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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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I call BS on the "unique and fascinating mechanics". The real reason games from the 80's will be "enjoyed" far into the future is that the generation that grew up with or played it will get nostalgic and run back to it every once in a while.
Games that I think might be hailed as "classics" in 20 years:
Portal
Most Mario games (they're still reselling all the old ones on handhelds, I doubt this'll stop in 20 years).
Counterstrike - Immensely popular in the day, it'll certainly be a fun fallback in the future.
I think that even if you have a great game, the mere fact that it has "representational" graphics is going to hurt it in the long run. Pac Man has essentially no graphics--it was abstract in 1980, it's still abstract in 2008, and it'll be abstract in 2080. But in 20 years GTA 3 will look like a poor representation of reality, rather tahn not looking like any reality.
It's almost like the Uncanny Valley--graphics that don't try to look real can't take you out of the game, whereas graphics that are more realistic *will* take you out of the game once those graphics are out-of-date.
"'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.
never have mod points when you need them. I was scanning through this thread to figure out where to post exactly what you just said. I will add though, that early video games had simple gameplay mechanics that couldn't really be improved upon without making it a completely different game. Games today will see and endless amount of minor enhancements, improvements and spinoffs over the next many years. When most people look back at games from today, they will be weak early versions of current games. Games from the 80's will never have modern equivalents. That being said, it's not really a knock on today's games, they're still good, just someone else will make the same game but better sometime in the near future.
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.
Well, it's true for almost any competitive video game too.
E.g., take a l33t zerg rusher from Starcraft and put him in a situation where he can't mechanically repeat the same rush, and watch him proclaim that the map is crap.
E.g., I once had the mis-fortune of working with a complete CS-head, and made the mistake of listening to him at first, which made it nigh impossible to shake him off when he got boring. Well, actually, I am a gamer, and at first it was just another talk about just another game, so it was interesting.
Then it got massively boring as I quickly realized that he was playing the exact same map, and did the exact same thing, every bloody day. Several hours per evening. He'd buy the same bloody weapon and a grenade, run behind the same warehouse, climb the same ladder, drop through the same vent in the roof, crawled through the same duct, dropped in the same room, and shot the guy camping in the corner, if one was there.
I guess that's the thing that got him the best score, or something, and he repeated it religiously. (And somehow thought it's worth talking about again, every day. But I digress.)
One time I'm dumb enough to say "yes" when he wants to show me how cool CS is and how great he is, after hours. (We were pretty much free to install what we wanted to on the company computers, and a multiplayer round in the lunch break or occasionally after hours was pretty much a sacred tradition for most people.) So he finds a server with that map, and he's even on defense this time, so it promises to be different.
He buys a weapon and runs and starts jumping in place in front of a vent. Some guy drops into that duct from the roof, my co-worker shoots him, and keeps on jumping. Next round, the same. Next round, you guessed, he's jumping in front of the same vent again like he's got mad kangaroo disease. Repeat for two bloody hours O.o
So I'm standing there dumbfounded, mostly out of sheer morbid curiosity. I mean, it was painfully boring even for me to watch that repetitive _work_. I expected him to go, "ah, screw this, lemme show you something else" any time now. Nope. For two bloody hours he repeated the exact same sequence and hopped in place in front of the same vent.
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