Rez, developed by United Game Artists and published by Sega for the Sony Playstation 2 on January 8th, 2002, may be the perfect video game. I don’t say that lightly. With a control scheme consisting of one analog stick and two buttons, and a duration of fewer than 90 minutes, Rez simplifies what a video game is in order to explore what it could be.

Creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who had been interested in synesthesia from a young age, was inspired to create Rez after attending Street Parade, a yearly electronic music event in Zurich, Switzerland. What Mizuguchi wanted to make was a game that gave the player a “good feeling” that increased the more they played. I can’t speak to any other feelings I experienced while playing, but I did have a lot of fun.

The story of how I discovered Rez is really the story of how internet media evolved throughout the 2000s. Naturally, as did anyone of a certain age early in the decade, I had a LiveJournal. In my early teens, I was writing for hobbyist websites. In 2005, I discovered Dailysonic, a This American Life-style podcast that I ended up contributing to several times the following year. I first signed up for Twitter in early 2007, when everything was text-based and you could send a text message to a shortcode and have it posted to your account.

As exciting and huge and rife with possibility as the internet was, discoverability was a problem. One of the earlier attempts in the decade to build a community around aggregation came in the form of Digg, created by TechTV host Kevin Rose. Shortly afterwards, Rose co-founded Revision3, a multi-channel network operating in the nascent web audio and video spaces. One of Revision3’s first series was Diggnation, a podcast recapping the most popular stories on Digg from the past week, hosted by Rose and his The Screen Savers co-host Alex Albrecht. Of course, I listened; I would routinely go for hour-long walks to the end of my street and back and often relied on podcasts for entertainment. I really wish I could say that I absorbed anything useful from all of these hours spent listening, but even in the depths of my memory I can barely remember what Rose and Albrecht sounded like, much less anything they talked about.

What I do remember, though, is visiting the Revision3 website on a whim in early 2009 and discovering the series CO-OP, created by a collective of former The 1Up Show staffers. CO-OP was a show that primarily featured different groups of people talking about video games, which may not sound particularly revelatory, but most of the video content about games I was exposed to growing up was comedic in nature, and so I appreciated the more nuanced discussion. While I did lose interest in Revision3 shortly after, I’m not too proud to admit that I attempted to create a similar show with people talking about video games at the college radio station where I volunteered. It didn’t last very long.

The creators of CO-OP had rebranded themselves as AREA 5, after their shared favourite level in Rez. They were right to do so; in fact, I wouldn’t trust any person who claims that Area 5 isn’t their favourite level. This was all of the convincing I needed, though it did take me a while to actually play the game, only doing so a couple of months ahead of the release of its spiritual successor, Child of Eden.

Rez’s story also involves the internet, though there is little reference to it beyond a brief pre-menu cutscene and the game’s final section. Instead, the story is explained in the game’s manual: the world’s overpopulation and the sheer amount of information online has corrupted cyberspace, and a new network based around an artificial intelligence named Eden has been created to manage the data. Eden becomes confused at an increased flow of information and begins to question its existence, and when faced with the paradoxes of human nature, it begins to shut itself down. You play as a hacker that must navigate this network, destroying viruses and corrupted firewalls in order to reach and reawaken Eden.

In the majority of video games, you have fine control over your character. You can hold up on the analog stick to move forward. You can press X to jump. You can even tap left and press Square to do a kickflip. As a rail shooter, Rez does not offer such control; your character is in a fixed position at all times, and instead of moving through the level, the level moves around you. While you are facing forward by default, the camera will sometimes shift to another angle. It is typically limited to a 150° field of view, though during boss fights a 360° field of view is available. Enemies, collectibles, or incoming projectiles can be targeted by moving the left stick over them and pressing X to lock on with your laser. Every time you lock on to or destroy an enemy, it adds to the game’s soundtrack. You can lock on to up to eight targets at once, and upon releasing X you will fire at them. Since releasing the X button is what destroys enemies, it’s optimal to hold it down in order to lock on to as many targets as possible before releasing it.

There are two types of collectibles, or support items, in Rez: blue Progress Nodes, which fill the Progress Gauge in the bottom left of the heads-up display, and red Overdrive Nodes, which fill the Overdrive Gauge in the bottom right. Progress Nodes are further divided into regular Progress Nodes and 3X Progress Nodes, which are visually distinct. Each Progress Node fills up your Progress Gauge by one block, while 3X Progress Nodes add three blocks. Once you have filled the Progress Gauge, your character will evolve to the next form. This is the game’s health system; the higher your form, the more hits you are able to take. For the majority of the game there are six forms, though you will have access to a seventh during the game’s final sequence. As the character evolves, their design gets more elaborate, progressing from a simple wireframe sphere through various human forms and culminating in an abstraction. When you’re in the highest available form, the Progress Gauge disappears from the HUD.

You can store up to four Overdrive Nodes, which can be activated with the Circle button. Overdrive functions as an auto-turret, firing at all enemies on the screen for a limited time. This is incredibly useful, especially during boss fights, where it is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of projectiles bearing down on you. I imagine that people don’t need help to feel overwhelmed.

The final element in the HUD is the Information Window in the top left, which is a scrolling text log of your various actions: locking onto enemies, firing the laser, collecting support items, and so on. All of these things are already communicated visually, so the Information Window is a bit superfluous. However, as you are playing as a hacker who is traversing cyberspace, it is at least thematically appropriate for your activity to appear in this format.

Rez consists of five playable Areas, with the first four unlocked at the start. These four areas are representations of historically-significant civilizations: Area 1 is Egyptian-themed; Area 2 takes inspiration from India; Area 3 is based on Saudi Arabia; Area 4 is patterned after China. While you can play them in any order, you need to achieve 100% analyzation on all of them before Area 5 unlocks. With the exception of Area 5, each Area is further divided into 11 Layers; each Layer is a short sequence possessing a finite number of enemies. In order to achieve 100% analyzation, you need to navigate all of an Area’s Layers and defeat the boss at the end. At the end of every Layer except the final one in an Area, you’ll need to shoot a Password Protector to unlock a Network Gate, then shoot the Network Gate a further eight times to advance to the next Layer.

Interestingly, it is possible to complete an entire Area without passing through any Network Gates, as enemy spawns are static; they will always appear in the same patterns with the same timing, including subsequent Password Protectors, regardless of what Layer you’re on. However, doing so is a disservice, as the game’s visuals and soundtrack increase in intensity and detail as you progress through the Layers.

At the end of every Area, you are scored on three things: how much of the Area you analyzed, how many enemies you shot down, and how many support items you collected. Opening every Network Gate and collecting every support item are easy enough to do, but shooting down every enemy on screen encourages mastery - knowing which enemies spawn where and when, how long they are on screen for, and how many hits they take to defeat. A tactic Rez frequently employs is to spawn in enemies after the Password Protector has appeared, forcing you to react quickly in order to maintain a perfect run.

While the game has only a single difficulty, bosses have dynamic difficulty depending on the amount of enemies you’ve shot down as you’ve progressed through the Area; the better you’re doing, the harder these encounters will be. There are three difficulties: Mega, Giga, and Tera, with the version you’re facing indicated in a pre-fight text box. Every boss fight is made up of several phases; during some fights, there are only certain phases in which you can do damage. If you survive against a boss for a certain period of time without depleting their health bar, possibly because you were busy trying to defend yourself from the barrage of projectiles they launched at you instead, they will self-destruct. Even if you’re not particularly good at the game, Rez wants to keep pushing you forward.

Area 5 is one of the best final levels I've played in a video game. Where the previous Areas were simulacrums of ancient civilizations, Area 5 details the evolutionary process, life’s ascent from the sea to the sky and the stars. As an aside, one of my most precious possessions is a painting I had commissioned in 2006 from the artist Julie Keene depicting a similar scenario. If I had to articulate why I’ve liked it so much for all these years, aside from being adorable, it’s that it serves as a reminder that though we may be bound by things we cannot change, our dreams have no such restrictions.

Where previous Areas contained wireframe versions of historic architecture, Area 5 presents you with digital abstractions of the natural world. You travel across the ocean floor and through forests made of wireframes and mesh, battling representations of spiders and whales. While the Area is structured similarly to those that came before it, the term Layer is not used, and there are no Password Protectors. Instead, the ending of every section features a Gate of Truth that you need to open. Passing through a gate transitions you to the next section, during which text appears to explain life’s journey.

At the end of the Area, your character attains the final form, followed by a boss rush where you fight simplified versions of the firewalls you defeated in the previous Areas. Between each of these encounters, Eden speaks to you, asking you who you are, why you’re doing this, and if you’re afraid. She asks you to save her, leading to the final boss fight, where she gradually reconstitutes herself and awakens once more.

In order to achieve Rez’s best ending, you need to shoot down every enemy in Area 5 and complete the game in the final form. This is a tall order that takes a lot of attempts; in the end, you get to watch a just slightly-different cutscene and you receive unique text after the credits. It is a shining example of an ending that a certain type of person would encourage you to “just go watch on YouTube”.

The internet is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, but it’s also one that we’ve taken for granted. When I was growing up, there were so many websites to visit, so many communities to be a part of, so many things to experience. I’d like to hope that it wasn’t just youthful naiveté, but it’s hard not to argue that sort of curiosity no longer exists. We cluster around huge websites owned by billion-dollar corporations, fully aware that they’re mostly horrible, simply because people we know use them. We’ve become obsessed with convenience and are indifferent when that convenience has a cost. Rez may not have been as prescient as Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty in predicting the future of the internet, but I think it's fair to say that it’s in the same ballpark.

Prognostication ability aside, there is nothing like Rez, and there will never be another Rez - even Child of Eden, which is a much more modern experience, can’t stand against its progenitor. It is something that anyone can enjoy their time with, yet overcoming its challenges requires a concentrated effort. It is brief, yet it always leaves you wanting more. It may be the perfect video game, and for that, it deserves placement on

KEVIN AND MATTHEW’S LIST OF THE TOP TEN MOST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME.