Edit: Just finished the article. The part about a lot of people not having played the classics is an important one. Part of me wants to think it's because a lot of those classics are PC-only and a significant portion of the "pros" mostly stick to consoles.
I spent most of my early gaming life entirely on Nintendo systems but over the last several years I've made efforts to go back to PC classics. When a new game in a series comes out, some people get kinda confused when I tell them I actually want to go back and play the original game first. I made a point of playing System Shock 2 before trying out Bioshock, and it heavily affected my opinion of the latter game. When people started talking about No Man's Sky, I went back and played the first two Elite games, and it's greatly helped me understand what NMS might actually be when it comes out. The UI issue is definitely a real one though. I have an unplayed new copy of the new Rise of the Triyad sitting in my Steam library because I want to play the original version first. I bought the original on GOG, but I'm having trouble getting the source port to work. I tried installing and running a DOS game once and just couldn't do it. My first computer was a Windows 95 system.
Even if I can't play a certain old game, I at least try to look it up, especially if I'm going to write about it.
Very interesting. I'll give it a read.
From the excerpts, I absolutely agree. This is the same reason why when David Jaffe came here rambling about used games and about how games and digital goods don't depreciate, I called bullshit on that. And many others did.
Let's forget about the obvious advancements on tech for a minute that create some sort of "outdated" public perception. The industry itself depreciates its own games at an incredible rate. They have no problems calling their 2013 version bad if that helps them sell the 2014 version, and if it is any good they'll only use it as a stepping place to sell you the 2015 version.
This may sound like oversimplifying, but it's very true. Collectors and people who want to preserve old games have known about this too. Studios themselves would rather forget about their own games unless there is a remaster/remake to be sold, than allow, encourage or spearhead proper preservation of their games. They don't encourage revisiting them because it gives them little to no money. Most of them are simply not interested, and thus, are sending the message that their products are disposable, immediately replaceable with the new and the fresh and not worthy of going back to them.
Obviously, not all of them are like this, but the industry is very responsible for this issue.
I just thought about this in the recent backwards compatibility thread. Console video games seem to be the one medium that doesn't give a shit about its past. Even casual consumers will easily watch movies or listen to music from 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Getting someone to play a video game that's more than maybe three years old is much more difficult unless it's something way up in the public consciousness like Mario or Pac-Man.
I think the industry does indeed do this because of an approach akin to software development. Most people don't want to use the 2013 version of your program when you have the 2014 version. I think a lot of the problems in video games are a result of them being simultaneously media and software. They're kind of being treated as one or the other.
The unique problem here though is modern games that actually have LESS content and features than their predecessors from 15 years ago. If you look back into the past of PC gaming it's surprising how much of today's complexity (and more) was still there back then. Ultima Underworld 1 in 1992 contains almost the full suite of core gameplay features people expect in similar games today, just with a less elegant control scheme. Console gaming is mostly different because the control interface there has gotten more complex over time, but PCs have had the same standard keyboard for decades.
So this is what it feels like to be punched in the gut over the internet.
Sad stuff, honestly. Film buffs, bookworms, band geeks, most people who consider themselves big fans will almost surely rush back and get "the classics" even if the modern stuff alerted them to band/series/author. Games are a growing medium so going backwards is a bit harder, but still. To say you're a huge TES fan and not even play Morrowind...not play the freely available Arena and Daggerfall that Bethesda provide...
I do hope it's mostly growing pains. I'd blame the difficulty of procuring old systems and games but all of TES is readily available for PC right now. There was even a huge set of the full series for <$50 that I saw.
Arena and daggerfall are FREE though. To claim to be a hardcore fan and never even try them is pretty dubious. And they're still pretty amazing in many ways.
There's mods--even at launch a big part of Morrowind was mods. Better Faces, some unofficial patches here and there, pretty up some things. Hit-roll is awful and I don't recall any mods to remove it, but it's hardly unplayable. And it's not like people play Skyrim purely for combat. I mean, I HOPE they don't. So that desire to explore should transfer well for Morrowind.
I've tried to investigate this issue too. Old console games can be really hard to get a hold of, because the old hardware can be tough to get a hold of. Old PC games are somewhat easier to obtain because there's some way to get them running on the modern computer you already own. Then you have GOG and Steam. Even people who just discovered the newer games on consoles should theoretically be able to run the old games on their shitty laptop.
I've found it's a lot harder to get people to go back and try old PC games though. Part of it is many of them just don't like PC gaming period. They don't like the idea of playing games on a computer monitor, or flat-out don't like mouse and keyboard controls. A lot of it however is that old PC games are at least as complex as modern games, but have less elegant user interfaces. Old console games are simpler because they had fewer buttons to work with. PC games from 25 years ago had basically all the same keys we have today. Ultima Underworld 1 is a big example. It's basically Bioshock 15 years before Bioshock, but I had to spend a day reading manuals before jumping into the game proper. Most people won't set aside the time to do that.
I don't think that's gonna improve until some of these old games get console ports or something. I think we need more stuff like the PlayStation version of Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition, or the tablet ports of Baldur's Gate.
While I agree with the general thrust of the argument that gaming is hype-driven and publishers often have motivation to trash their old products in order to promote the new, I think the element of interactivity makes comparisons to classic movies a lot more difficult to swallow. The barrier to entry that comes from older control and UI paradigms is very real, to the point where playing the foundational games of the WRPG genre is more akin to reading Chaucer than watching a black and white movie. Chaucer is absolutely worth reading of course, and modern novels have no business billing themselves as new and improved versions of the "obsolete" Canterbury Tales, but the disconnect is definitely there and it's not surprising to hear that people aren't well versed in the history of a major genre or long-running series.
This is to say nothing of the fact that a lot of older games have been rendered completely inaccessible due to lack of backwards compatibility for anyone who limits their gaming to consoles. I wouldn't recommend that, but it's a common enough situation.
This is a great comparison, especially when talking about old PC games. Old console games less so.
A lot of posts in this thread seem to be correctly comparing the playing of video games to language. I remember someone saying the core video game market feels like a whole community of people decided to create and speak their own language 30 years ago and just kept developing it to the point where almost no one new could learn it. Going back in time in that language is like going back in time in the English language.
The above is a half thruth. Feature wise the older games are richer yes, but interface and feelback are too far behind in comparison to what we have today. Althought not all games fall into the same trap, something like Link to the Past or Super Metroid plays fantastic even today, but those game set mechanics as their main priority and used a matured way of presentation and visual presentation (2D and perspective).
This is because generally, most big developers stopped making major advances in 2D game design once they switched to 3D. I think that's why so many Super NES era games hold up so well today. It was the peak of 2D game design as far as consoles are concerned.
I think this article is relevant and important, but I also kinda sorta understand why it is so.
Part of the reason why it's an issue is that since the game companies are the curators, they can decide what is actually available to me to replay. Grim Fandango was recently re-released, but before it was, it was impossible for me to get a copy to play. I had been told about it for years, and possibly if I had been willing to pirate I could have played the game, but I was not willing to pirate.
Even when they are available, sometimes those titles simply will not play on all computers. I haven't played any of the Fallout games, but was told Fallout 3 was very good. I played the first hour or so of the game, and then came across a bug that would not allow me to keep playing. Googling provided no answer to how to fix the bug. I stopped playing and haven't gone back since. When something similar happens in other media, it's usually only specialists that access the title, and then try to provide that access to other people - so we have multiple translations of Beowulf, because if we were given it in the Old English in which it was written we'd soon give up. We can possibly view something like the team of fans who modded KOTOR 2 to restore cut content as doing something similar.
So the problem is two fold as I see it: software legal issues and software functionality. Because both are in fact in the hands of the studios, it really does end up being on the studios to curate, at least until the copyright runs out. This is also a good example of why copyright should run out sooner than it does, because the culture loses it's history otherwise.
And this is why it's important. This problem is especially true on consoles which are closed ecosystems. Nintendo tries with Virtual Console and Sony tries with PlayStation Classics, but they are very narrow channels for classic games compared to what you get on PC.
On PC not only do you have all the digital stores readily selling old games, but modders and other hobbyists go to great lengths to make old games available and playable on today's computers. To be honest I've only been able to play some classics because people provided source ports that let you customize modern WASD controls. Ultima Underworld is the only game I've successfully played in DOSbox. There's a whole site dedicated to providing accessibility to Frontier: Elite II, including instructions for how to play it properly and a source port. It's like someone offering a new translation of Chaucer or something with their own annotations. GOG goes to some extent to provide this kind of assistance on its forums. Nintendo also pretty admirably includes new digital manuals with all Virtual Console games.
It would be amazing if someone actually took the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition idea -- modernizing the controls of really old games, to the next level for a lot of other old CRPGs.
