Christmas is all about friendship and love, so what better way to celebrate the seasons than to Mount your friends? Usually, my gifts at Christmas involve a giant tub of jelly beans I’ll never eat (because I don’t really like jelly beans), some chocolate, PJs, a few too many Lynx cans that make me question what my family thinks of my BO, and some cash for the Steam Winter sales. My friends get similar stuff, so we all agreed one year to buy Mount Your Friends, a co-op game all about climbing each other to make giant fleshy towers.
That’s how most of my Christmas evenings went (playing with friends, not fleshy towers). I’d scurry away from the family drama and the bickering to my room where I’d find friends doing the same, and we’d all agree to buy a new co-op title that we could spend all night playing. One year it was Worms, the other it was Bloons, then No Time To Relax, Call of Duty Zombies DLC… the list goes on. The one constant growing up was that I’d end the night laughing with some buds online, and the one game that stuck out more than any other was Mount Your Friends.
I played it the year it came out, so I was 14. I can’t remember exactly what my life was like back then, since a lot of my childhood is empty blotches with the odd splatter of paint making up hazy memories that I’m still puzzling together. Either way, Christmas was always a weird time. The day itself was usually fun—I remember that much—but I’d often have already lost the holiday spirit by November, and be completely burnt out before dinner. But times with my friends cut through all of that, even if we were playing the most immature shlock on Steam. £4 to dive in and have a few hours of fun? It was a steal, and I’d save the rest for the bigger titles I’d been waiting to see a price cut on.
This was pre-Discord, and TeamSpeak was the most ‘90s looking pile of crap I’d ever seen. Anyone who asked you to use it was a lost cause, or a World of Warcraft player, which is basically the same thing. Instead, we resorted to Skype (never native Steam calls)—it was usually low-quality and annoying to set-up, but it got the job done. And it didn’t look like a webpage from an era before I was born, so that’s a plus. We’d all join a group call, scramble to get setup, one of us would struggle to connect (because he was in Denmark or France or something), and when it all finally clicked, we’d sit back and play until Christmas was over. I remember rushing around the house, looking for an Xbox 360 controller, because mine was broken and playing Mount Your Friends with a mouse and keyboard was a nightmare. I found my dad’s old one and plugged it in. I don’t think I ever returned it, but it was the same controller I beat Dark Souls with for the first time.
Before we’d even begun building our towers, we all set out to make our characters unique. I had a steel-gray character we all called Schwarzenegger, and my mate had tried to make himself. The aim is to build up a tower using your limbs, but it often resorted to blatant sabotage and trying to ruin the tower for everyone, creating obstacles that were nearly impossible to climb in the time limit, meaning nobody could reach the top to extend it. Before we even reached that point, we spent the better part of two hours trying to figure out the controls – think QWOP but vertical. I never played it after that Christmas, so it remains a little memory capsule of that year, but I wouldn’t go back and swap it for any other game, even if it was a bit crap. That was its charm and what made it so fun to sit in a call and play around with.
I have a muddy history with Christmas. The whole season tends to put me in a funk, because there’s so much baggage that I’m still not completely comfortable confronting, but I’m glad to have these memories I made with my friends. Even if we didn’t know each other in real-life, it was nice to have people to spend time with on those nights, playing hours of Minecraft, Call of Duty, Mount Your Friends, and even Counter-Strike. Yeah, I played Surf on Christmas, once. I’m not proud of it, either.
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