The Powerful Emotional Pull of Old Video Games (2014)
nautil.us
nautil.us
From a user's perspective, the work they've done getting games to work on modern systems is alone worth the price of admission -- I must have spent hours [4] tweaking Dosbox configs to try to get my copy of Master of Magic to play music (the game directory that began with a 7-floppy installation in the mid-90s has been copied to every system I've had since then). Buying (another) copy of the game from GOG and getting a Dosbox config that Just Works, was well worth the modest price.
From the publisher's perspective I'm sure it's a win as well -- I could easily believe they gave up on ever realizing any more income from that IP a decade before they were approached by GOG.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com
[3] https://www.gog.com/support/website_help/what_is_gog_com
[4] The finickiness isn't unique to Dosbox, I remember having to fiddle with the in-game settings for a while running bare-metal on at least one '90s era PC as well.
Archmage + channeler + confusion spam can win so many otherwise unwinnable battles. And yes, I have alechemist to keep up the mana supply, so I have almost no spells or troops and still win fights with my magic spirit scouts.
Naturally I use Rjack's portrait as I'd prefer not to face him in game with a strategy like this.
Steam is my go-to place when I want to support a company that spent years persecuting their own customers for getting refunds.
1) The gameplay is often much easier to pick up quickly without a crutch mode because there were fewer degrees of freedom.
2) The artistry was at times amazing. Orson Wells said that "the enemy of art is the absence of limitations" and I think the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, in particular, demonstrated the truth of that maxim.
One more-recent case that really stands out is Command & Conquer - Red Alert 2. This game had much simpler graphics than later RTS games, so the focus was mostly on gameplay. IMHO, this was the best RTS ever created[1], and the reason for this was that it was sort of at the peak of perfection for its level of graphical and spatial limitations.
1. I know Star Craft was epic as well, and Generals from the remaining remnants of Westwood combined with EA was great also. And... Dune. Red Alert, for me, was the sort of Vivaldi[1.1] culmination that built on all these past successes, just before the age of "Moar Triangles!" reached RTS.
1.1 (I heard you liked footnotes) Vivaldi, the Baroque composer, built upon the style of Corelli and others before him, even copied some aspects of their musical styles, but this is what made his music so great.
EDIT: figured I could be less lazy and find out myself. It appears you can play online through https://cncnet.org/red-alert-2. Now all I need to do is figure out where to buy it and how to make it work on my Mac. I suppose it's old enough I might be able to play via a virtual machine.
OpenRA looks like it's for OS X as well! Man, I feel like I just stumbled into heaven!
I still remember yelling out loud with surprise the first time enemy artillery destroyed some of my aircraft while firing on ground targets further away.
Sadly the 'moar triangles' era began shortly afterwards and definitely abandoned the simplicity of well balanced gameplay and solid game engines, for flashy graphics and other cheap lures.
Total Annihilation
Supreme Commander
Planetary Annihilation
The amazing thing about these games is how much longevity they have due to quality design. There is an active community of players around TA still to this day. Who have done some pretty amazing things over the years... The game is routinely played with more than 10 times the number of units it was 'designed for' with extra large custom maps and LAN games that can take hours to play out.
Supreme Commander came out and upped the ante, TA had scaled to massive RTS battles where micromanagement became nearly pointless. Supreme Commander goes further, units range massively in size, so much so that you often spend most of the game zoomed out, controlling an army of thousands of coloured dots spread out over maps up to 80km x 80km
Then somehow they found the crazy inspiration to go further. Not content with nuclear weapons deforming terrain with explosions so big your units are mere specs on the map if you zoom out to admire the fireball... Planetary Annihilation is everything you imagine when you read the name. Spherical planets swarming with thousands and thousands of tanks robots planes and ships, satellites in orbit, rockets, teleportation and other crazy machines to transport your army between planets and moons, massive asteroid pushing engines that let you push asteroids and moons out of their orbits and use the planets themselves as weapons of warfare.
TLDR: Yep, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, and Planetary Annihilation are three of the best RTS games ever, if not THE best RTS games ever then clearly the best Strategic RTS games ever.
Total Annihilation Intro Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6mZZiI4ShQ
Supreme Commander Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItDVrkLkYXw
Planetary Annihilation Launch Trailer - https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=enzglv8sLn8
Planetary Annihilation: Titans Launch Trailer - https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=gpZWAZwoNz0
There is still active development on some of the fan sites on a 3.9 and 4.0 'fan patch', which will also have corresponding groups of players using the patches.
There is online multiplayer via both virtual LAN / hamachi style setups and via a few tools like GameRanger that also help keep these older games connected.
The community is spread thin, but still thriving, since the simplicity of the game makes it so easy to keep enjoying it. I'm looking forward to its 20th anniversary on September 30th next year (2017).
Also, limitations means the spirit of the game emerges stronger.
The result is, to be brutally honest, that reading Beowulf is a chore; most Shakespeare works need a walkthrough; Dante's Inferno is fun but we'll never appreciate it in the same way as XIII-century political junkies did. And so on and so forth for huge chunks of literature.
In short, most old literature is not as accessible or enjoyable as contemporary pulp. You have to accept these limitations as you consume it; which is why Plato does not sell as much as J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown. Similarly with games, we cannot expect today's kids to appreciate what came before them. Some will, some won't. That's just how it is.
Again, this generalization is not valid for me, there are lot of counter examples like Marcus Aurelius. But apart from that, it's mostly a fashion problem. Sure the fashionable item will sell more (it is usually designed for). That tells nothing on the rest. You are right that we will never have the same context, and that some artworks are starting to be beyond enjoyability, but it's not always the case. For music for example there is folk, not fashionable but enjoyable even for kids, and maybe one day people will play an old Zelda as they could have listened to Stairway to heaven.
>we cannot expect today's kids to appreciate what came before them
Anectodically I've had many opportunities to play old video games with kids and they all appreciated them, in fact I'm not sure they could tell that it was old games (Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi's Island (Snes) on the top my head).
Edit: to continue the analogy with music, it would have been has there was a race to write the symphony with the most instruments, with ads telling you to always upgrade to the next symphony for your listening pleasure. Then one day some people started to notice that some ancient guy/girl with only their guitar or voice was as well enjoyable, and if not a better a different emotional medium. It seems obvious but for video games every time you say that some old games had something that we may be missing you get the usual "you are a nostalgic old fart"
> Again, this generalization is not valid for me, there are lot of counter examples like Marcus Aurelius.
Great example: we don't have the original, we rely on translations of a single XIV century copy written in a dead language (classic Greek). Depending on translations, we may or may not enjoy it -- I'd argue you probably wouldn't read it in XV century Catholic Latin. In other words, we love playing the (excellent) 3D version of Sid Meier's "Pirates!" rather than the original crappy-looking 2D version; in a few years, we'll probably be playing the VR port. That's fine, but it requires some effort -- either by us tolerating the crappy original, or by developers/translators constantly bridging the cultural gap.
Similarly, folk music might require instruments that are expensive or hard to find these days, like an accordion or concertina. Again, enjoying it requires effort at some level.
> Anectodically I've had many opportunities to play old video games with kids and they all appreciated them
Sure, but would they go out looking for SNES emulators on their own, rather than looking forward to XCOM2 or some shiny new MMORPG? Unlikely. Granted, the "side-scroller platform" genre is a bit fossilized, so it's probably easier to approach classic games in that category; but a lot of other genres have aged really badly. No self-respecting teenager would take Double Dragon seriously these days, nor any Atari 2600 game.
In short: like with literature, appreciating old games requires extra work at some level.
And hey, enough kids go looking for SNES emulators that the average user age in a lot of ROM Hacking communities is between 13-18. The vast majority of people at SMW Central are well under 18 years of age, and likely didn't grow up with the SNES game:
Best of all, my boys now want to work together to make a game. My oldest has already made an FF clone on his TI-84. If their interest holds, it could be an awesome project to work on together.
Heck, I do, and I'm one of the people who never played either til then.
http://www.nindb.net/snes/yoshis-island/
That game itself was impressive in its mechanics too, given that it had situations where enemies behaved in unique ways that were never likely to come up in the actual game.
Or a game which I still remember quite fondly from 2001, Wario Land 4. There, despite using traditional sprite animation, every single level had at least one different tileset and background (usually two or three), its own music (which had things like echo effects added for caves and sped up or slowed down based on on screen events) and tons of details that were exceedingly unlikely for the player to notice. Like a whole tileset for a single room or two, with tons of animations. Or music specifically for part of an ending medley... if the player did really poorly overall. Or a sound test where every single song was exclusive to the sound test.
That's the kind of thing that was more common in older games. A huge amount of attention to detail and small secrets scattered everywhere.
However, I somewhat disagree about your first point. Some old school games are not easy to pick up; some are so punishing as to be almost non-viable for today's standards. Some games came with a complex manual that you absolutely had to read (and it was really hard for those of us living in countries where piracy was the only option).
For example, some 90s RPGs are so untractable and complex I never had the patience to learn how to play them. I'm thinking for example of Darklands, which has many fans in the abandonware community, but which would probably never succeed these days.
Much for that reason, Ocarina of Time has always been top of my list for nostalgic games, and the score was arguably some of Koji Kondo's finest work.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7PqehW2X7mHp3UW2Ix5Z85...
However, I did get Bitmap Brother's Magic Pockets... and now the intro music is stuck in my head... Betty Boo.
On a tangential note, does anyone remember many games that had their soundtrack on audio cassette? I had a copy of Star Glider 2, which had a synth-y track on tape, which you were meant to play on your hifi while playing the game.
I remember the (terrible) home computer conversions of Outrun came with a tape of the arcade music, which was some consolation.
I tried playing it again recently though and, although there was the nostalgia there, but it just wasn't the same. As someone else mentioned, some games just haven't aged well unfortunately.
I've been going back over the past couple years and replaying them. For a couple of reasons: there's the sense of closure of having finished something I started a dozen years ago (shouts to Turtle Rock, which Elementary School Justin did not have the fortitude to complete). More, though, I just wanted to see if these games which I spent so much energy and imagination on a while back were worth the investment.
I've been struck by how mature and powerful these games were in their own right:
- Earthbound is this dense, bizarre paean to Western culture also wrapped up in this story about losing your innocence and the creepiest final boss fight ever;
- Link's Awakening forces players to answer the difficult question of why you'd want to wake up from an amazing dream;
- Even Final Fantasy has a narrative device that I've yet to see replicated since, of having the main villain straight up win, and then forcing you to deal with the fallout and rebuild from the literal dust and ashes.
These things are for sure enhanced by nostalgia, and a common argument against these games are that you're looking at them "through rose-tinted glasses" (the implication being that their luster is gone without my memories of playing them as a child). I'm not so sure that's true -- but, more importantly, I'm not so sure that matters.
In a lot of ways, it feels like having gotten coffee with an old friend after a long time apart, and remarking on how both you and they have matured so much. If you have fond memories of video games, I recommend you blow the dust off of the proverbial cartridge and treat yourself.
What was different back then was the costs involved in developing a commercial game. As the appetite for high-end graphics has increased, so too has the cost of producing games, which has led to fewer risks being taken by big game publishers. Thankfully the indie game scene is stronger than ever, and has proven to be a good outlet for game developers when experimenting with new ideas.
That's exactly what I remember people saying about then-modern games in the 90s.
We all did a 6 hour tour of super metroid, it was great. There is something to this for sure. Hearing original Zelda music transports me back to being a kid instantly.
I wonder if anyone has the source for them still...
EDIT: oh, no. I'll see you guys later. telnet://twgs.classictw.com
I lost many hours playing this game.
strategy games like master of magic or total annihilation, were faction had a distinct feeling from each other, even if some were more powerful, are almost impossible today where multiplayer is a large portion of the game and necessarily need to be balanced, which causes many games' faction to feel reskin of each other with just minor changes and not really unique mechanics.
Neither of us play the SNES at any other time.
There's not much innovation anymore. Modern AAA titles are rife with handholding, patronizing, unimaginative and focus-grouped-to-hell stories (because those sell the best), DLC bait, and other such tiresome tropes.
I remember the 90's being a time when there was a lot of innovation and experimentation because nobody had it down pat what would sell the best. You'd never see a Mister Mosquito[1] or a Vangers[2] or an Urban Assault[3] nowadays. You might see an indie homage or two, but that's totally different from having a large studio throwing resources at the wall and seeing what sticks.
It's a time I dearly miss. You want to know what the most memorable game in recent memory was to me? Undertale[4] . A retro-styled indie RPG with graphics that could probably have been pulled off 20 years ago on the SNES, but in spite of that limitation, its story and sound design is absolutely top shelf and is, in my mind, one of those games that everyone should play at least once.
Commercialism ruins everything. Sure, the usual response to this is "but there are more games than ever, and it's easier for anyone to jump in", which is true, but it still feels like as if there's some magic that was long since lost, only occasionally recaptured by a clever group of developers.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Mosquito
[2]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264080/
To me, the only hope is to have lots and lots and lots of games made. Whenever we wax philosophical about old games, no one ever mentions the absolute piles of junk that were made. And then some were good, but not great (compare Super Monkey Ball to Marble Madness) I loved Marble Madness as a little kid but couldn't really wrap my head around the controls, whereas SMB was fun right off the bat (and I was still terrible at it - but for actual gameplay reasons now).
Remember Roller Coaster Tycoon? The whole game felt rock solid and hand crafted. The 3D version added the ability to ride. But the world was so much less pretty. By contrast, look at the evolution of 3D in the Myst series; the game was supposed to be played like Uru, but computers could only handle HyperCard at the time. And contrast again with Into the Manhole, which really ought to be flash cards (or like flipping pages in a book - I remember the animations surprising and delighting me as a kid).
TL;DR: don't worry, it's not all bad. Some games need constraints, and people will build engines just for that. And some don't. But the important thing is: more games! (So more amazing ones trickle out).
Soma: Story, Atmosphere, Thought Provoking
Deus Ex HR: Story, Atmosphere, Thought Provoking
BioShock 1: Story, Thought Provoking
DragonAge 1,3 / MassEffect 1,2,3: Story, Characters
Witcher 3: Story, Characters
Portal 2: Story, Mechanics
Undertale: Story, Mechanics
Alien Isolation: Story, Atmosphere, Mechanics
Mirror's Edge: Mechanics
Braid: Mechanics
Dark Souls / Bloodborne: Mechanics? (Haven't played)
Blood Dragon: 1980s simulator
I can identify the "commercialization" trend that you're talking about if and only if I focus my attention to a single franchise or a single aspect of a single franchise. Example: Mass Effect lost its hard SF edge in 2, 3 but the characters and mechanics got better. Starcraft lost its story and character edge in 2, but the mechanics got better. Bioshock lost its philosophical depth in Infinite but the story and characters got better.
Overlaid on top of this is a trend of increasing production value. Every franchise gives you some facet to point at and say "devs don't care about X, only production value, boo." This ignores the boring explanation that it's hard to churn out sequels that exceed the original in each and every possible point of comparison. Sequels need to be evaluated on their own merits and the industry needs to be judged as a whole. Otherwise everything is guaranteed to look like it's going downhill.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Let me know your favorites and I'll promise to give at least one a try.
Then there's Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate 2. Between those you have some of the best western RPGs ever made.
I find a lot of modern gaming to be incredibly shallow. Good for a single play session, but I put the game down and never return.
It's a bit of a shame really; these companies spend a fortune on fancy graphics and it just doesn't matter one bit to me. I'd rather play Dwarf Fortress in all its ASCII glory than play Destiny or The Division.
> I find a lot of modern gaming to be incredibly shallow.
Sturgeon's Law.
> Good for a single play session but I put the game down and never return.
You seem awfully quick to ascribe this to game quality even though there are significant confounding factors: growing up and having more demands on your time, the opportunity cost of abundant digitally downloadable games, youtube's ability to let you explore alternative choices without spending many hours on a replay, etc.
Just so we're on the same page, though, have you played modern BioWare or CD Projekt Red titles? It's not uncommon for them to gate entire alternative chunks of the game behind player choices. 10x so with low-production-value assets. If someone can look at Witcher 3 and call it shallow and not replayable then I'm pretty sure that we're never going to see eye to eye on the subject of game quality.
> It's a bit of a shame really; these companies spend a fortune on fancy graphics and it just doesn't matter one bit to me.
That is a shame. Are you sure you're actually trying to appreciate the artwork, though? Being dismissive of graphics is certainly the "hip" position in most nerd circles I've been in -- something I became keenly aware of back when I was doing CG in academia and considering it as a career path. I can still picture the sneers on my friends' faces and hear their dismissive snorts when I would start to go on about the artistic accomplishments in this or that title. It sucked, although it wasn't what drove me away (the shit wages and working conditions did that on their own). There's nothing wrong with appreciating other facets of a game more than graphics, but if someone gives graphics 0 or negative weight then I tend to suspect they're primarily trying to build "nerd cred" rather than trying to enjoy games. Like the kid after a movie who can talk about nothing but loopholes.
> I'd rather play Dwarf Fortress in all its ASCII glory than play Destiny or The Division.
Are these unbiased samples or are you comparing your favorite from one era to a mediocre pick from another? How many of the games on my favorite list (addendum: I forgot Spec Ops: The Line) have you played and found wanting compared to your favorites from previous eras? In particular, would you apply the word "shallow" to any (in the facets I marked as strengths)?
I'm genuinely curious as to whether our difference of opinion is due to different tastes or having played different titles.
Well, it depends on your point of view. Some people don't play games to appreciate the art at all. For some, the art is purely a functional part of the puzzle that allows for immersion (such as in my case).
For example, I recently started playing Dark Souls (which I'm head-over-heels for, by the way), and while the visuals could be described as "gorgeous", even at the low-res and detail I'm playing at to keep it responsive. But when I see amazing vistas in the game which include castles and bridges and turrets, those are places I actually get to visit in the game, and not through some weird warp, but by slowly working my way there, usually in a very circuitous route.
Are there games which advance the state-of-the-art with regard to graphics and art? Undoubtedly. Could I point them out to you? Not a chance. I don't have the prerequisite knowledge or experience to even notice in most cases, much less know where to begin in a task such as that. But I do appreciate that there is good art in the games, to the degree that it helps my immersion in the game. Sometimes that means lovingly crafted pixel art, sometimes it means detailed models and textures. It really depends on how it's integrated.
My comment about the graphics was really about how a lot of these assets are only on screen for a few minutes. Some art team has spent days working on a boss character and I'm through it in 10 minutes or so. So much development time spent on such little effect, given that I really wouldn't have noticed the difference if they'd spent half the time. Whereas the games that really captivate me (like CK2 or Factorio) have relatively simple graphics, but really deep gameplay that keeps you coming back.
It's about priorities in development, I wish they spent more time on gameplay!
I've played almost all the games on your list, some of them are great (favs: Portal, Deus Ex, Dragon Age). I notice you didn't list Dragon Age 2, that game sums up a lot of my feelings about modern game development. I would also lump Mass Effect 2 in there for similar reasons. ME 1 was a great RPG with good gameplay mechanics, ME 2 was a beautiful looking cover based shooter (boring!) with mediocre RPG mechanics. That's what the game industry has come to, because it's far easier to churn out mediocre gameplay with fancy graphics than it is to actually make a truly great game.
But yes, some of them are still lacking. Dragon Age and Mass Effect are still fairly simplistic in gameplay compared to Baldurs Gate 2 (or the old Final Fantasies), and simplistic in story compared to Planescape. Bioshock was beautiful and had a great story, but System Shock 2 still had far better gameplay. Likewise with Deus Ex HR and Deus Ex 1.
Mirrors Edge is one of the few that truly stands out as having tried something exceptional with the gameplay, I've been dying for a sequel for a long time!
*
I guess you could sum up my point like so: Graphics are great when there's good gameplay underneath them. FF7 was both a beautiful game for its time and also had great gameplay. Likewise Chronotrigger, BG2, Deus Ex, Sim City, etc. But a game with great graphics and mediocre gameplay will forever be consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Marathon trilogy starts off a bit slow, but it's got some great sci-fi writing (if you like sarcastic AIs that are constantly making opaque references to classical literature) and twitch action.
If twitch action is your thing though, it's hard to beat Descent and Descent II.
I'm currently playing through Planescape Torment, which is less like an RPG and more like an avant-garde fantasy novel.
What really amazes me is looking at the players and seeing a lot of people going into aerospace careers because of it. And not only that, but finding that they have a huge leg up on their classmates because they've already learned so much from the game.
The magic is still there, you just have to find it.