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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.
That's the answer to his complaints right there. You want to see good creative games that didn't cost multi-millions and may have been made by a single person go look at indie game areas. I for one am very glad that gaming has moved past the point where a 12 year old could build games that matched the game industry, if such a day ever existed. Modern games are sometimes uncreative but that doesn't mean the old days were somehow better. The difference is that nowadays more creativity is required to make a creative game as all the genres have pretty much filled up.
This guy really needs to see my sig. And by the way, I'm one of the people he doesn't believe in anymore. A gamer who wants to make games. Am I discouraged by the big money games? No, because I don't want to make those.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
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
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.
I know when I was gaming on my C64 I never had to listen to spoiled pre-teens fling insults at one another or had to rely on an ever growing list of ignored players just to try and enjoy the experience I'd forked out for.
The games might have been garbage, but I recall the experiences with more fondness than anything I've picked up recently.
I don't even need to go back that far, the 90's had a lot of fantastic games that I still play and have a lot more fun with than running another damn WoW instance, or another round of Countersrike: OMGSNIPERFAGZ!!LAWLZ Edition.
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*.
One thing I will note is that...about 15 years ago a friend of mine polled his classmates about "Super Mario Bros 2 or Super Mario Bros 3" and everyone, everyone in the class (male and female) had an oppinion.
Nowadays games have become very audience-specialized. For instance, the two top-selling franchises right now are Grand Theft Auto and Pokemon--how many people can you find that play and enjoy both? Off the top of my head I'm actually struggling to think of a single accquaintance who enjoys one and doesn't turn up their nose at the other.
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 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.
Face it, pushing a game out the door is a risk. Because games are invariably very, very expensive pieces of software.
This isn't what it was in the 80s, where 2 college students come together and hash out a game over the time of a year in their spare time. If it flies, great, if it doesn't, so what. In the 80s, making a game was "easy". Now, hold your horses, of COURSE it is way "easier" today to code a game with DirectX (which pretty much takes the burden of actually placing the graphics onto the screen off your back, with perfect algorithms that you'd need to study 10 years of advanced maths to get close), but back then the computers sucked so badly that even a hint of graphics was already something that inspired awe in your player. Take the average 80s game. "Pole Position" anyone? With some blocks resembling cars and a "pit stop" that consisted mainly of you moving an unanimated sprite across the screen.
Doesn't need an "animation artist" to make, does it?
Sound? Yeah, it squeaked. We have sound. And when the gun fires it makes "taktaktak". Perfekt.
Story? Yeah, someone of the crew wrote a 10-liner for the manual (since in the game there was no room for story anyway. Remember, 64k is a lot and 640k more than anyone would ever need). Here's your story. Go along the lines of "bad guy hijacks something we think is cool, princess or some gem or something, and you gotta go and get it back. Make it about a page".
Physics? What for? Gravity is "lower sprite a dot every 2 seconds".
Of course, a few crafty coders can hack that together in a few months.
The huge advantage of it is simply that you can take risks that way. You can leave the used and tried paths and try something new. If it blows, well, you tried and you didn't break your neck for it.
This is no longer possible today, with games that cost a few million USD to make possible. Can you imagine sinking about 10 manyears of highly qualified artists into a bomb? 3 bombs like that and EA is a goner.
For a small studio, one such bomb is already the torpedo it needs. And I think we all know a few studios that sunk because they couldn't get their wonderful game (which would have been wonderful, most likely) done before they ran out of dough.
So studios stay with the pathes they know. So we get NHL 200x, Command & Conquer Part 18, Doom 200 and the millionth fantasy MMORPG. Because it works. Because it sells. Because it is no risk.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
You really nailed it there! I have started playing Oblivion and though it is a great game, I still feel only a fraction of the wonderment I felt when I was a boy playing something like Eye of the Beholder or Legends of Valour on the Amiga. Back then I would have practically shit myself at the thought of a game as open-ended and free as Oblivion, now the cynicism of age has taken the shine off it somewhat. It's easier to get "into" a game when you are young, I think. The suspension of disbelief is that much stronger. Now all I see are 3D engines and scripting back-ends.
Gigabytes of lovingly crafted art assets just wash over me, whereas back in the 8-bit days I was excited by a level that had a different background colour.
(As an aside, there is still an outlet for simpler 8-bit style games, on mobile phones. And man, is it one ocean of crap.)
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.
Sometimes I like to play Doom3/Quake4 with a resolution of 800x600, or 640x480, because it gives that pixelated look that I remember so well from the games of yesteryear, when I first started playing (games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Descent).
I was a big gamer back in the 80s/early 90s. I loved my NES/SNES/Genesis and would play for hours a day and had tons of games.
Then I lost interest, from Saturn and on games were boring to me. It seemed all about graphics but not fun. Since I had a 200mhz PC up until 2001 I never played any PC games either.
But for the hell of it I got a Wii a couple weeks ago, I feel like a kid again. These games are fun. Super Paper Mario is a great example. It's a side-scroller yet it has 3D, it's a perfect mesh of all the previous mario games and it's fun.
The controller is great too, in fact I think it should become a standard for TVs and not just Wii. It makes more sense to point-and-click through your cable box program guide or your tivo menu. It would also be nice just to program your TV with a Wii style remote rather than using the usual volume +/- to navigate (and accidently click channel +/- and have to start over!)
Yay for Wii
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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 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.........
I was with you until this part. Ultima Underworld pales next to Oblivion? Oblivion is one of the most retarded, "streamlined" RPGs ever made. It's an example of the modern-day, marketing-driven tech demos that this article is criticizing. Go play Daggerfall from 10 years ago and remember that it came from the same company!
"Sufferin' succotash."
It seems this comes up every 3 weeks or so but...
My simple answer is no, games were not better. If they were I'd simply play them with an emulator and leave today's offerings behind.
A while back I downloaded some Atari 2600 emulator with something like 870 games. I thought this was going to be fantastic. My experience with it was lukewarm at best. While I did get into playing some old classics I loved I came to realize that it was more me being 10 or 12 years old that made the game good. Not that they sucked but it just wasn't as good.
Now the big thrill was playing all the games I never owned but use to ogle over in the catalogs that came with games. Stuff I begged my parents to get me. After spending a few hours going through some of these "classics" I wanted to go an apologize for ever bothering them about it. Again, if I was 10 again and had just gotten BurgerTime it would have surely kicked ass but as a 30-something it was pretty lame.
Who knows, maybe I'll feel the same about CounterStrike when I'm 50 or 60.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I was beginning to think I was the only person on the face of planet Earth who felt that way. As I once quipped on Slashdot: "Oblivion is an RPG for thumb-bashers who want to play an RPG but without all that gay story and s---."
I mean, come on. You get 30 seconds of dialog then spend 5 hours trying to accomplish the quest, 4 hours of which was spent trying to build up enough cash and/or magic in order to complete the quest. Ultima IV, you had to change the way you played the frakking game to win to stay in synch with the story.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com