Things you miss from a bygone era of gaming

[Ninjamohawk]

I thought this might be an interesting talk -- Things about video games that have disappeared. Things you hold fond memories of that just have no real place in games today.

I'll start: Loads of gaming magazines.
I used to love to buy a handful of different publications every once in a while. Some would have a set theme or come with goodies. Games journalism wasn't a serious business like it is today so you'd get all sorts of wacky humor and in-jokes for long time readers. It was great. As a kid it was like porn to me when my Nintendo Power, Game Informer, or EGM came in the mail.

Box *art*
Seems today what you get on the cover is some rendered image from the game or a setpiece. Back in the pre-32 bit eras (and even in the 32 bit age) you'd see all those different works of art on game covers, in the manuals, on the media itself. I cannot count how many NES games I bought based on their cover art.
EDIT: or LACK of cover art, like The Legend of Zelda. I hadn't heard anything about it but the spartan box cover was so mysterious. A wise purchase. Only time you see a very plain looking cover today is if it's in a special edition where the branding is all over the main packaging.

What are some of yours?

[Edmond Dantes]

I agree on both those points. To me magazines were a huge part of gaming. I enjoyed buying an issue of Gamepro or EGM or whatever and pouring over all the games they talked about, thinking about what ones I'd love to play the most. It was almost as much fun as actually playing the games. Sometimes, nowadays I find back-issues more fun than the games they discuss.

And cover art... oh man, even today, I base a lot of my purchases on how interesting the cover art is. You are so right that its a lost art and designers are getting increasingly lazy with it.

Now, here's some things I miss:

* Cartridges. I know there's good reasons the industry switched to more standard CDs and DVDs, but there was always something special about cartridges, like they gave gaming a unique identity. Movies came on tape, music came on CDs, games came on cartridges. In addition, one advantage carts have is their durability--you can play hackey-sack with an NES game and it will still work (as long as you clean the contacts). On top of that, they gave each system a unique identity--the NES just is not the NES without those gray cartridges with the ridged pillar down the side and that little knob you're meant to hold onto.

By contrast, Playstation and Saturn games come in boring jewel cases and would be otherwise identical if not for system logos on the packaging. But then, that's progress, and I suppose it can't be helped.

[M.Buster2184]

I know it's not completely dead, but I miss the wait and suspense of a good game coming out. There were no trailers for games or anything too often back in the day. Occasionally there'd be a sneak peak in a magazine, or an exclusive, but there wasn't the constant press and coverage that is around today.

[Daltone]

I know it's not completely dead, but I miss the wait and suspense of a good game coming out. There were no trailers for games or anything too often back in the day. Occasionally there'd be a sneak peak in a magazine, or an exclusive, but there wasn't the constant press and coverage that is around today.

I agree with this entirely. Watching 100 gameplay videos, pre rendered trailers etc spoils things fo me. A once monthly snippit in a magazine, backed up by some mysterious screen shots, was enough to get my attention.

Anyway, I miss..

*Shareware. More than a demo, less than the full game.

[SOL BADGUY]

Colors, nonhumans/Earth inhabitants as main characters, long games without the usage of DLC expansions on console games, 8 and 16 bit music, locations besides Earth and characters that didnt come from Earth.

[treismac]

* Cartridges. I know there's good reasons the industry switched to more standard CDs and DVDs, but there was always something special about cartridges, like they gave gaming a unique identity. Movies came on tape, music came on CDs, games came on cartridges. In addition, one advantage carts have is their durability--you can play hackey-sack with an NES game and it will still work (as long as you clean the contacts). On top of that, they gave each system a unique identity--the NES just is not the NES without those gray cartridges with the ridged pillar down the side and that little knob you're meant to hold onto.

By contrast, Playstation and Saturn games come in boring jewel cases and would be otherwise identical if not for system logos on the packaging. But then, that's progress, and I suppose it can't be helped.

This perhaps above everything else. Cartridges possess a personality and durability that discs can never, never have. You see a beat up cartridge at a flea market you wonder what its background story is. You see a beat up disc and you wonder how in the hell will this game play in ___ modern console.



I miss the whole oral transmission of secrets a great deal. The Konami code, the Super Mario Bros. through the ceiling short cut on 1-2, Justin Bailey, etc... yeah, learning those was like receiving some ancient thaumaturgical* incantation from another druid. Sure, Nintendo power or another video game magazine might have been the origin of the knowledge, but the way it was spread was much more hands on and magical. The easy access of video game knowledge via the internet rocks for the sake of utility, but it does unarguably kill the mystery of obtaining secrets in this day and age of Google Fu and game faqs.

*Sorry about the obscure word. I just learned it and you know how it is with vocabulary, use it or lose it, right?

[recorderdude]

I miss the limitations.

Look at today's games. You can practically draw the real world into them with the up-and-coming 3D graphics generation and you could damn near do it last-gen. Being able to do everything has made us revert to doing nothing special at all. The biggest game market has become FPSes focused on gritty, realistic environments, with forgettable orchestral scores, if any, and universally dull soldier characters, which, despite all that, are still at the peak of graphical and audial capability for the systems they're on.

Now, why exactly is every game looking and sounding as good as they possibly can a bad thing?

Breaking limits is what made the game industry THRIVE, and there's few left to break.

When gaming was first introduced as the Electronic Pong (and as an extension, the oddysey), it was huge. You could CONTROL the graphics? It was big for everyone.

Soon, everyone and their mother began making clones of the game, and the market became oversaturated. People had been seeing the same thing for a long time and they wanted something new...

Space invaders soon hit the scene from japan. It was huge. People had never seen a shooting game like it before. The aliens even had faces! Clones appeared once again, it got old even quicker...

BAM! Pac-Man, a game with a discernable main character. It was in color! It was fast-paced, and eating the ghosts was super satisfying! Everyone began to clone it, people got bored with maze games....

BAM! Donkey Kong, a game with a REAL STORY!....etc, etc...

The way that the gaming industry introduced itself to us was, essentially, through huge bounds of graphical, audial and general innovation and breaking the status quo of popular games to create a new one. This would go on for decades with Mario setting the bar and inspiring tons of platformers, a great deal of which added their own twist, sonic rushing the gaming masses into the 90s and a glut of animal mascot games, mario 64 setting the bar for 3D Platforming, etc etc..

Now, when we look at these games today, we say "Sure, super mario bros, that was a great game"....was. We're not blown away with its colorful worlds and unique cast of enemies like we once were. We've gone through generations of graphics, innovations of every sort, and....I can't help but feel we've run out of them in the mainstream view. Every FPS now has a "super epic" trailer with dark music and outlines of all the amazing graphics, and, honestly....it doesn't impress me anymore. Nothing breaks the mold enough to say "Hey! This is new! This is groundbreaking! This is something no game has ever done before! No game has ever looked, sounded and played this good!"...and this is the model that video games have been following since their very start. For long-time players, it's hard to get interested anymore when the entire formula of a successful game has changed from innovation to the "follow-the-leader" titles that were once only mildly successful; the industry encouraged new concepts despite the risky business for doing so because the payoff would be so great if they actually worked out. Nowadays, with the investment of time, money and labor required to make a full-scale modern game and the uncertainty of doing something original merely breaking even, making yet another mildly successful FPS that anyone could do is a wiser investment.

That's not to say that there aren't still some great games this generation that aren't FPSes, but they're really not limit breaking. I've seen so much done on modern super-consoles that it's very hard for my senses to be blown away anymore by what indie games can do. Despite that, I still say "wow, the genesis could do THAT?" every time I reach the moth boss of alien soldier, or say "damn, they got the NES to sound THAT good?" every time I listen to the soundtrack of Mr. Gimmick. Limitation breeds creativity, and limits are few and far between by now. We can still be entertained, but we've been so spoiled by EVERY popular game reaching the pinnacle of graphical and audial capability that we can no longer appreciate games that really try to be something amazing but pale in comparison to the might of the rehashes.

I know that I can't hold back the march of technology and I pray that I am wrong, but, at this point, I doubt it.

[spman]

This may seem like an odd one, but I miss going to the video store to rent games, especially the independent mom and pop stores that would often have a larger selection with more obscure titles than Blockbuster did. I remember driving my mom nuts because I'd spend a half hour studying the boxes trying to figure out which game to rent, hoping I didn't pick a loser. Back in those days you didn't have the amount of media covering every single new release that came out, so often times you'd find games you'd never heard of, sometimes you'd find a hidden gem, othertimes you'd waste your money on a dud. The worst was getting the dud and being forced to keep it for the full 5 days and having to wait to rent something else.

[bb_hood]

or say "damn, they got the NES to sound THAT good?" every time I listen to the soundtrack of Mr. Gimmick. Limitation breeds creativity,

Sunsoft actually created a soundchip for gimmick that allows it to play 16bit music on an 8 bit machine. So yes I would agree that limitation does breed creativity.

I would say the thing i miss most is the raw challenge you can get from some nes games. Finishing Gauntlet on nintendo 1 player using the Warrior (without cheating) or continuing is mega hard. Most current gen games really arent that hard.

[treismac]

I miss the limitations.

Look at today's games. You can practically draw the real world into them with the up-and-coming 3D graphics generation and you could damn near do it last-gen. Being able to do everything has made us revert to doing nothing special at all.

...

Limitation breeds creativity, and limits are few and far between by now. We can still be entertained, but we've been so spoiled by EVERY popular game reaching the pinnacle of graphical and audial capability that we can no longer appreciate games that really try to be something amazing but pale in comparison to the might of the rehashes.

I know that I can't hold back the march of technology and I pray that I am wrong, but, at this point, I doubt it.

I am with you on this one, recorderdude. When the 16-bit days first ushered in, I wanted better more realistic graphics and hardware horsepower. It was evolution. My NES could never hope to give me the experience of Street Fighter II, after all. Now that video games have "evolved" into movies with slightly worse scripts that you can play, the experience is as banal as the the formula for today's video games are cookie cutter. I don't want my games to look real anymore. I live in reality; I don't necessarily want to play there digitally. Too few developers put out games that explore worlds peripheral to reality (i.e. B action movie tripe) either out of laziness, lack of creativity, or fear of commercial failure. Who knew quirky and stylistic Katamari would be such a big hit and turn into a Namco franchise? Who would have thought that a game as amazing as Okami with so much heart would be Clover's last game for Capcom? I suppose in any market innovation will be the exception rather than the rule, and even in the case of innovation it is all too easy for it to devolve into gimmick [*cough, cough Nintendo, cough*], but I do think there could be a convincing case for there existing an inverse relationship between the personality of (main stream) video games and technological progress.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

What I miss most? Simplicity.

Take just about any 8 or 16-bit game and chances are you can figure out what to do almost instantly, you can dive right in without having to wait for a dozen company logo splash screens to load, and said games will have lasting appeal.

That isn't to say I don't absolutely adore modern complex games like Skyrim, but at the same time I wish the complexity in modern games was streamlined to the point of being accessible like retro gaming.

[JSoup]

I miss the mystery that breeds creativity in design. These days you can tell how long a game is or how many secrets/bonuses it has by glancing at the achievements (or lack there of). I find myself looking up the achievements lists for games I'm interested in before committing myself to a purchase just so I can make doubly sure I'm not tossing money away on a short, overpriced game. Then I think back to some of my favorites and how that wasn't a problem, almost literally unlimited gameplay, mostly because we had no goddamn clue how much crap was hidden in a game. I was the first person in my ring of friends to fully complete Super Mario World, was wowing kids in 6th grade at "how the hell did you find 70 stars?" in Mario 64. And then there are other games that we essentially already know everything about and that everything constitutes a lot of information. I've been discovering new little things in Mario RPG and Harvest Moon on just about every playthrough I've done since getting either game.

A videographer friend once told me that the problem with modern film making is a lot of creativity that you saw during the 70s and 80s is gone, simply because you no longer need to figure out how to do something neat and then try to sell the idea. Now you get a bunch of computers and throw money at them until the job is done. I see that being true for games as well, except instead of money you toss internet at the game and everything is solved.

Which brings me to the second thing I miss, a time when the internet wasn't a required tool for playing a game. I like the connectivity the web has brought to the people, I like the competitive statistics we can build against each other simply from enjoying our games....but I hate the gamers themselves. Seriously, all this online crap has done is made the more annoying community members more annoying and a hell of a lot more hostile. When someone died on the team during a Golf Land playthrough of the Simpsons arcade game, we didn't all drop everything and start calling the guy a faggot, for example.

[Emperor Megas]

I miss the limitations.

Look at today's games. You can practically draw the real world into them with the up-and-coming 3D graphics generation and you could damn near do it last-gen. Being able to do everything has made us revert to doing nothing special at all. The biggest game market has become FPSes focused on gritty, realistic environments, with forgettable orchestral scores, if any, and universally dull soldier characters, which, despite all that, are still at the peak of graphical and audial capability for the systems they're on.

Now, why exactly is every game looking and sounding as good as they possibly can a bad thing?

Breaking limits is what made the game industry THRIVE, and there's few left to break.

. . .

The way that the gaming industry introduced itself to us was, essentially, through huge bounds of graphical, audial and general innovation and breaking the status quo of popular games to create a new one. This would go on for decades with Mario setting the bar and inspiring tons of platformers, a great deal of which added their own twist, sonic rushing the gaming masses into the 90s and a glut of animal mascot games, mario 64 setting the bar for 3D Platforming, etc etc..

Now, when we look at these games today, we say "Sure, super mario bros, that was a great game"....was. We're not blown away with its colorful worlds and unique cast of enemies like we once were. We've gone through generations of graphics, innovations of every sort, and....I can't help but feel we've run out of them in the mainstream view.

. . .

That's not to say that there aren't still some great games this generation that aren't FPSes, but they're really not limit breaking. I've seen so much done on modern super-consoles that it's very hard for my senses to be blown away anymore by what indie games can do. Despite that, I still say "wow, the genesis could do THAT?" every time I reach the moth boss of alien soldier, or say "damn, they got the NES to sound THAT good?" every time I listen to the soundtrack of Mr. Gimmick. Limitation breeds creativity, and limits are few and far between by now. We can still be entertained, but we've been so spoiled by EVERY popular game reaching the pinnacle of graphical and audial capability that we can no longer appreciate games that really try to be something amazing but pale in comparison to the might of the rehashes.

I know that I can't hold back the march of technology and I pray that I am wrong, but, at this point, I doubt it.

I've never encountered this problem yet (knock on wood). But then, I don't play drab FPSs, or really any that aren't fantasy, or science fiction based (aliens, zombies, mythical creatures, etc.). I've never stopped being impressed with what developers can create, but I'm pretty selective in what I play. I'm far more blown away by amazing writing (like the Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid series), creative visuals (like El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, and Child of Eden) and immersive gameplay (like the addictive active reload gauge in Gears of War, feeling Yorda's hand tugging when I run with her in Ico, using the Spirit Camera in Fatal Frame, being forced to walk at pace through the dark in Dead Space because I need to use my gun sight as a improvised 'flash light' and you can't 'run' and aim at the same time) than I ever was impressed with raw graphic prowess when games really pushed the system like back in the day.

I'm still constantly impressed with game play innovations and developer creativity.

I DO have an issue with a 'lack of limits' on certain types of games though. Like 3D platformers. I just like platform games better in 2D; and I really don't care for sandbox games at all either, because I like games to have a focus, and sense of urgency. I like to feel that a game is very structured and scripted rather than open ended.

[Emperor Megas]

I also REALLY miss arcade style games that you can end in a couple hours, or less. People complain about games that are ONLY 10-20 hours long. That's crazy to me. Usually the time that people gamers saw a game takes to complete takes me about twice as much on average. Games that are supposed to be really short (by today's standards) take me tens of hours to complete, which usually translates to several weeks of playing as I don't game for hour and hours on end like most 'hardcore' gamers.

[segafan1989]

I miss arcades and they skating rinks they went it!

[brainerdrainer]

Yeah I miss the old artwork on the cartridges. That was always awesome and sometimes misleading. A game might have awesome looking artwork but then the game is completely oposite

[BydoEmpire]

Games that were games, not (poorly written, deep-as-a-puddle) interactive stories. You play to beat your score, play to beat your time, and you just keep playing the game because it's fun. The aspect of classic games that you can almost always get better. Even 20+ years later, I can still pop in Yar's Revenge or Missile Command and try to get a little better. There's a depth there because the games were designed to be always replayable. At the same time, you coudl play a complete, fulfilling game in just a couple of minutes. There wasn't a big learning curve, there weren't layers of controls to remember, there wasn't backstory to remember. It was just game. Easy to learn, difficult to master.

I like that games of the 80s & 90s were actually more mature in scope and content. There were so many simulators - from Solo Flight to Falcon 3.0 to 688 Attack Sub. There were tons of turn-based strategy war games like Battle of Antietem and Panzer General. The variety was huge, and the subject matter was a lot more mature than what you see nowadays (with some exceptions). There were games that required thought and strategy. Today it seems like blood, boobs and swearing is substituted for maturity.

I like that older games required you to use your imagination because you couldn't have hyper-real graphics and 5.1 sound. You had to make your own backstories, you had to use your imagination to transform that square into a knight. I liked that, it made the games more personal.

[Graham Mitchell]

I miss pounding the crap out of an arcade cabinet that isn't mine, and leaving the arcade sweaty.

[Flam]

I miss the pop culture aspect of gaming like it was in the 80's and 90's.

I also have fond memories of (don't necessarily miss) rushing into a Toys R' Us and trying to be one of the first ones to snag one of those voucher tickets off the gaming rack and redeeming it at the 'gaming' office.

[Ninjamohawk]

Ha! I used to work at Toys R Us when they did that would take the tickets for me and any friends I had who wanted a soon-to-sellout game.

I agree with, surprisingly, every point in this thread so far.

It's like the magic is gone from video games. Maybe it's just being an adult versus being a kid and maybe kids today will have their own magic stories to reflect upon their gaming memories but I ... doubt it. Everything is samey.