Thug's tools. Moon gravity. Flying underwater, somehow. That's what cheat codes used to be all about, and they all sat on sheets of paper with a million wrinkles from the thousands of times they'd been folded and shared with someone else at an internet café or on the school bus.

Cheats were never about winning games, because they were all about experimentation and having fun for the sake of it alone. Games are a lot cleaner today, and they're more curated and respectful of player intent, which is great. But I can't help but miss when games let you be irresponsible with them. It's 2026, and I don't think I'll ever be able to play a new racing game that lets me drive a giant T-Rex prop across a Hollywood studio, with both those things being secrets. Fun came before fairness sometimes, and chaos was part of that charm.

I'll keep these traditions alive in some way or another

None of these traditions vanished because gaming "lost its soul" or something. They disappeared because the medium grew up, scaled up, and streamlined into something faster and more efficient. However, in doing so, it has definitely left behind moments that felt human, imperfect, and deeply personal.

I don't want gaming to go backwards, so I'm not going to spend time wishing for all of these things to come back. I just wish this medium remembered what it felt like to wait, to wonder, and to share joy without an algorithm telling us what mattered. These were traditions that shaped us and are now gone. Knowing they're never coming back, however, is the part that still hurts. Still, I'll make sure I get my friends online on the same Discord server for when a games fest rolls around, and we make petty wagers about which games will be revealed, and I'll even paint murals for games on canvas instead of discovering posters. These traditions will remain alive in some way, because I can't ignore their memory completely after saying they framed my love for gaming as a whole.