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Was Videogaming Better Back in the Day?
An anonymous reader writes "Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs looks back at the dawn of videogaming, when we were all kids just typing in our games, one line of BASIC at a time. And he finds the present lacking: 'The dreamers became assets instead of leaders, and the rockstar designers became, well, Rockstar ... or Blizzard, or Valve. Publishers with cash-rich money to spend bought the creative process, and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola. So, how dare I be surprised that the price of today's gaming blitz is a little piece of last generation's soul?' Do you agree? Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?"
Why does it have to be either or? Can't both types of gaming be good? We have complex games now, but simpler stuff is available on things like XBox Arcade. Just relax and enjoy.
Pick up an old game, and you'll realize two major facts:
#1 The game is hard. VERY hard.
#2 The control sucks.
Yup, #2 is sad but true. The old school games do have a completely different feel to them, and adding in the physics that came around during the 8 bit era lead to "slippery" feeling games. But #1 was because games weren't MEANT to be beaten by most people. When you beat a game, that was because you were a hard core badass gamer. They were meant to be played over and over and enjoyed. By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
Does that make them better? You can argue both ways. Pick up Ikaruga and you'll be able to appreciate how getting level three is an accomplishment all over again.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Logical fallacy: False dichotomy. Simple games can have a story, and old games aren't all simple. Unless you plan to go back before, say, the NES. And I don't think anyone can claim that in video game terms/technology lifespans the NES is not old school. Anyone who says it ain't has a date with me with a NES controller cord wrapped around my wrist in a dark alleyway.
But it looks like he really is talking about the 2600 and prior. And then he says the following on page 2 of TFA: "Were the games actually better? Well, no, of course not."
Is it a slownewsday already?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Honestly, these crotchety articles looking at the past with rose-colored glasses are really getting old.
why? forty-two.
No kidding. "Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?" What the Hell kind of question is that? Story-wise, something like Unreal Tournament Foo has about as much story as the booklet that came with a Berzerk cartridge, while games like Ultima V (playable on Apple II, CGA-equipped PC and other beyond-elderly hardware) kick the unholy Hell out of cliched fantasy crap like Neverwinter Nights' original campaign.
Certain genres are lacking today though. Try and find a good adventure game, or a good turn-based strategy game. 10-15 years ago there were plenty of quality options to choose from, and today there are few, if any. Platformers have also suffered, but to a lesser extent. Enough, though, that re-releases of old Castlevania and Super Mario Brothers games are best sellers *now*.
Too many games now days are the same from year to like the sport games that are mainly just roster updates.
There are a few games that do get better over time like Heroes of Might & Magic, RTS games, Sim City games, other sim games, TBS games, a lot driving games now let you drive any where, and 3d shooter have been adding cool things to them but now days many of ones out right are the same. Pc pinball games still can't beat the free visual pinball + vpinmame and when they try they are way off in the rom part as well not giving you all of settings that are in the real games settings / test menu Pro pinball did do a good job with that.
I did miss the non looping path in need for speed one.
Side scrollers where fun back in the day but too many of them relied on spike abuse like the mega man games.
I hate to say this, but every time I bring out a classic on an emulator or old DOS Box I am sorely disappointed and now I won't even try to keep from ruining the nostalgia of games like Populous, Syndicate, or even Castles II.
When I played this games, I was amazed and they sucked hours out of my life.
But now... I realize how clunky game play was back then and that I put up with a lot more to play a game. Maybe the new games (and my DS) have spoiled me. I remember going through boot disks and extensive 100 page manuals just to get by and I liked it.
Now... The controls seem unintuitive and the game play lacking in a sense that it isn't bad, but it isn't how I remember playing it in high school.
To be fair, I will pull out a SNES emulator or the old DOS War In Russia (Hex Games are clunky no matter how good of a GUI you put on them) and play them for a bit.
Again... Maybe I'm getting old, spoiled, or the novelty of old technology is wearing off (I remember when I felt I was like a movie hacker the first time I sent someone a BBS message on a 1200 baud modem), but I won't play old games mostly to keep the nostalgia from being ruined.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
90% of everything is crap. As time passes you remember the good 10%. It is doesn't matter if it is movies, cars, TV, or video games. So yes the old games we remember are better than most of the video games on the market today.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
First of all, 99% of stuff now is also shit, so toss out that argument.
The packaging was better. Real effort and imagination were put into it. Does anything come with a microscopic space fleet now?
The manuals were better. I've still got glossy, 300+ page manuals on my shelf that are practically history books, that came with Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Red Baron, etc.
But most important, the game play was better. Go down any list of "Best Games Ever", and it's freakin' dominated by old titles. Railroad Tycoon, Civ, Wasteland, Zork, X-Com, Monkey Island, Wizardy, Ultima...
The graphics have gotten better, yes. But the story and gameplay suffered along the way, as more time and effort were put into the graphics. Sadly, it seems like it was treated as an either/or by most developers.
The answer to almost all nostalgia-motivated questions like this is no, things were not better in the past. The human mind has an amazing capability to remember good things and forget bad things, so while there were many good games in the past, there were also many terrible games in the past and the percentage of good games is a constant.
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You are comparing a single player experience with multiplayer. Your post has nothing to do with new and old as you would get the same difference if you weren't playing online.
And if you hate WoW instances and morons in CS...why are you playing them?
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
You're not comparing the games of today with the games of yesterday, you're comparing the you of today with the you of yesterday and, big surprise, you liked being young.
There were some good games out at the beginning of the epoch, henceforth known as 'the Dawning'. I haven't seen anyone mention Karateka, or the original Prince of Persia. Some good games.
There are some good games out now, henceforth known as 'the Nowening'. God of War 2, Fight Night Round 3, etc. Some good games.
But most, and I'd spew out a highly unreliable 70%, of the games are crap. Just like everything else mankind produces.
Don't give in to nostalgia, it makes you sound even older than you are.
Excellent point. New games aren't replacing existing games, they're adding to the body of games out there. Anyone with an old console, a Java-enabled phone or PDA, a service such as XBox Arcade, a "greatest hits" modern console port, or the wherewithal to grab an emulator and some ROMs will find it at least as easy to get hold of an old classic as it is to buy the latest console or PC game.
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You might as well ask an old man if music was better when he was younger. :-)
I'm going to have to fight the nostalgia and say, "hell yea gaming is better now." I spent my fair share of time typing in games in BASIC line by line from a book. And you know what? Those games sucked ass. The ONLY reason I spent any time playing them was because I didn't want to feel like the time I spent typing was wasted.
I don't really see anything special about games "back in the day." Sure, you can say that programmers were forced to be creative with limited resources, but I am not sure that is necessarily a bonus for the end user. Really, most games 15, 20 years ago were just plain simple. Maybe they had a good idea that could keep people hooked, but really, they were extremely repetitive (I'm looking at you, Atari). They just have nothing on some of the depth you can get in games today. Even overlooking tge fancy graphics (which is a bonus in and of itself, IMO), you can spend a fair amount of time just learning how a modern game works... learning strategy, etc. It is much more than hand-eye coordination these days.
That said, I don't play many games any more even though I could. The really old game just plain bore the crap out of me within 5 seconds and the modern games just take about a couple hours longer to bore me. But that is just me getting older. I don't think it should reflect on the quality of gaming.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What really killed gaming complexity was 3D. We still haven't entirely recovered from the "need" to have everything in 3D.
Consider the set of verbs you might have in a late-generation 2D game, like Civilization or Starcraft. You might have tens, or hundreds depending on how you count. (Note modern Civs may use 3D hardware, but they are still fundamentally 2D games. The only effect is that I can't play Civ 4 because I have a laptop, whereas I could probably run tens of instances of the engine itself.)
Now, compare that to the set of verbs you have in Quake. The movement commands, jump, change weapon, and shoot. That's about it. That's about all you can afford in 3D, especially on a console because that set runs you right out of buttons.
3D made every feature immensely more complicated, both to create the assets and to implement user control, and as a natural result, we usually lost features in the jump to 3D. Result: Simpler games. Even now, the average blockbuster of today may be far prettier than a 1999 top-ten hit, but the 1999 top-ten hit will be much richer.
I think this is what actually killed the adventure game genre. Is it that nobody's interested in playing another Day of the Tentacle, or that there isn't a company out there that can afford all the requisite 3D animation work?
As my canonical example of how hard 3D is, imagine Nethack in 3D, with no compromises (except for anything that may be literally impossible due to being a play on words or something). Every monster, every polymorph, every item, every effect, everything in glorious 3D. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
I'm not saying all games are crap. They aren't. But we jumped to 3D before we were really ready technologically. Except for FPSs, I still don't think we are; it's all too expensive.
IMHO, the simple BASIC games of the past were better if you were an aspiring computer programmer, because it gave you a fun way to experiment with making the computer do what you want. (Assuming you were paying attention to those lines of code you copied from COMPUTE! or other magazines.)
The early commercial games for 8-bit computers and 2nd-generation video game consoles were good in their day, and had the advantage of creativity -- limited by CPU and memory capacity, but not by special-purpose hardware, there seemed to be much more variety in game genres. Today by comparison, game consoles provide accelerated 3-D graphics, so most games are 3-D FPV action or adventure games and focus on "realism". They provide much greater detail and depth, but it seems not as much variety. How many simple board games or 2-D puzzles can you find on a modern console? Of course the PC, being a general-purpose machine, still has a decent varienty of games. And the Wii's virtual console gives it the advantage of having both old-style and new-style games.
It's not that it was bad. It's that it's become bad by today's standards. Hell, by the standards set a few years later.
Super Mario Bros. was an amazing, huge game at the time. But it was buggy at times, and glitchy, and the control wasn't very well rounded out. You couldn't go backwards, etc, etc. You can make the argument that the lack of left scrolling was an artistic decision, but it wasn't. It was a technical limitation given the game's scope at that early era of the NES's lifetime.
Compare it to SMB 2 (USA) or SMB3. It's not just that you can do more (you can). It's not just that you can move more freely (you can). It's not just easier to see what's going on on screen (it is). It's that the game controls well on the newer ones. You really can't improve much over the level of control you had on SMB 2 & 3. That's why New Super Mario Bros controls like Mario 3 in most ways that matter. SMB1 was a great prototype. My problem is that it didn't age well. Other games have stood the test of time. I can still pick up Zelda 1 and play through it without feeling like something is missing. I can do that with SMB3. I cant' do it with SMB1, a game I adored when I got my NES.
I would say the same about Doom 1&2. Both helped to usher in a new era in gameplay (the FPS). But play anything released after Unreal or Quake, and then play Doom. Lack of a z axis, no mouse integration to speak of, and other factors make it an important historical footnote, but an unfun game once you play something a bit more evolved.
Super Mario Bros 1 suffers the same problem. Gaming history is littered with titles that broke new ground, and were later eclipsed by what would be considered mediocre titles a year later.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
That's not it either. Lack of a save game is not a bad thing in my mind given the type of game it was. SMB3 had no save feature, and it played fine (still does).
I can still put serious time into SMB3, but not SMB1. I think the control is the biggest thing for me at least.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
So were those old games better? I think it's almost impossible to evaluate through the dewy-eyed nostalgia filter. The closest comparison to old-school (pre-NES) games are probably the "casual games" of today, and certainly Xevious or Galaga compare well with Heavy Weapon or Bejeweled. But comparing Gauntlet or Ultima to KOTOR or Diablo is like comparing a cave painting to a Picasso. They're so different, and so much products of their time, that it's dfficult to say one is better or worse than the other.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
>They were meant to be played over and over and enjoyed. By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
This is the most insightful point of a highly-moderated post.
Why on Earth would a game company want you to play over and over, and keep enjoying your single purchase? Of course what they really want is "the next purchase," every time and on a continuing basis.
It's kind of like movie previews. They used to be a teaser, promising more and better, but now they pretty much show the best bits, and promise only more. Movies used to play longer at theaters, and it wasn't unusual to go to a really good movie more than once. Today they hope to get that once, and maybe the DVD, especially with the "extra" crap. But by all means let's get another movie onto that screen, to get that one sale + DVD on that one, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I don't think the majority of games put out today seem as fun because the entire activity is FAR more mainstream now. I can list a helluva lot more great games from the 8, 16 and 32bit eras than I can anything past. I think this is largely due to the general shift towards three dimensional games at that time though. While I have nothing against 3D games per say, the idea now that EVERY game has to be in 3D has ruined quite a bit of what gaming used to be and still could be. It's destroyed entire franchises (like Sonic, and even Mario to some degree) and made fun genres almost entirely obsolete. A nice side-scroller could be great nowadays with high resolution sprites and full-on particles effects. But that's not very marketable, and I'm not sure if it's merely because the industry thinks that way or if the lot of people introduced to gaming through Madden on the Playstation would instantly dismiss such (despite Madden having been 2D at one point)...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
No doubt, good games are still around, but what I often miss these days are the experimental games, those that don't really fall into any genre and instead just are what they are, back in the day of the C64 and Amiga there where plenty of them, today on the other side to many games just try way to hard to fit into genre clichés. Games these days are often void of personality and more often then not I end up thinking about games in terms of 'yet-another-FPS', 'yet-another-RTS', etc. instead of thinking about them as uniq games.
Its kind of the same thing that bothers me with Hollywood movies or TV series, sure technically they might be well done and I am sure a lot of craftsmanship went into them, but often that craftsmanship annoys more then it helps. Shaky cameras can be great for some things, but when every second movies/series does them they start to get annoying very quickly. The effect ends up not helping what the production is trying to do, but the effect stands out on its own, its the trendy thing to do and so everybody does it. In games its basically the same, somebody comes up with a nice new genre (say GTAs open city environment), and a few years later you have ten games that all do the freaking same thing. I wouldn't mind sequels much, but when not only the sequel is repeating past gameplay but half a dozens other games as well, it really becomes annoying and boring. Especially because those new games often don't expand on the gameplay, they simply repeat it. This gets especially scary when games end up looking so much alike that I no longer can tell them apart (Quake4 looks like Doom, Saints Row like GTA, etc.).
This all wouldn't be so bad if it would be because we already tried everything and are kind of running out of ideas now, but the sad part is that there are still tons of ideas floating around that nobody ever tried or didn't try in quite a lot of years.
Some might argue that XboxLive and similar services allow experimental games again and to a certain degree they are right, but more often then not those services are abused for rereleasing old classic over and over again instead of actually new games, Nintendos Virtual Console being the worst offender in that direction.
Planescape, Xenogears, Fallout 1&2, FF 4&6&12, Vagrant story, Warcraft III, Starcraft, etc ... all kicked the crap out of what passed for a story back in the day, but these are the gems of their respective eras. Looking back thats all we see. It's easy for nostalgia to cloud our thinking. Ultima underworld was interesting and fun, but it pales to games liek oblivion which basically take the same idea and run with it. There is a lot of crap today, but there was back then too. Except we're comparing the 80% of todays games that are crap to the 20% of the games fromt he past that we remember. It isn't a fair comparison. We should compar ethe top 20% now with the top 20% then or the bottom 80% now with the bottom 80% then.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The problem with comparing old vs. new games is people tend to stretch things.
Pick the best 5 games of 2006 and compare them to the best 5 games of 1976, 1986, or 1996 but not 1976 though 1996. It's like comparing the music of the 60's (1960 - 1969) with music produced in the last six months.
I miss that period of my life when I killed time playing video games and dreaming and thinking big thoughts.
I've discovered that my second childhood has come around just as the Wii has been delivered and life has never been better!
Are the old games better than today's? While there is no accounting for taste, be happy that all the oldies can be played on modern platforms, if you like. Makes it fun to host a retro party.
Try and find a good ... turn-based strategy game.
that made me think of the first two xcom games. oh god, it's a wonder I graduated college given all the time I spend killing aliens. And when xcomutil came out and suddenly I could create missions where my squad had to battle 50 baddies at a time, oh boy, I was screwed (or not screwed really).
I'm sure there are good games out there today, and this is just selection bias because I don't have time to play as much anymore, but I have never enjoyed a game as much as I enjoyed xcom.
(and yeah, I've played laser squad nemesis)
Yes video gaming back in the day was way better. Sure we didn't have the graphics, or the joysticks with 5 buttons for each finger, but the games were fun and challenging. I was a wee lad in my single digit ages when we got our Atari 2600 and I still remember games like Target Fun and Combat! Featherweights by today's standard of shooting games, but we used to make up or own games to make Combat more challenging, like you had to ricochet off of 3 walls before hitting our opponent. Now games are all graphics and special effects, you don't even have the challenge of having to play the game to beat it with all of the cheat codes and mod devices, if it gets too hard just pause, type in a combo and skip the level or become invincible. It wasn't until the minigame in Donkey Kong 64 did I finally sit down and beat the original DK, and that was much harder since they only give you one life. And I had more fun playing the DK mini game than I did playing the N64 game. I love seeing the retro Atari 2600 with the 30 or so games pre-loaded, I haven't gotten one yet, but it did make me dig out my old system and hook it up again. Raiders of the Lost Ark anyone?
I am 40 years old. I had a wood-grain pong unit. I have played almost every console out there. Have been PC gaming for years as well. Gaming is better period. We have more options than ever before. I can now play with friends and family remotely. I can download games instead have to go to a B&M store. The quality of games is better now as well. Higher budgets and production values don't automatically mean a better game, but it helps and when a game is well done it's still as much fun to play as any game in the past. The list goes on. I tire of these "things were better when" articles. Even if they were, we live in the present, not the past. Grow up and move on.
I think people have a natural tendency to think things were better "back in the good old days". I don't think it was better, we were just more easily amused because we were younger. I remember as a kid in the early 90's on my 386SX20 with 4 mb of ram playing games like Police Quest, King's Quest, The Colonel's Bequest, Leisure Suit Larry, Wolfenstein 3D, Captain Comic, Duke Nukem, etc. I also must've spent thousands of hours on NES games like Super Mario. And back in those days PC and console games weren't quite the same experience as going to the arcade, so I must've spent hundreds of dollars a quarter at a time on games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Daytona USA, etc. Fun times!
I dunno. I suppose it is one perspective to be older, in that you've seen firsthand the evolution of video games, but, then again, you are looking at the old ones with more of an adult mind vs the child mindset when you saw the early games.
Personally...and I'm a bit older, I'm of the opinion that the early game designers had to work more on making gameplay itself FUN since they had so little in the way of tech to work with.
My personal favorite is the old arcade game Robotron 2084 . A very simple game, but, very intense. Hell, my friends and I still get a bad case of 'tennis elbow' after playing it for too long. I've got a MAME cab. with access to virtually every game made that I'd ever want...and yet, I primarily play that and Tempest (the mame machine is in an old Tempest cab).
Funny thing is...I've had parties, where friends bring their kids...some of them have been pretty young, but, raised on current PS and Xbox type games. They really freak when they see and play some of the old games. They might not be super interested at first, since the graphics are a bit crude, but, they see us old fellers crowded around playing and see how much fun the game play is...and then they really like playing it.
Don't get me wrong..I like exciting sound and graphics as much as the next person...I started playing pinball (which is now again on of my favs, currently restoring a 70's Playboy pin)..my first video game system I got was the old Fairchild one..played cousins' Atari 2600..fell in love with Wolfenstein, and Doom and Descent....play a chipped PS 1...etc. So, I've seen games evolve over the years. While many of these games are great, in the past few years, well, my perception is....game designers have seemed to settle on 'safe' gameplay basics, and only seem to generally work on graphics and the like.
I don't see much innovation on gameplay itself...at least not that much.
But, what do I know...I'm gettinig to be an old guy. Actually, I just rediscovered Zork and got it to play on my old iBook on an upcoming vacation (great for playing on the plane)...just an old txt game, but, fun.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
People should consider art in both the "Now" and "Then" capacities. Otherwise we'd slam a lot of books such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Fin for racist content.
Compared to games today, SMB is certainly archaic and even lacking in features. However, examining it against its competition at the time reveals a game that was head and shoulders above the competition. To my knowledge, side-scrolling platformers hadn't been done before that point.
It's also rather telling when children today are often found enjoying games that are sport even fewer features, worse graphics, and horrific control on flash portals.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Agreed. At least from my gaming presepctive, which is simulation and historical games it just gets better and better. Simulations get more and more realistic as computer power increases, and historical games get more and more detailed. I would never trade my current flight sim favourite IL-2 versus European Air War from 1998, or Chuck Yeagers Air Combat from 94. Il2 is superb in terms of flight modelling, realism and the sheer number of aircraft modelled. EAW pales in comparison. Historical games are similar - Fields of Battle, my favorite back in 95 or so, is a mere shadow of the historical battles games of today, like Take Command: Manassas and such. Silent Hunter III is miles ahead Aces of the Deep as a submarine simulator as well. Not just better graphics, sounds and the like, but game companies learn from their predecesors and make better games, including more realism.
The only games of old I have yet to find a better version of is the UFO/XCOM series - that is the only old game I still play relatively often on DOSBox.
"If Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to electronic music"
Question: Some random slashdot users likes a different game to you do you?
a) Make no comment as people have different tastes
b) Politely disagree but realise people have different tastes
c) Rail on the user using words like 'retarded' and hark back to a mythical golden age of computer gaming that just happens to coincide with when you had the most time to play games.