Slashdot Mirror
Retro Gaming Gets Hot
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, retro gaming is big business, according to a recent article in The Rocky Mountain News. The story talks to Nintendo, Namco and the maker of those all in one controllers that feature games from old systems like Atari. Lin Leng, who's working on the latest Pac-Man game, summarizes it best: 'The games today are hyper-realistic, photo-realistic and take a long time to complete, an average of 20 hours of gameplay,' he said. 'But with Pac-Man you just jump in and play and you get a quick fix. It also brings back childhood memories for some of us.' There's also an interesting sidebar to the story talking about Invader, the Parisian graffiti artist tagging famous locations around the world with images from Space Invaders. The author's website has the full interview with Invader posted in his weblog."
"Hey! I get to PAY AGAIN for this game I bought 10 years ago! YEAH!!!!"
I'm glad that some companies have figured this out! I love the latest and greatest games as much as anyone, but my heart still belongs to good old 2-D action games. Ah the memories of dimly lit arcades where you could go and bask in the warm glow of electronic sex, erm I mean video monitors...
Emulators like MAME and ZSNES are a blast when you just need a quick game to let off some steam or kill some time. When on the go the old Gameboy Advance really has you covered with tons of classic games available as well.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Instead, they've got blocky graphics, tinny sound and bizarre objectives. And despite their rudimentary look, these games have inspired an almost manic need to play them
Because when you know for a fact that you have 4 colors and less than 100 pixels on an axis, your mind will start thinking how playable you can make it. When you have 1600x1200 on a 100fps, 48bits w alpha and a graphic card which beats most PC's computational power, you mostly think how to fill all of that for a 'real-life' gaming experience. Well, if I wanted real gaming experience, I would go and play waterpolo or football, not pc 'real games'
It's been hot for a while for some of us. I've been using MAME for years, and I still have an Apple ][e (and //c) with 50+ disks of games that I use every few weeks or so.
I guess I'm the exception.
(BTW: these 5.25" floppies from 15 years ago *all* still work. They just don't make 'em like they used to.)
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Legal or not, emulators do the work of the majority of old arcade machines out there. Pair them with the right controller/pad/what have you, and you get all of the old arcade experience, or at least most of it. You don't get the old, dimly-lit smoke-filled rooms with drug deals going on in the back, but still, it's damn close.
I'll be more interested when one of these devices offers a faithful emulation of Baby PacMan. I loved that game, and I always wanted to get good at it, but the machine at the Showbiz Pizza(the only place that had one around here) was almost always broken.
It's no wonder that retro gaming is big business. Those who used to play the earliest arcade games are starting to come into positions of influence.
Take a trip back to the early to mid-90s, or whenever you were a kid, and try to recall all the public service announcements and news stories that all had the same message, "Video games are bad, get out more."
Now suddenly, video games aren't so bad anymore. Especially the older ones; those who are intrested are making the moolah.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
All I have to say is Secret of Mana was probably the best game ever. Since that point in time, I have never enjoyed a video game because of the pseudo-realism and new format of RPGs. FF7 was a great game, but still those old 2d Nintendo games were just awesome. I remember how I used to look forward to every new release of game in order to see "better graphics" ie: FF2->FF3... but, now I want the games to lose quality. It seems all the game makers went from story lines to graphics.
/. community will know about it once it is released.
I have a friend who is writing a 2d RPG on OSX. He is pretty far in the programming, and no, i dont have a website, but i'm sore the
GroupShares Inc. - A Free Onling Investment Community
-------
artlu.net
So how long until Nintendo or whoever starts going after the authors of emulators?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Tulip in the netherlands has revived the Commodore brand. While they're distributing things like an ePet memory stick or an eVic-20 mp3 player, they also have a 'console' to play ancient C64 games.
Of course with the number of C64s still out there and available for $2 from goodwill stores, you may as well go buy the real thing and get to play Impossible Mission instead.
Classic gaming has been huge for years. It's unfortunage what happened with the "Great Arcade Flop" in the late 80's. If you are a real geek there is no doubt you've heard of CGE or the Classic Gaming Expo. They are boasted as the "worlds [...] largest event paying tribute to the people, systems and games of yesteryear."
Steal This Sig
The word Atari predates the videogame. It's a term from Go. It means the situation where a group of stones is one liberty away from being captured. Thusly, if you aren't directly in the videogame industry, you can probably use the word as much as you want.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Something I've noticed is that retro gaming means different things according to where you're from. Generally this is met with ignorance from the Americas, as they've not been exposed to our scene as people on our side of the pond have.
American retro usually means old arcade games, such as Pacman. Old consoles like Atari and NES are also common, whilst young, overly blog-keen teen Internet wasters think that their SNES is the most retro thing since sliced bitmaps.
European retro tends to mean Sinclair Spectrums and similar computers, with strong emphasis on the programmers and sceners involved, particular in smaller countries where more people know each other.
Amiga and C64 seems to bring common ground to us all, as most countries featured these as popular machines.
Goes to show that all the money and time you spend on graphics and special effects is all for not if the gameplay suks. I mean these games are in 8 bits at best yet the game play is truly revolutionary and addicting still today. I hope this goes as a message to all the game companies that visuals are nice but gameplay is what will truly make the game great
Pac-Man could be played for a very long time on one quarter if you memorized the patterns. And once you got to the key levels the pattern never changed. At least that's how it was with the Pacman ROM at our local grocery store. Of course, after most of the kids learned how to do this they changed the game out. And every time someone lost a pacman they'd hit the machine and blame it on the joystick. 'This f***in joystick sucks, man!' I guess it's the guys like me making retro games big business.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
All I had to do was look at the shelf at Walmart. They're charging $20 a pop for the "classic NES" series (Zelda, SMB, Excitebike, Donkey Kong). Now, if they put, say Zelda and Zelda II on one cart, I might pay $20 bucks for the "on the go, I'm bored" factor (I did for Dragon Warrior I&II), but the truth of the matter is that Gameboy Advance cartridges can hold 32 MEGS at 8-bit (or 16 at 16-bit). The original NES only went up to 8 MB, *max* (games based on the MMC5 chip. Only a few towards the end of the NES' run used this. I.E. Castlevania III). That means you could fit at LEAST 4 NES games on one GBA cart. It's not like they even did any rewriting. Hell, the reviews say that Zelda still has the old "8-sprite slowdown" from the original NES days.
Looks to me like the Retro craze is the best thing that could happen to the game companies. Now they can come up with even LESS new stuff and STILL fleece their loyal customers. =\
"Pac-Man is still as compelling today as it was 30 or 40 years ago," said Genna Goldberg, spokeswoman for Jakks Pacific, a company that sells a classic Atari joystick loaded with 10 games from the original 1970s Atari home console.
2004-1980 = 30 or 40??? That must be that "new math" I'm hearing so much about.
~Philly
"Pac-Man is still as compelling today as it was 30 or 40 years ago"
Considering that Pac-Man only came out 24 years ago, this statement is pretty amusing.
And people wonder why companies hold onto old games, instead of releasing them into public domain.
Since the number of big-time games designed to run on Linux are very few, I've found that most of the time I'm playing games in Linux is through, well, open source emulators that quite often are availible as cross-platform.
Because of this, retro games tend to come to the rescue for entertainment while using Linux.
Let's face it, Frozen-Bubble and Tux Racer get old real quick, whereas Super Metroid and Zelda (for example) are interesting for quite a longer period of time. Besides, I've always preferred the original Puzzle Bobble in xMAME anyway.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
The other day I'm at Walmart, looking at the new "Classic NES" games. They release Pacman for God's sake. It's there for $20 bucks right next to Namco's Pacman Collection (Which has 4 games, I might add) for $10. Then there's Bomberman. The NES Bomberman with no multiplayer support. I'm all for rereleasing classics, but this just smacks of Nintendo making a quick buck. I always thought Nintendo was above this sort of thing. Maybe with the Gamecube tanking Ninendo's desparate for Cash.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The Classic Gaming Expo has gotten bigger and bigger over the years. They've had to seek larger facilities; in fact, this year, as a result of this expansion, they're holding it in San Jose rather than Las Vegas. And since I live in the Bay Area, I'm currently rubbing my hands with glee.
HEE HEE!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Those lazy days during the Viet Nam war when I dodged the draft by going to College (since my father was not a senator.) And I spent much of my spare time in the computer lab playing Pac-Man on a PDP-8.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
(Score:-1, Mentioning go in a non-chess-related article)
At the moment there is a deal floating around where you get the first 4 Zelda games (full versions) with a new Nintendo Gamecube. Pretty cool.
...and several more. It's quite cool, there's a built in NES emulator.
Further, if you get a copy of Animal Crossing for GC and perform various bizarre Japanese tasks you can get full, working versions of:
- excitebike
- wario woods
- donkey kong
- tennis
- golf
- baseball
- zelda
Read Pynchon.
Retro Gamer Magazine
Retro gaming is back!
Well, there probably was no agreement between Infogames/Atari for the band to be able to use the name, but that's immaterial because they don't NEED one anyways. Two companies can have the same name as long as they operate in different industries (and/or in different geographic areas). It's just like how Apple was allowed by the Apple record label (home of the Beatles) to call themselves Apple as long as they stayed clear of the recording industry (and then were sued when iTunes came out). There's a multitude of other examples. If you were to flip through the yellow pages for a couple different states you'd find hundreds of companies with the same names that have no legal ground to sue each other.
On a related note, I remember my brother talking about how in Czech Rupublic there is a beer named "Budweiser" seperate from the American beer company. They won the right to the name because their use predated it in the Czech Republic. Budweiser (american Budweiser), I believe is still sold under a different name though.
What I really enjoy about the emulators is the mobility that they give you.
I have an Apple II emulator running on a notebook computer, so I have that with me - not just for gaming (downloads of Apple disk images are available), but for playing with the old system. You can do a "call -151" and drop right down to machine language. Boot an (emulated disk) with Integer basic, do a call -151 and then an F666G (I hope I got that address right), and you are in the mini-assembler... You can play with these systems in many ways - not just on the gaming side.
Also, you can look up Apple CE. This program lets you run an Apple emulator on your handheld pocket PC. All the disk images on your emulator can be brought right over. The Apple emulators tend to support a Monochrome mode, and there is a nostalgia to the warm green monitor feel that is produced. Besides, when you save off your spreadsheet at work for someone, and they have trouble reading it, you can always just tell them that it's in "Visicalc."
There are often some (technical) differences between emulated environments and the "real thing" - sound a delays of disk devices, the number of supported expansion devices may differ from the simulated and "real" systems, including how shared resources / critical sections may be handled (if anyone really wants a technical example of this, they can e-mail me).
Anyway, emulators are really expanding the use of "orphaned" platforms.
There are emulators for IBM 370, Apple, Commodore, and many others. At the University of Pennsylvania, they did an "Eniac on a chip" project. For many, the emulator itself is the game.
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
"Zoidberg! You ate fry! Fry's dead!"
"Its alright! I had another guy!"
"Hooray!"
That's right. All your base.
Back when I followed emulation pretty heavily, you could just tell this undercurrent was coming back up. I picked up on this in 1996. It's 2004. Something about newer games really smacks of "losing soul", because they take forever and a day to play. Personally, i just got sick of following new games after a while, because they are too complex for playing for short periods of time. I admit it: I'm a grazer, and when I can choose from a thousand NES ROMs, I'll play nine or ten in a session.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
One of the draws for me to the older games is the high score. After you're done, you get a numerical number of how good you are, and if you're lucky, a spot on the high score table.
Once I moved my MAME system into my new apartment, our competitiveness really showed, you wouldn't think you'd see people our age getting pissed over the high score in Pooyan, but it happens.
Dear Corporate Masters
You are not root, go away.
Clones and variations aren't anything new.
We had Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Pacland, Pacmania, Pacman Jr and a few more flavours of Pacman that I can't remember off the top of my head. Similarly, we had Tetris, Wetris, 3-D Tetris, etc.
Even popular arcade machines of yesteryear were sequeled: Galaga/Galaxians, Operation Wolf/Operation Thunderbolt, Nemesis/Salamander/Vulcan Venture, R-Type/R-Type 2, Gauntlet/Gauntlet 2, Outrun/Outrun 2, etc.
The reason why we got more of the same is because people wanted more of the same. If it aint broke don't fix it is one of the oldest rules of arcade/PC/console gaming.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
There are still plenty of people making awesome, simple games that you can sit down at for 20 min and just have fun. Check out this guy's stuff, you'll never think of 2-D shooters the same way again.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
This is actually a big boon to the indie games market. Games like Pac-Man don't require 3 million dollars and a team of people to create. All it really needs is one guy and some artwork.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
In the bad old days (yeah I'm thirty in a handful of days, and i have been using and programming for 25 of them) games didn't have the hyper-real look to them. They didn't have specially mastered soundtracks, nor cinematic cut scenes.
But they did have gameplay. I remember sitting on the couch playing my old dick smith vz-200 with my brother, becuase the game encouraged co-operative play. And it was fun. I don't enjoy playing some tekken clone where the sole point of the game is to beat up the guy next to me.
Sure I can see my blood splattering everywhere as my avatar gets the crap beaten out of him, but it winds up leaving me with very little empathy for the guy i'm playing with.
The difference really comes down to the fact that the current titles are all derived from traditions coming out of the hyper-competitve japan school boy environment, whereas the old games came out of a very different co-operative environment of the old silicon valley.
.....now it's $25 for something I used to pay $.25 for.
-Valiss
I sat down not too long ago, and blew through most MAME, Commodore 64, nintendo, atari2600 game made.
:)
You take in a culture if you remember what date one game came after another.
The new kids can't really experience what it was growing up on a trim diet of video games, they got them all at their hands.
Today it takes a lot of time for a good game to come out, so we're still forced to play old games or nothing at all. I recently just beat Dracula on Castlevania 1 without dying the whole game. Mame lets you save your replays
Of course, if you know video game culture, and what's came out before, you really really know how BLEAK things look out there, especially with the corporatization of sequel ideas over new ideas.
The best thing we have to look forward to is a better PlanetSide, or a Virtua Fighting World Online. Games that take whats known and make an intensive RPG for longer game lasting play, and online games give great dynamics for competition and cooperation.
Dungeons and Dragons by Turbine should be cool, as well as Lord of the Rings by Turbine. World of Warcraft looks semi cool. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas looks cool.
My favorite RPG of all time still remains Legacy of the Ancients for Commodore 64:
http://www.legacyoftheancients.com/
I'm really a sick video gamer too, I've competed in world championships and did well. I'm famous through Starcraft/Warcraft3. I really know what I'm talking about on this stuff.
People think theres unlimited ideas for a video game, but theres only so much you can do, and you see lots of video games being the same. Take River Raid for example, it was copied in all those side shooters, Gradius/LifeForce/etc. Theres hundreds of side shooters. Once you play one style of video game the bar is raised, if another game can't give you at least as good as features, then it loses out. Not a lot of people see this.
Right now theres nothing worth playing, so I'm writing up my own video games. www.pathofdreams.net/crazyj
I'm still trying to get a foot in the door of the video game industry, but it seems like I'll have to code a whole game myself before that'll happen.
God spoke to me
My eBay sales in this area are way down since 2002. Don't know if its the economy or emulators but retro gaming is certainly not hot financially.
I've been playing Nintendo with my two boys (ages 8 and 3). We just finished playing Donkey Kong Country I and II -- 16-bit games from about 10 years ago. They loved them. Compared to Donkey Kong 64 from a few years ago, the older games are much better -- much more exciting, challenging, and satisfying. My kids don't care about retro, they just want to play fun games.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Why are such computers featured so rarely on slashdot retro games? Wasn't they popular in US?
Another thing, big "booya!" to all authors of emulator software. Thanks to their software, I use my unix workstation to do some gaming sometimes - nowadays games are too much schematic for me, sorry! :)
Another of the plug-and-play multiple game controllers is the Power Joy III, which packs 84 NES games (though many were never released in America, and one is, unusually, marked as having been created in 2003), and also comes with one of those silly LCD foo-hundred in ones, which is really just a few games with different speeds/difficulties. ThinkGeek used to carry it (which is how I got it), but it seems to have vanished from their lineup.
I wonder if Atari has any issues with Atari Teenage Riot...
I think the last game I really enjoyed playing was Lode Runner. And that was 20 years ago, on my friend's AppleIIe. Games these days mostly leave me cold. And I'm not interested in brilliant "realistic" graphics, what's the point ? What get's me going is when my mind is engaged: I want abstract games, games that put interest/novelty/gameplay first.
For some time now I've been working on a 3D version of lode runner. Here are some screenshots. There are some other differences to the original, such as being able to walk on the walls and ceiling. This creates some interesting topology! I even sampled the original sounds from an AppleIIe I bought recently. It's a kicker.
Simon.
There are no games as big as 8 megabytes, nor 8 megabits for that matter.
The largest offical NES game was Kirby's Adventure, weighing in at 768 kilobytes.
The largest unlicenced US NES game was Action 52, at 2 megabytes.
I've bought a few of these to do web reviews, as well as for the novelty value. I have the Atari 10-in-1, the Activision 10-in-1, and the Namco Arcade joystick.
They flat out suck.
I am horrbily disappointed that, in this day and age of microcontrollers and well-written emulators, a better product could not be produced.
TVGames is slaughtering at least my memory of these classic games. Amongst other things, I found that all three are lacking a noise generator (makes explosions sounds like "boops", especially in Missile Command,) the colors are off, and the Namco arcade joystick is locked into four positions but includes Bosconian -- an eight-position game. In their defense, the game play for most games are identical to the originals.
What it comes down to is that if you DON'T have the console or a good emulator and rights (term used loosly) to the ROM image, it's not a bad $19. Otherwise, stick with the emulators and, of course, the original console; the former posessing much more longevity.
Bug reports to code@NOSPAMBOTSoranda.com
Does anyone remember the record that was released with songs for all the popular games like Pac Man and Defender?
I would love to hear them again.
SYS 49152
DrMrLordX, please see these links:
;)
1. http://www.pinballsim.com/
2. http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/pinmameguide.htm
3. http://www.vpforums.com/
Remember, this a virtual pinball machine customized by people to match the real thing. At least, you don't have to repair these emulations.
Also, you need Windows for them. I'd love to see MacOS X and Linux ports.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
In fact, Nintendo used the first instance of FUD I can remember being focused to... They used to say that SNES' PAL/NTSC converter could fuck up your SNES and void your guarantee. Know what? My SNES is still alive and well and I use the PAL/NTSC converter to play japanese games. Oh well...
The slashdot crowd might want to check out Console Classix. They've taken the game-rental business model and applied it to emulation. Nintendo knows about CC, and has left them alone. For each copy of a ROM they have available, they have a matching physical cartridge. So, if they have 3 ROMs of Tetris, they pulled the ROMs from three individual carts they have on-site.
The emulators are all open-source, and they are encouraging porting from other platforms (currently it's Win32 only). Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis are availble, with other platforms coming soon. The NES and 2600 are free, but the SNES and Genesis clients require a small monthly fee to play (like $5 or something).
Anyhow, go check them out, and if you have any old carts lying around that you don't want anymore, consider donating them to CC so they can have more ROM images available for "rent".
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Only on Slashdot is a company holding onto a successful product it personally created, made money with, and decided to hang on to in order to re-release it later on "GREED."
It's called being a business and selling the product you have a right to sell. You need to get out of the college dorm room and get a real job someday and start making money--is that "greed?"
Those companies own those games. It's not like the games came out all that long ago--20 years is hardly a long time. The public domain doesn't have a "right" to these games. Get over yourself.
And conversely, I don't know of many modern PC games where you actually get 20 hours of gameplay out of it. Most shooters are somewhere in the range of 6 to 8 hours nowadays, and some are even shorter than that.
But I guess the more disturbing thing is that the interface isn't that easy to get into for a new user any more. With PacMan, it was obvious. Even someone who's never played it before, could just jump into it.
By contrast, most modern 3D games take quite some getting used to the interface. Now for those of us who pretty much grew up on Quake, WASD comes naturally. Doing rocket jumps, shooting rockets at someone's legs (instead of head) and switching weapons in mid-flight is our second nature. But for a casual gamer it can be quite a put off.
E.g., I've recently coaxed/coached mom into playing a new 3D game. (Let's just say fairly standard over-the-shoulder 3rd person game and controlls.) Now mom isn't stupid, but she's never played more than PacMan/Tetris/other old games before.
So it went something like this. I'll quote only my lines, from memory:
"Now talk to that guy. Uh, click on him... Yes, you need to be closer to him... Umm, no these keys here... Hmm, yes, I guess if you really want the arrow keys, you can always reconfigure it that way. I wouldn't recommend it... Uh, see, yeah, if you have the right hand on the arrows, now you'll have to move it to the mouse to click on him. Told you... Yeah, you're supposed to click on that answer to get a mission... Yes, you need to get a mission first... Uh, you closed it without getting a mission. Try again... right, now go in the direction on your compass... No, of course not through the building. Go around it... now jump over the fence... yeah, the jump key... uh, no, sorry, I meant press the jump key _and_ the forward key... no, see, just keep pushing forward while you jump... yes, keep pushing forward and press the jump key... ugh... yes, that's the guy you need to kill. Click to select him... yes, click on him... told you the arrow keys with the right hand were a bad idea... uh, no, you're too far away to attack... umm, well, either you start using the mouse for that, or you could press the '1' or '2' keys... yes, press 1 or 2... no, mom, you're pressing 3 and 4... don't worry, you'll get the hang of it, we all occasionally have to look at the keys instead of the screen... right, so keep going where the compass points you... yes, it's behind a building again... uh, ok, you remember that right, but you can't jump over this... no, mom, stop jumping... yes, I told you to jump before, but that was a lower fence... jeeze, no, you can't jump over the _building_. You're not superman... no, honestly, you can stop trying..."
And it went like that for some more time.
Guess that was quite a lesson in usability.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Boring, drab, dark graphics. Yet the gameplay was so amazing, it didn't matter. In fact, the graphics suddenly became part of the dark, paranoid atmosphere.