Remembering the Harry Potter Video Games

“Yer a pirate, Harry”

I am incredibly busy this week (which seems to be a running trend this fall), so this is probably going to be a decently short post. But I’ve decided it’s going to be about two of my favorite things; video games and Harry Potter. Luckily, I’m able to combine them into one thing; Harry Potter video games, which exist in excess. Isn’t the world a wonderful place?

I got into video games at a young age. And while maybe I wasn’t into The Legend of Zelda or Dark Souls at that time (Dark Souls didn’t even exist yet), I did play a variety of different games. I distinctly recall receiving a GameBoy Advance SP for my 5th (?) birthday, and I took that thing everywhere with me. I brought it on car trips, I brought it to parties, I brought it to funerals, I brought it to the shitter, literally everywhere. I poured who knows how many hours into that little blue box, and it was great.

I’ll probably talk about that more at a later time, but for the most part, those games were standard platformers. I remember playing Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2, Yoshi’s Island, and Frogger, among others. But then there were a few other games that I was really into, and these games were on my parents’ desktop computer at home. There were a lot of them, and I remember most of them quite distinctly. Sim Park. I Spy Spooky Mansion. Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, which is somehow still in business. Like with the GameBoy, I’ll talk about those games sometime. But today? Today I want to talk about the old Harry Potter games.

My first experience with Harry Potter came from the owl scene in the first movie. My parents showed me this scene when I was like two because I loved owls. They didn’t even show me the rest of the movie because I was, you know, two. Yeah, the owl thing is pretty deep-seated. But that was all I needed, because from then on my connection to both owls and Harry Potter was set in stone. I’ve loved the series ever since, even if the newest movies are hot, confusing garbage and J.K. Rowling’s pulled a George Lucas and gone off the edge.

Somewhere along the line, my parents made the connection between Harry Potter and video games for me, though, because they bought me several Harry Potter games. There are three that I can remember, though I sometimes get them mixed up in my head; there’s the Chamber of Secrets, the Prisoner of Azkaban, and the LEGO Creator game that I forgot existed until just now. I played the hell out of all of those games, though Chamber of Secrets was always my favorite.

It’s interesting, though, that I played these so much, because for nowadays I can really only remember bits and pieces. I remember that I played them, I remember certain segments, and I have flashes and images in my memory from those games, but I couldn’t necessarily tell you anything specific about them. I mean, to be fair, I was very young back then, and it’s been many years, so who can blame me? Besides myself, anyway?

Most of my memories revolve around Quidditch, actually. That’s what I remember the most from any of these games. The LEGO Creator one had Quidditch. That one also had trains and some LEGO sets you could build, and I remember those vaguely, but mostly it’s just Quidditch in my head. The Chamber of Secrets one had Quidditch, and I used to ask my mom to help me beat the levels, because I was five. But she wasn’t really much better at the games than I was, so who knows how we made it past those parts. It also had a dueling segment where you could duel other students, and that was fun, too. I remember that. I remember weird turtle things and throwing gnomes into holes. I remember the whomping willow. And, in the third one, I remember Buckbeak.

Other than all that, though, my memories are pretty vague. I remember some greenhouse segment in the third game where you turn into a rabbit, and how you had to collect beans in all of the games. I also remember a scene where you had to fly around to catch the key to open the door to the Sorcerer’s stone, except that’s in the first game/book/movie so I guess I played that one too? But there’s an ice slide in my head somewhere, and a bunch of jumping puzzles and weird bonus rooms and Dumbledore. And for a while, that’s all I thought I remembered, and perhaps would ever remember, because the games aren’t on Steam and I have no idea where to get them. Until I, *ahem*, found an old copy.

To my surprise and delight, I was actually able to get an old copy of Chamber of Secrets working. And, to my further surprise, I remembered everything that happened. I couldn’t necessarily point to something and say “Yeah, that’ll happen next,” but playing that game brought back such a rush of memories. All the sound effects were familiar. The goofy dialogue, spoken by voice actors who are most definitely not Daniel Radcliffe, was all familiar. Even the textures and puzzles were kind of familiar to me. It all came flooding back, and all it took was playing the game for just a few minutes. It was incredible.

Of course, besides realizing that I spent way more time on these games as a kid than I thought, I also realized that they weren’t quite as good as I remembered. The movement was wonky, the acting was lackluster and the cutscenes are jank, it’s very much a game meant for children, all that sort of stuff. Some of it I can write off as the faults in the emulation of the program, but not all of it. Part of me thinks that I should just let sleeping dogs lie. But then again, it was still so much fun.

One of these days, when I have the time, I think I’ll get all of those old Harry Potter games working. I’ll try and get LEGO Island 2 working while I’m at it, I think. Because I do want to see how much else of these games I remember. It might be a fun weekend activity, perhaps while intoxicated with friends (I can legally say that now, because I’m 21). Because while the games didn’t exactly have a huge impact on me on an emotional or developmental level, or at least not to the same extent that the books and movies did, they were a pretty solid part of my childhood. Or at least the video game portion of my childhood. And maybe one day I’ll write another article about this, after I’ve revisited all those old games and have a better grasp on them. Because right now, all I can really think about it the fact that when I first booted up the games, I was shocked to find that they did not have the movie actors.

Anyway, until then, if I really want to play some Harry Potter video games, there’s always the actually very good LEGO Harry Potter games.