Games today are flashy, require years of development, and are more quickly cast aside than the haste with which they were purchased. While the pace of the gaming industry increased, quality subsequently waned. Today we have a sundry, unimaginative list of titles, often capitalizing on the namesake of Hollywood’s hit movies.
Then again, there’s a lot of pressure to produce: games must turn a profit, sell million of titles, and sport features such as Internet connectivity or they won’t reach shelves. Yet perhaps the gaming industry has simply run out of good ideas.
I look back with reverence and admiration on an era often thought to be ancient gaming history. The age of Mario Brothers, Mega Man, and CastleVania. Titles such as those are now the epitome of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramids of video gaming! Want a more modern analogy of their significance? They’re Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or The Beatles compared to Nickelback (Not to offend to all you Nickelback fans too deeply, but respect must be given where due). Games like Mario had more computing power than the Lunar Lander, yet today they’ve probably got less than your toaster. How on Earth were they ever so successful?
Summed up in one word: fun. Games like that didn’t need to rely on pricey studio graphics or the artistic quality of their soundtrack. Nope, a super-fancy midi file and some 8-bit Windows Paint quality 2-frame animations footed the bill. How many of you can name all the shortcuts, cheats, and surprises in the original Mario Brothers? How about the best order in which to defeat all the boss robots of Mega Man 2? If you can’t, you probably at least tried to figure it out. Maybe you even spent hours doing just that. Simple surprises frequently lent themselves nicely to the re-playability of the classics.
Some would go as far as to say that games are more social today. If by that they mean five guys sitting around drinking beer and stuffing their faces with Doritos to the familiar sounds of Madden Whatever Year echoing throughout the house, then I’d say that there’s a lot left to be desired. Perhaps they meant World of Warcraft, a game where millions sit glued to their computers for hours, all separated from each other (at least the Madden guys have physical company).
What happened to the pause button? Games today have to bait to win. They must constantly keep the carrot in front of the player at all times, and the bigger the carrot the better. When another game comes along with a bigger carrot it’s curtains for the inadequate title as players feverishly jump ship. The classics didn’t need a carrot. The secret was in the sauce, and the recipe still wins to this day.
Modern games rely predominately on time spent. They slowly reward the player for countless hours of playtime. Big producers have taken the recipe for the classic sauce and done the equivalent of mass factory floor production. Yet grandma’s slow home cooking is still the best. Despite the same roots, the games of yesterday were easy to pick up, easy to put down, and at the same time a whole hell of the lot of fun to master and show off to your best friend. Search YouTube, and you’ll find numerous recent posts of flawless runs in several of the best titles of all time. Moreover, those games offered cloture: you could win. Find me a World of Warcraft player that can describe how the game ends in one sentence, 140 characters or less.
At the end of the day, we could trace the lineage of all games to their roots. A couple of controls, buttons, and a screen to play on. Throw in weapons and enemies to beat, and you’re all set. However it’s less about the elements that make up the game, and more about what it represents to the player. The best games engage our imaginations and capture dreams. Moreover, they make them attainable (I remember wanting to be Luigi back in the 1980′s). If nothing else, we ought to respect the classics for what they are: some of the best titles ever made. To call them outdated, old, or antiquated it to misunderstand the nature of the video game as Shakespeare’s Hamlet misunderstands the nature of greatness:
Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
With that, I must resume my flawless run of CastleVania before bed!
