Technology is amazing.

Yes, we have cars that can drive themselves and we’re driving around a little roving science lab on Mars, but the greater direct impact on my life involves video games.

Back in my youth, if you were playing Nintendo and something amazing happened, the only way you could go back and see it again was if you happened to be running the video through a VCR.  This is not a thing people did.

On later systems, sports games got instant replay functions, but if the people you wanted to share a replay with weren’t around there still wasn’t a good way to show them what happened.  Even in 2002, the easiest way to tell someone — usually my younger brother — about something amazing was to take a picture on my flip phone and try my best to describe what he was seeing.

(In this case I punted to the Broncos and this guy caught the ball while standing out of bounds, pinning them at the 1-inch line.  I was far too excited when it happened.)

Fast forward to now, and we have what would have seemed like something out of the Jetsons in 2002.  The other day I was playing a game of hockey on the PS4, and after a whistle I cleaned out the opposing skater.  One of his teammates immediately reacted to my late hit by throwing down his gloves and trying to beat in my face:

A slight quality upgrade from that cell phone picture.  And really, this was easier for me to do.  All it required was pressing roughly three buttons and the system uploaded this clip to my YouTube account while I continued playing.

The other cool thing I can do now is play games on the same team as my brother even while we’re sitting on our respective couches 15 miles apart.  We’ve played countless games this way, starting with Madden on Nintendo 64 and continuing with every sports game we’ve had since then.

We’ve long been able to play games against one another, but even that technology was spotty for a long time.  With computer games, at first you could only communicate through little chat windows, and no matter what you were playing the game was often choppy as your systems and connections struggled to keep up.

Now the gameplay is great, and we can actually speak to one another through headsets that plug right into our wireless controllers. 

So when the whistle blows after I commit a penalty (like hitting someone after a play), I can actually hear him when he says “what did you do?”  And he can hear when I laugh and respond with, “my bad.”