Pretend-Games You Played As a Kid

[Shadsie]

There's a topic at the main Zelda Dungeon up about a mother freaking out over her kid's Zelda-obession and part of the article was about how when he's not on the game system, he's playing "Link" in the backyard. A lot of the ZD commentators chimed in with things they used to play as a kid, including "Mario-tag" with their friends.

It got me to thinking about some of the weird stuff I'd play with my friends and cousins as a kid. We had long, ongoing structured narritives, too - only most of our stuff was self-made stories. Generic things like "We are vampires" or "We are princessess with magical powers" (I remember being a badass, monster-slaying hero-princess... *before* I ever set controller to the first NES LoZ, mind you), or with my cousins "We're cheerleaders, but we're dead!" (ghosts, zombies). Crazy stuff.

The only existsing intellectual property based thing I remember playing at length (with my best friend/neighbor) was "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure." YES. It was the 80s/early 90s! I AM OLD! My friend had a schoolgirl-crush on Keanu Reaves' character, Ted so we pretended we were Bill and Ted's girlfriends and we traveled through time with them in their time-traveling phone booth. (For those not familiar with the film, look it up - it's insanely GOOFY).

So, what kinds of games did you play with your firends on the playgrounds and backyards of your kid-days (or perhaps are still playing now, some of you) - and did you ever play based upon movies, games, books, or was it always your own stories?

 

[RedDekuScrub]

I liked to pretend that the floor had snakes on it and I couldn't touch the ground.
I liked having sword figghts with home made swords (Suprisingly that had nothing to do with Zelda!)
I remember doing almost everything imaginable with a carboard box.
I remember playing hide-and-seek. But the Seeker was a monster or bad guy, and everyone had to hide from it.

 

[Dan]

Great idea for a thread.
At my school we used to play cops and robbers,
erm we also pretended to be pokemon and have battles. I was a rhydon and horn-drilled my friend

We also played the predator too, and there was this kid obsessed with HULK and he would act out on it all the time. At the time I didn't know what the hulk was but he would always shout "I AM, THE HULK I'M GETTING ANGRY"
Oh so many memories getting unlocked

Then there was the kid that liked to roleplay as a tiger and would used to tell me "NOTHING CAN GET PAST MY TIGER LIKE SENSE". I didn't think much of him...

 

[arkvoodle]

Oooh where to begin!

I used to play an absolute plethora of imaginary games as a kid with my friends. One in particular involved 3 characters, I, my male friend and my female friend. I was always the villain, because I loved being one! Our adventures normally included the typical villain stuff. You know, destroying the world/taking over the world while they tried to stop me. Of course, they always succeeded because that's just how we planned out the stories.

Normally, we'd play the games in sort of "Episodes" spanning out over a couple of weeks. Every day when we went out to play, it's a new episode/continuation of the previous one. Sometimes though we'd spend days building things out of sticks/spare things to act as enemies and bosses.

The adventures/stories usually were very in depth, and weren't confined to one particular time period or style. Once we finished an episode/adventure, we'd write everything that happened down so we could play it again sometime. I still have some of the journals somewhere. So they act as a sort of keepsake. The adventures didn't last for years though. We only really played that game for a few months before I moved away. After that everything sort of stopped, which is sad. D;

 

[Ventus]

When I was a kid (my high school math teacher says that all of the time!!), I used to play many games.

- "Kings and Queens" was basically a tag game I played in Kindergarten with all of the classmates that WEREN'T girls. Back in KG, the boys didn't like the girls and vice versa, so being anything feminine (princess, queen, etc) was a very bad thing. Whoever was "it" was instead the Queen or the Princess, and they had to tag someone to bring more queens/princesses on their side. Whenever everyone was converted to princess, the game ended.

- I played "Link" as well, by myself that is. Slashing the air with my fake sword, doing wondrous things out of the wazoo. Unfortunately I was branded as weird by my parents, so that behavior came to a stop. Well, I still play "Link" when I'm incredibly bored, and I'm 16.

- I played a game called "Combo Chaos" (original game based off Soul Calibur II) with my two little brothers. Essentially we were game characters (Link, Mario, many others) and the protagonists (Link, Mario and many others) would fight the bad guys (e.g Princess Peach, who we called 'Roach' -- at that time I still hated girls). Eventually we drew our own plans [literal plans] for a campaign, we even had save systems and tournaments and such in place. However, playing the game ended when our trampoline (our method of fighting safely -- we needed to jump!) died. I miss Combo Chaos, because it was a way to beat up my brothers without actually hurting them, and it was massive fun.

- This wasn't pretend so much as it was real, but did anyone else have friends over (or maybe your dad or something), where one person would grab your arms and the other one would grab your legs, swing you back and forth for momentum then launch you in some direction? I played this a LOT.

I have many other games but I can't remember them.

 

[Vanilla♥Hero]

Ooh, I played lots: (Pfffft, sorry for the length of this. Kinda long.)

Lions – This was the earliest game I remember playing. My older sister and I would crawl around on the floor and pretend to be lions. That was pretty much it. Yay for developing motor skills! :>

Sinking Sands – My older sister, my older nephew and I used to play this one on special occasions. My memory gets a little fuzzy on this one since I think I spent a lot of time hiding under my sheets from the “mummies”. I just remember that it was in the desert and that my sister had been turned into a swan by an evil magician and all that good stuff.

Fairies – My older sister played this with me. I grew up in a very densely wooded/forested area, so we’d head out to the thicker parts of the woods and build “fairy houses” among the gnarled tree roots, and we looked for the fairies to show up. My sister had a way of making things exiting, so she’d point up in the trees whisper about how the fairies had come, and ask me if I saw them too. Afterwards she’d tell me about how I was her fairy, and she still calls me that.

The Bloody man – This was a game we used to play in Kindergarten. We always got red popsicles on Fridays, I believe, and one of the kids used to smear his popsicle all over his face and hands and call himself the “Bloody Man” and chase after everyone on the playground. Especially the girls.

The floor is lava – Your standard “you can’t touch the floor because THE FLOOR IS LAVA!!!” sort of game. So instead you climb on the furniture and get scolded by your parents. But how can they scold you when they’re clearly burning up in the lava right now?

Pirates – My nephews and I would push the sofas out in the middle of the room and pretend that they were our ships and that we were pirates. Touching the floor for a certain amount of time meant death by sharks or drowning, so if someone went overboard you had to save them and haul them up on ship before they died….

(Insert title that I can’t think of here) – Despite not knowing what to call this game, my nephews and I played this the most. Another fantasy based game, we split my property into districts of sort that we said each housed different elements. Our home district was the earth or forest element, and we pretended to either make alliances with the others or fight battles with them. We decided we were royalty in our forest home, and we built things up in the gnarled trees (easy to climb) and “made weapons” with which to defend ourselves. My father didn’t like it when he found out about our fake weapons and threw them all up in the really tall trees that are harder to climb, but one of my nephews managed to retrieve one and I still have it today. Basically we tied sturdy ropes or thin chains to a cluster of deer antlers and tied a bone handle on the other end to make “maces”, so I can see why my father would’ve been upset since you really could hurt someone or something swinging that around… but that doesn’t change the fact that having them made us feel awesome. Even now, if my nephews come to my house we often visit our little “forest home” even though it’s overgrown now.

There were a lot of others, too, pretending to be Pokemon, ponies, fortune tellers, characters from Lord of the Rings, monsters… there were also a lot of games I’d play by
myself in the woods, making up characters and stories. Anyway. Life is fun.

:>

 

[Shadsie]

*Looks above.* I liked pretending to be animals as a kid. I thought it was pretty universal, like "The Floor is Lava!" which all kids seem to play.

One of the favorite games of my sister's kids was "Dogs," which they'd play with their big Great Dane, which didn't have to pretend.

 

[Drum_]

I wasn't aloud to do this crap.
I would get hit.