We don’t know how to talk about old videogames
It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned critic, a casual player, or a hardcore gamer. Most of us are awkward around old videogames, as if they were embarrassing uncles in a family reunion.
(For clarity’s sake, I’ll be generalizing ahead. I’m not pointing fingers, after all, but looking at a broad conversation that spans countless websites, forums, blogs, and social media accounts.)
The worst we can say of old videogame is that they’re showing their age. We lament that even the best seem dated. We analyze how the industry has moved on. Even sophisticated retrospectives often boil down to a tautology: this old videogame is old.
We demand old videogames play like new. Instead of evaluating their internal qualities, we judge how much they predated current fashions. If — remarkably — we think they’re good, we overuse the words “still” and “remain.” Like it’s a miracle the old videogame hasn’t up and died.
The reason is simple: we tend to think of videogames in terms of technology. After all, videogames grew up with computers. They’re used to showcase and benchmark hardware. It’s been like that since the beginning, since Spacewar! proved what the PDP-1 could do back in the early 1960s.
Under this paradigm, videogames are constantly evolving. They’re always getting better, more advanced, more sophisticated, more impressive. Numbers matter in gaming circles. We used to obsess over bits, now frame-rates. Even softer, non-technical aspects are judged numerically: more hours of playtime and content are nearly always a good thing. Naturally, this places videogames on an upward curve. The highest peak is always right now and the past is inevitably falling behind.
For the last ten or so years, however, this technological mindset has somewhat loosened its grip.
Retro indies have kept the 16-bit aesthetic alive, which has done wonders for the longevity of the Super Nintendo library. A Link to the Past and Super Metroid have been so consistently aped, it feels like they could have been released yesterday.
Speaking of Nintendo, their gamble on outdated hardware for their latest hybrid console, the Switch, has given fuel to the concept of good-enough graphics. Many gamers — myself included — are willing to trade graphical horsepower for greater flexibility and comfort, double-dipping on downgraded ports like The Witcher 3.
Even before the Switch, the mobile game boom expressed the same theme: fun trumps technology. No one asks, “But can it run Fortnite?”
And of course, the ongoing deluge of remakes and remasters suggests there’s demand for classic gaming experiences. Yet this trend also exposes how old videogames remain difficult to talk about.
We’re often not satisfied with simply playing or replaying a classic. It has to be given a new lick of paint, quality of life upgrades, or high-definition textures. We can’t let it age. This is less problematic when the vanilla version is readily available or when the changes are subtle and even necessary given modern-day displays and hardware. (It’s hard to argue against what M2 did with Virtua Racing, upping resolution and framerate without mucking up the art style.)
But sometimes the remaster or remake is a radical departure, and it replaces the original. (Will Nintendo ever rerelease the 1993 Game Boy version of Link’s Awakening now that its 2019 reimagining is out?) The history of each videogame is buried underneath its updates — an issue that plagues even (or especially) modern videogames, patched, fixed, completed, and expanded upon with downloadable content for months or years on end.
It’s anyone’s guess how future gaming academics and historians will approach the medium’s history. Which version of a videogame will they analyze? Which one will even be at hand?
In our appreciation of the classics, the future is at stake. Because the narrative being spun in the background, whether we’re playing a classic or a new release, is the overarching story of videogames climbing nearer to the heavens with each passing generation. This means fog behind us and clouds in front, only the current ledge in view.
Maybe we need to tell other stories. Maybe old videogames are more than stepping stones up a slope. Maybe they still and always will have tricks to teach us. Because they’re simply good, well-designed, fun. They work, their rules are solid.
We don’t begrudge chess for being the same game across centuries. That’s the point. The rook’s not supposed to gain new moves.
In the same way, we might need to reassess what we find dated, embarrassing, weird, and uncomfortable about old videogames. The best are complete experiences. Graphics, controls, game mechanics and systems, interface and level design, progression and flow, narrative universe, all come together as a whole. Modernize one thing and you change the experience.
Look at the Legend of Zelda franchise. The first title from 1986 is a time capsule. As the saying goes, they really don’t make them like that anymore. Market expectations are different and so are today’s players. They’re not schoolchildren with no other videogames to play. They’re more impatient and wouldn’t stand by such arcane secrets and objectives. Also, they wouldn’t read the instruction booklet before booting up their game. Modern reviewers of the Legend of Zelda tend to assume it’s far more obscure than it really is. They ignore the tips, hints, information, and fold-out map that once came in the box.
Yet what makes the Legend of Zelda dated is crucial to the experience. The spartan and crude graphics, the limited move set, the lack of narrative threads and secondary characters, the dearth of directions and hand-holding, all convey the sensation of being in a desolate, unfriendly wasteland. That sensation would nearly disappear in later entries. A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, in the 90s, domesticated the gameplay and polished its rough edges. Game progression and item placement became more predictable and standardized. Even the supposedly grueling Breath of the Wild from 2017 — set in a post-apocalypse of robots and dark magical sludge — mostly involves soothing, minimalist strings playing over sunsets while nonviolent dragons skirt the skies.
The Legend of Zelda is old and dated, and that’s what makes it special and inimitable. We shouldn’t remake The Legend of Zelda or go back to 1986. Instead, we should play The Legend of Zelda. Not because it hasn’t aged a day, but because it has. This is true of many other classics: they’re relevant because of their age, not in spite of it.
In praising old videogames, however, it’s easy to fall into traps of condescension, nostalgia, and historical revisionism. When a revolutionary videogame has lost its luster, we often point out that it was nevertheless great for its time. This well-intentioned argument tends to come up when a former masterpiece is no longer technically impressive or innovative. Only if novelty was all it had going for it, maybe it was never that great to begin with. Maybe we overvalue novelty in videogames.
In this same vein, we often say we shouldn’t judge old videogames by modern standards. And that’s both true and a bit misleading. Because the unstated assumption is that modern standards are superior, the product of better technology and greater refinement. And that makes sense, in technological terms. In artistic and interactive terms, it’s not so simple.
When I play a classic for the first time, a part of me certainly tries to understand the context, the historical importance, and so on. There’s usually a brief adjustment period, since I’m used to how modern videogames look and do things. But once all this throat-clearing is done, only one question remains: how good, how valuable, how interesting is the overall experience? And what I find is that, in the case of the true classics, that overall experience can withstand any set of standards, modern or otherwise.
My latest obsessions are the Doom games from the 90s. That includes Doom, Doom II, and Doom 64, all recently released on the Switch, and all first-time playthroughs for me. I think they’re incredible and I’m still picking up the pieces of my blown mind. Of course, they’re clearly old: you move on a flat plane and can’t look up or down; they don’t have much of a story; and the graphics aren’t even fully 3D, the enemies being charmingly animated 2D sprites. (This gives the games their iconic look, and actually makes them more attractive than later, more advanced shooters with polygonal character models.)
Level design is brilliant, but certainly representative of an era. It can get strange and convoluted, with Doom II in particular stretching the limits of playability, becoming increasingly wild and experimental as it goes. There’s stuff there — sudden teleportations, transforming mazes, dropping platforms and walls, leaps of faith, architectural abstraction — that almost shouldn’t work. Except it does!
Doom, it’s said, laid the groundwork for an entire genre, as other first-person shooters built on its foundations. That isn’t false. Yet it’s not exactly right, either.
This idea — that new videogames build and improve upon the old — hinges on the upward-curve story of videogames. It’s true that sequels often find developers more comfortable with the console or engine they’re working with, leading to a better result. And some kinds of games, like simulations and multiplayer shooters, focus less on unique one-off experiences and more on constant (even annual) iterations on a formula, so the skyscraper metaphor, with all its building on top of the old, pretty much does apply.
Yet getting into Doom for the first time in 2020, it’s hard for me to find it underneath a modern shooter. I recognize the influence, but it’s like a distant echo. It’s not really Doom anymore.
Fact is, current videogames just don’t do what Doom does, not with that particular mix of frantic action, simple mechanics, and complex level design. Doom was doing design by subtraction before it was a thing. It feels pure and direct — yet also sophisticated, thanks to the open-ended nature of the levels, the prevalence of optional or secret areas, and the ease with which rooms can change at the touch of a button. There’s a plasticity to the level design allowed by the relative crudeness of the graphics. Ironically, my modern standards let me appreciate the value of Doom’s abstract visuals, and what it enables that our current fixation on realism and fidelity doesn’t.
Videogames haven’t been going downhill since 1993, of course. But they haven’t necessarily been going uphill, either. They’re going forward, into new territories; they’re not getting better or worse, just different. And what this means is that, if you want the original Doom experience, only Doom will do. And this applies to most of the enduring classics.
Not every old videogame is a masterpiece waiting to be rediscovered. Far from it. As a medium, videogames are constantly under siege by technological progress. The entire Playstation and Nintendo 64 era, when many developers were getting their 3D feet wet, is looking pretty rough these days. I doubt even the most eloquent hot take can salvage the blurry textures, muted color palette, and atrocious frame-rate from 1997’s Goldeneye. And a lot of early titles from the 1980s aren’t beautifully simple, like Doom, they’re just boringly simple.
What I do think, though, is that, as a gaming community, we sometimes lack the rhetorical and critical tools to address videogame history. We end up stating the obvious, pointing out that a game from two decades ago doesn’t feel like one released today; or we defend the classics in such a way so as to turn them into sterile museum pieces; or we mummify them, wallowing in nostalgia, which is always a dead end, because nostalgia dies with us.
I, for one, believe the best videogames are much more than what we remember. And that the past can be more surprising than the present and more exciting than the future.