Why?

"Why?" is a question I asked myself as a kid. My dad would watch golf on TV pretty often, and I just couldn't understand the appeal:

"Why do you watch this?"

"Why do people like this?"

"Why does this take so long?"

"Why can't we watch something else?"

"Why does anyone watch this?"

Thankfully, my dad was and is a pretty laid back guy, so he'd answer my questions without getting too annoyed, and then get back to watching golf.

When my mom bought my dad a Game Boy for Christmas in 1991, he got Nintendo's Golf (1990) with it. Whenever he got tired of Tetris, my dad would play Golf, and whenever I couldn't find where my dad had put the Tetris cartridge, I'd play Golf out of a voracious appetite for all things Game Boy. Eventually something clicked, and I began to play Golf even when I knew where the Tetris cartridge was. To this day, I don't know what the appeal was, but I quickly found myself playing Golf four hours on end - it remains an odd outlier of a childhood filled with Mario and Mega Man X.

Some years later, I got into collecting old games. Games I remembered from when I was a kid, games I never heard of, and games that existed well before my parents even met. Being a new collector, I went for quantity, not quality. I bought as many games as I could without accounting for if I'd ever actually play them all. Eventually I snapped out of this mindset and bought games worth playing, but not before making a startling realization:

I have a ton of golf games.

Upon realizing this, I again began to ask myself "Why?".

"Why are there so many golf games?"

"Why do people need so many interpretations of the same game?"

"Why are so many of these by Japanese developers?"

"Why does this game have a robot?"

"Why did I buy all of these?"

Yes, it seems that golf is one of the most well represented, but rarely talked about genres of video game in our time. There are hundreds of these games. Most are completely forgettable, some are terrible, and a few are completely insane. 8-Bit, 16-Bit, Home console, arcade, handheld, PC, 2D, 3D - I say we try them all, or at least as many we can before we go insane. Why, you ask?

Why not?