this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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You can go to GOG, buy some really old game, install it on a PC, play it and after a few minutes go: "How the fk was I so dazzled with this shit back then?!"
At least for me, whilst most such game were A LOT of fun back then, almost all of them feel kinda meh nowadays, the graphics-heavy ones because they look like shit now compared to even games from 10 year ago and the other ones because their game mechanics are so shallow and simplistic (and often oh so reliant on reaction times) compared to even what Indie companies have been doing in the last couple of decades.
Yeah, the memory of the fun that was had survived the passage of time, but most of those games pale in comparisson to games I've played in the last 2 decades. Beware of confusing the two like the sterotypical old person who complains "Music was much better when I was young, before Rock-n-Roll".
PS: I'm not even especially big on fancy graphics but instead prefer complex multi-layered game mechanics, so the kind of games from back then I still can enjoy today are things like Civilization.
Lack of games to compare to, mostly. For instance, how many games could you compare Warcraft to, back in 1994? Probably only Dune II. By 1999, any RTS game would be compared to Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation and possibly others. "Doom clone" remained the definition of FPS for roughly 3 years. Meanwhile, every platformer since the late 80s was compared to half the catalogue available on the NES. Something something "learning from others' mistakes, standing on the shoulders of giants"
Not every old game is a gem, just like not every modern game is trash. One of my personal old favorites that holds up well is Jedi Outcast. Does a better job at making you feel like a lightsaber wielding jedi than Force Unleashed
Also, Suspension Of Disbelief worked extra hard back then and nowadays it's a bit more lazy... ;)
I'm not talking about comparison to modern expectation; I'm saying that devs were scrappier, had less established frameworks of design and technology, and still created a beautiful cultural moment
Yeah, I mostly agree with that.
Mind you, the biggest hindrance the create something special back then was technical, nowadays it's time: codebases are far more massive nowadays and the work that goes into making assets (sprites, models, audio, animation and so on) that go with the code in a modern game is gigantic compared to back then (or, alternativelly, if done with reusable assets you get just another of hundred of similar-loooking low-buget indie games).
Even something like Bioshock with it's unique vision was already a massive piece of work when it comes to game assets, though artistically (and as a game too) it's a masterpiece, IMHO.
I actually made a handfull of games back in the early 90s (a minesweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum done in Assembly and never published, and a Tic-Tac-Toe game for the PC done in C that I sold to a small magazine and did got published) and then started working on game making a few years ago, and definitelly the programing work has expanded in terms of size (with still some down-to-the-metal technically complex stuff like shader programming) but the asset creation work has massivelly exploded (no wonder AAA games have bugets in the hundreds of millions of dollars range).