Never Graduate: Bully and Nostalgia

I have a problem with playing games and never finishing them. For me the conclusion of a game brings all of the fun and excitement I had while playing crashing down. It stops the story, the character development and all of the great experiences you had within the game. Simply it just ends.

The game that defines this experience perfectly for me is Bully. For those that don’t know Bully is a game developed by Rockstar (The creators of Grand Theft Auto). The game takes place at a school for delinquent children called Bullworth Academy. You play the role of bad boy Jimmy Hopkins who takes on missions for the various groups in the school (nerds, jocks, preps, etc.). The story plays out very much like Grand Theft Auto and you can customize Jimmy in a similar fashion to characters in GTA. The weird thing is Bully is one of my favorite games of all time and yet I have never beat it.

It is hard for me to believe I haven’t beaten the game and I have been playing it since it was first released. The first time I played it was in my friend’s basement, on his PlayStation 2 back in 2006, 2006?! That was 10 years ago and I still haven’t seen Jimmy graduate from school! Adding to the craziness of this is the fact that I have purchased the game on four separate platforms. Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and now PlayStation 4. Yikes!

I promised myself I would finally beat the game over the summer of this year but now it is fall and Jimmy is still stuck in perpetual school purgatory. Poor kid.

So why am I stuck in this bizarre limbo of end or never end?

I think I narrowed it down to two distinct reasons: 1.) It represents childhood nostalgia and 2.) If I never beat the game it will never end.

In a weird way Bully represents the comfort of my childhood. I could go over to my friend’s house and play out Jimmy’s story without a care in the world. Playing Bully as an adult reminds me of all the good things about being a child, care free fun. You could play with your friends, go to the movies, go to a carnival, play innocent pranks on people and ride bikes without worrying about any consequences, all of these things you can do in Bully.

So it is only natural that if I never beat the game I can keep going back to it and relive every moment without bringing it to an end. Not knowing what happens to Jimmy Hopkins doesn’t matter to me because the whole experience of getting there is what I play for. Maybe I will get around to beating the game someday but until then I am comfortable replaying all of Jimmy’s adventures at Bullworth Academy as long as they keep feeding my nostalgia trip.