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Will Modern Games Stand the Test of Time?
The Multiplayer blog spoke with Tadashi Iguchi, one of the developers for the recent Pac-man and Galaga remakes, about the decision to bring new life to old classics and whether today's games will receive similar treatment twenty years down the road.
"'I think more than half of the games you see today with huge budgets and such a "realistic" focus will be either stale or forgotten in 20 years,' he said. 'On the other hand, the masterpieces of the '80s will definitely be enjoyed far into the future. The reason for this is simple — many of these classic titles have unique and fascinating mechanics that can't be diminished by the advancement of technology.'"
If it's chess, I'd guess "no".
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There are classics out there today as well. Consider star craft. The gameplay mechanics are pretty good. In fact, what i'm hearing about star craft 2 is that its a remake of the old game with a little more colour.
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Grab yourself a full set of MAME ROMs off a torrent, the signal to noise ratio is pretty low. Most of the classic arcade games have been forgotten, and rightfully so. Same thing here.
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Great games will be remembered and the rest will be forgotten. There was nothing special about the 80's in that regard. There were just as many crappy games (ratio wise at least), we have just forgotten those.
Your game's reputation will suffer in the long run because gfx will improve with time. If you focus on the total picture of gfx/gameplay/tilt/sound/etc. and do it properly your game will have a much better chance of keeping it's rep high.
But that's an easy made analysis.
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Rose tinted glasses, my good fellow.
Nostalgia has this way of making anything in the past seem wonderful.
Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for some Pacman on the Atari.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Many classic Sierra titles have been remade by fans, even after they received official updates into the VGA world.
Ultima VII is still played via Exult, and is being remade by fans at the same time.
Some games are considered classic, and are revisited. Most won't.
I wouldn't be shocked to see Half Life 1 get ported to Valve's next engine.
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"'I think more than half of the games you see today with huge budgets and such a "realistic" focus will be either stale or forgotten in 20 years,' he said. 'On the other hand, the masterpieces of the 80's will definitely be enjoyed far into the future.'"
Well, they weren't all masterpieces back then, now were they? I don't know about anyone else, but I can certainly remember some stinkers from that era. Pitting the average game of today against stuff that has obviously stood the test of time seems a bit disingenuous.
People tend to look at the past through rose coloured glasses. They remember the good things, not the bad ones. In the case of games it is no surprise. You find a game you love, you play that thing to death. Thus it stands strongly in your memory. You find one that sucks, it quickly gets set aside and thus more easily forgotten.
There was a lot of pure crap released in the past. You just don't remember it because you didn't spend much time on it.
Kind of hard to compare. The equivalent of games 20 years ago are the cheapie games you download over the console's net store. Zumies is the kind of thing that will be around for ages.
Something like a Half-Life will maybe end up feeling old, ucky, and unfun to play but it will eventually be superseded by another well-done shooter. Same play mechanics, better graphics, different storyline, you know the drill. The next best racing game? Well, the big one from 1995 will feel skunky by this point in time but the latest one on current gen consoles feels great. The good points will be taken from it and other contemporary games and be reworked into various new racing games and fifteen years down the line we'll look back at 2008 and say "wow, just look at how far we've come."
I agree with what the poster said above, grab the old ROM's and see how poorly the games stack up to your own memories. I love shooters but Doom feels awful and clunky now. I say this as a person who played the shit out of that game and was disdainful towards every shooter that came after it until Half-Life.
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It doesn't really matter that much whether or not modern games are good enough to withstand the test of time. Many are so reliant on developer servers being up that eventually they will become unplayable after the game isn't popular/profitable enough to justify further server uptime.
Whoosh... You're agreeing with the parent article you're supposedly disagreeing with.
To me, in middle school when it came out, Warcraft II was absolutely amazing and revolutionary. From the beautiful opening cutscene, to the pre-rendered musical score, to the beautifully-done graphics and interesting gameplay that kept me on the edge of my seat.
Then, a few weeks ago, I started it back up, and was shocked by how klunky the interface was. It was hard to select things, hard to manage the economy, hard to figure out what buildings I had to build to get certain improvements. Peons would stop working when their resource depleted (and they wouldn't even tell me!). You couldn't save and recall groups of units. Worst of all, the beautifully-balanced gameplay seemed to have been almost a figment of my imagination.
The truth is: Warcraft II (Command & Conquer which came out around the same time, also upped the bar) broke a lot of new ground in RTS design. And while newer games can often go astray, nobody will say that they haven't also improved on the genre. Warcraft II was great because it *first* exposed us to many of those great designs, but games that came out afterward often improved on that.
The same could be said of the Civilization series... CivII will always have a fond place in my heart, but whenever I go back to playing that, I really miss the innovations that have been made in the series since then. (I never played CivI, sorry!)
Professional golfers repeat the same swing time after time. Baseball players try to perfect their swings. A bowler strives for perfect repetition.
Back to the subject at hand... old video games were more like chess than newer games. They could be mastered with study and repetition. Today's games more and more rely on simulating the real world, meaning that each new game renders the last one obsolete as the simulations improve. I believe that the move from 2d to 3d represented a fundamental shift in gaming, away from the abstract toward the concrete.
The old games, lacking the realism, had to rely on the challenge. Today we're more concerned with reflections, textures and socializing. PacMan would have been very different if other humans controlled the ghosts.
As others have pointed out, people are looking at the 80s games with rose colored glasses. A lot of those games really sucked. Another thing to note is that those games are very easy to recreate, so of course they're still recreated. Stuff like Pac-Man and Frogger are games that you could make in a weekend by reading a tutorial in a C++ book - and those original games had 1 programmer working on them start to finish. Try recreating GTA4 in 20 years time. It's still going to take a lot of time and money just like it did the first time. The game mechanics are complex, there's fairly strong AI. Comparing the gameplay mechanics between that and Pac-Man is apples and oranges. There are a bunch of gameplay mechanics in current games all working together. Each of those gameplay mechanics will survive long into the future, being copies from generation to generation in the games that people are gonna make. You could say that we're still playing Wolfenstein 3D 16 years after it originally came out in the form of any current FPS game. The innovations that each game incorporates should be the things that are judged whether they will stand the test of time. Not the games themselves, which are getting too complicated.
If you want an analogy, look at the movie industry. We're not seeing remakes of Casablanca every couple of years, but we are seeing elements from Casablanca that have been integrated into the language of cinema - even long after the average moviegoer wouldn't know a Casablanca reference if they saw one.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
And that's why CS will not "stand the test of time".
It was wildly popular for a while, mostly because there was no serious competition, it was new, and the hardware requirements were so low that a lot of people could play it. Oh, and also because it was popular, never underestimate the self-reinforcing aspect of multiplayer games.
I used to play a lot of CS. I was pretty good. Not one of the top-players, but always in the top 5 or so scorers. But if you ask me today what I remember, it's exactly what you described: To be "good" at CS meant to know the map, the important places and the timings to reach them. All the popular CS maps had their choke points, sniper locations, etc. and the most important skill was to know where they were and whether you or the other guy would be there first.
That's mechanical rote knowledge and simply doesn't make good memories. Our memory system is built to trigger on stuff that it recognizes. So if I play those maps again today, I'll have all the routes and points back in active memory after one round. But those memories won't be triggered by anything else, because they're so specific.
That's why CS will be forgotten, but Warcraft or Starcraft will stay - because the things that you learnt to play those games are repeated again in every other RTS. It's no the Zerg, but you still have rushes, and the basic mechanics (pump out as many as possible as early as possible and go berserk) is the same.
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I have to disagree with you here. If there's one game that is close to "standing the test of time," it's Counterstrike.
It's one of the few games that hasn't changed much in almost ten years, not at all really, and it hasn't diminished in popularity.
And it's simple enough that skill does really matter... you have to have good reflexes and make good tactical decisions.
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We'll probably never find out because we won't be able to play the games 20 years from now when the DRM servers are kaput.