I love old video games.
It should come as no surprise. There is powerful nostalgia that has fundamentally shaped how I think, what I like, and who I am in them. Majora’s Mask, Chrono Trigger, Banjo-Tooie, Sonic Adventure 2, Jet Set Radio, Assassin’s Creed 2, Mass Effect1, and so many others are powerfully influential to myself and many others. Many of them are still quite good, and as I speak about frequently, even attainably perfect. One of the fun things about attainable perfection is that attainably perfect games are defined by the ethos and aesthetic and feel of what they are. Sometimes, that means they’re kinda janky piles of crap.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
Brian Eno — A Year With Swollen Appendices, Faber and Faber | 1996
This is a well-known quote and one that I can’t deny feels true.
It applies so strongly to the waves of nostalgia that lovingly plague modern video games. The crunchy pixels and faux CRT scan-lines, sprite art meant to emulate particular styles, and chiptune music and sound effects are powerful ways to convey atmosphere and aesthetic. And they’re fun! Signalis, Crow Country, Psuedoregalia, Deltarune, Triangle Strategy, Hedon: Bloodrite, and Cassette Beasts are all bangers, and they all look like how we remember old games being.
When you play these and they feel good and fun and make you want to play old games, you go back and play the inspirations, and… the inspirations can’t help but show their age. This is not bad!!! But it’s important to acknowledge. These new games imitating aesthetic are made with the benefit of decades of refinement and hindsight about what makes them good or not, what works, where the friction is. Cinema, literature, and music are all the same. It’s just harder to notice, because they all have the benefit of decades, centuries, and millennia (respectively) of history and experience to look back on.
Old games still deserve the love they get. I will always give them that, even if they’re not even “decent” by modern standards. But being good by the standards of their contemporaries is is just as worthy of laurels. So many games are good because they are flying to pieces, shrapnel embedding itself in your brain. Space Invaders speeds up as you kill the titular invaders because the game has to do fewer calculations, and the engine can render each frame faster. Silent Hill’s famous fog is a rendering limitation. If you want to see this working in the opposite direction (and to its credit, the same direction at the same time), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s game engine was constantly tripping over itself with the equally weird and equally astounding spontaneous NPC interactions that were possible.
Please, go back and play old games. Get proper old with it, too. Start up some MSX games, old Amiga stuff, Dreamcast, VirtualBoy, GameGear, please. I beg thee. I’m not saying you have to enjoy it, but I am telling you to Get Some Context for the things you know and love now. Play some jank-ass Xbox Live Arcade games, boot up some old PlayStation demo discs. Just get in there. It will make you love the things you love now more.
Footnotes
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Putting games from 2007 in here is likely shocking for people, and will make readers think I’m a damn child. I’m not. I’m 30 or 40 years old and I do not need these accusations. At the time of writing, 2007 is closer to 20 years ago than 15. ↩