I’ll be straight up here; I’m 17. I don’t really know what the industry was like before the 00’s. I grew up playing SNES and PSX games. I don’t exactly have the knowledge of the more obscure titles other than a select few. I never knew what arcades were like.
At around 7 or 8 I started subscribing to the UK version of Nintendo Official Magazine and kept this up for around 5 years .Over that period where I obsessed over the newest Nintendo titles and found that the writers kept on referencing games which I never played before, and found myself frustrated that I had not played this so called “Link to the Past” the writers kept on hammering on about.
In a bout of curiosity, I went over to the internet and looked it up. I remember saying “Legend of Zelda eh? Sounds pretty cool” I picked up the GBA Version of Link to the Past and found myself enthralled by the gameplay and intense storytelling. I never knew that a videogame as old as me could be anywhere near as good as Pokemon Ruby or Viewtiful Joe. It was up to ye olde ninty.net forums to tell me that I had missed entire eras of videogames and masterpieces. However I saw that a few classics were being remade at the time so I borrowed a friend’s limited edition copy of Zelda: Windwaker, had no intention to actually play Windwaker and played Ocarina Of Time on it’s bonus disc all the way through instead... Then Master Quest.
Needless to say, I was hooked on “Classic” games. I picked up the Resident Evil remake on Gamecube and played entirely through that, which for a 10 year old was a pretty god damn scary game. I found out that some real gems had never been rereleased so I downloaded all sorts of seedy emulators and ROMs (I’m not going to discuss the grey area of downloading ROMs here, it was pretty hard for a 9 year old to find an NES game in 2003.)
It was on my PC that I experienced many more games and eventually became so deep into retro gaming I missed out on quite a few notable titles coming out at the time, namely Resident Evil 4 which in hindsight I really should have played at launch.
The sad thing is, most gamers my age will probably never find that same experience I had with a Link to the Past or Mega Man 2. Often citing that gameplay is obscenely outdated and pixels look like utter tosh. It’s a crime to miss out on what are not simply games but now important, culturally relevant pieces of popular culture. I had no nostalgia for any of the games I played back then, I welcomed and embraced them with open arms and they just so turned out to be some of the best games I had ever played at that time.
It takes a moment to really think, games back then were simply pure bursts of fun, be it lighthearted or dark in nature. No faffing around with bad anti-aliasing or games being non-HD in their native resolution. Games were what they were truly meant to be and embraced that. Now, in 2011 games have a chronic obsession over being cinematic and having “hollywood spectacle”. Gaming has not reached it’s peak. Not at all. It’s sad to see that since the shift to 3D, we often see that games are more caught up with their visuals and budget than actual gameplay. (See: Final Fantasy XIII)
With the industry rapidly changing each generation with massive paradigm shifts, it’s excellent to see that companies are catching on to the fact that they can finally have a reasonable distribution platform for their classic games and now have finely distilled archives of gaming’s greatest classics. It’s really a crime to think that some people have never experienced games such as Symphony of the
Night or Link to the Past. Even if the games are right under their noses. Some proclaim that classic gamers simply permanently have nostalgia goggles tacked on to their faces. It does not take a genius to know that I’m not exactly old. Dismissing classical games with the simple excuse of “nostalgia goggles” does not cut it anymore.
While there are undisputed modern greats such as Shadow of the Colossus and Bioshock. It’s important to know your roots when it comes to gaming, because all it really comes down to is not the plot, not the sound or graphics. It’s here that gaming has a significant difference to every other artistic medium, you can’t simply read a synopsis of a game yourself. You can’t capture the magic of experiencing the entrance into Rapture in words, because games are not simply just plot driven, it’s the entire experience that counts.
No game should be dismissed simply because it’s old (maybe Daikatana) because in the end, all games are their own unique experience. Do not be afraid to reach back into gaming’s oldest tomes. Planescape: Torment is worthy of anyone’s time, as are many other forgotten and under rated games. Expand your horizons for gaming, do not simply play the newest releases. There are years of games available to you through Good Old Games, Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and of course the Wii’s virtual console. Who knows? You may discover a hidden gem.
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