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Thread: Video games that are surprisingly close in time or the same year

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    Default Video games that are surprisingly close in time or the same year

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNLdblFQqsw

    This video gave me some ideas, discussing things like "The pyramids were as old to the ancient Romans as the ancient Romans are to us."

    Some surprising things to me:
    -The original PlayStation is 22 years old. Home PONG came only 20 years before the PlayStation. That means that the PlayStation is closer in time to dedicated PONG machines than it is to today.
    -The Atari 2600 and Sega Dreamcast were both being sold new in the same decade (1990s)
    -The Atari 2600 was discontinued on January 1, 1992. The SNES launched on August 23, 1991. That means the Atari 2600 and Super Nintendo were sold new together for 4 months.
    Real collectors drive Hondas, Toyotas, Chevys, Fords, etc... not Rolls Royces.

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    To me, the SNES is "new." To those I talk to in real life, the GameCube is the console they grew up with. So I kinda understand what you mean.

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    Quote Originally Posted by WelcomeToTheNextLevel View Post
    The SNES launched on August 23, 1991. That means the...
    ...SNES launched on my 17th birthday.

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    The Bentley Compu-Vision, a PONG machine, was introduced the same year as the NES (as the Famicom in Japan).

    The PS1 and PS3 were still officially supported during the same year (2006).

    The Sega Genesis and Dreamcast were both being produced in 1998.

    The PS2 was produced for a longer period than the entire pre-crash video game industry.

    As for some "closer thans":

    The PlayStation 2 is almost 17 years old. It came out in the US 6,109 days ago as of July 18, 2017. 6,109 days before the PS2 came out was February 4, 1984.
    At that time, the Atari 2600 was the market-leading video game system, and ColecoVision was the most advanced.

    The Atari 2600 is closer to WWII than it is today. When the Atari 2600 came out, World War II had just ended 32 years ago. Which is about how long the NES came out today.
    Real collectors drive Hondas, Toyotas, Chevys, Fords, etc... not Rolls Royces.

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    This thread makes me think of video game history as a whole. Technologies have a sort of slowing curve as they improve. In the initial period after they come out, improvement is rapid. As the technology matures, the improvement rate slows.

    For instance, look at The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Came out March 20, 2006, almost 15 years old. You can still find it in used game bins in places that don't sell retro games, and it looks almost as detailed as what's out today - because it looks pretty close to real life. It also has a vast, highly detailed world. Go back the same nearly 15 year period and you're at October 4, 1991, near the launch of the SNES. Between 2006 and 2020 is a moderate gain, 1991 to 2006 is night and day. Since Oblivion was a relatively "high-end" game at its time, let's look at what was in the same market position in '91: stuff like Super Mario World, F-Zero, Sonic the Hedgehog 1, etc.

    Home video games came out in September 1972, with the Odyssey. 48 years exactly this month. It took us as long to go from something that could literally draw three dots on the screen and used overlays to Super Mario 64 as it's taken us to go from Super Mario 64 to today.
    Real collectors drive Hondas, Toyotas, Chevys, Fords, etc... not Rolls Royces.

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    Quote Originally Posted by WelcomeToTheNextLevel View Post
    This thread makes me think of video game history as a whole. Technologies have a sort of slowing curve as they improve. In the initial period after they come out, improvement is rapid. As the technology matures, the improvement rate slows.

    For instance, look at The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Came out March 20, 2006, almost 15 years old. You can still find it in used game bins in places that don't sell retro games, and it looks almost as detailed as what's out today - because it looks pretty close to real life. It also has a vast, highly detailed world. Go back the same nearly 15 year period and you're at October 4, 1991, near the launch of the SNES. Between 2006 and 2020 is a moderate gain, 1991 to 2006 is night and day. Since Oblivion was a relatively "high-end" game at its time, let's look at what was in the same market position in '91: stuff like Super Mario World, F-Zero, Sonic the Hedgehog 1, etc.

    Home video games came out in September 1972, with the Odyssey. 48 years exactly this month. It took us as long to go from something that could literally draw three dots on the screen and used overlays to Super Mario 64 as it's taken us to go from Super Mario 64 to today.
    Yeah I think we were actually kind of spoiled by it. My interest in modern gaming has waned because games ten years ago are really not that different from games today. Meanwhile 10 years meant the difference between Final Fantasy 1 and Final Fantasy VII. I realize I got used to the steady supply of freshness and one upmanship of the 90s and now I easily get bored because that hasn't kept up. The only comparison I can think of is maybe what it was like witnessing the early days of film and going from silent movies to talkies to The Wizard of Oz.

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    Quote Originally Posted by TonyTheTiger View Post
    Yeah I think we were actually kind of spoiled by it. My interest in modern gaming has waned because games ten years ago are really not that different from games today.
    Exactly, video games got "good enough" technology wise over a decade ago. I don't see a point to buying new consoles as they don't seem that much better than what came out over a decade ago. I'm still using an 11 year old computer for daily usage and it's good enough for my needs. It's not like most games play that different compared to what came out ten years ago, they just look very slightly better.

    I really don't get why companies are still pushing technological advances as reasons to buy new electronics. This isn't the way things like ladders or hammers are sold, I don't need to upgrade a hammer if I have a working one from decades earlier. Electronics are getting the same way with advances, I see less reasons to buy something new just because it's slightly more powerful than what I already have.

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    The difference in a game's appearance isn't as stark as it was with identical spans of time in the past, but technology still isn't keeping up with the games of today. Lots of AAA games still can't even manage to run at 60fps on the home consoles (and PCs require regular upgrading to keep up). How a game can look in a screen shot is just one piece of the picture. Modern gamers value performance, and they're a lot less tolerant of poor performance than gamers were back in, say, the 5th gen, when we didn't really know any better because we had all that we had and were wowed enough by the newness of 3D to brush aside things like choppy, low frame rates.

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    I just found two games from the same year that look vastly different.

    Time Killers on Sega Genesis and Super Mario 64. Both 1996. In fact, Super Mario 64 was completed before Time Killers.

    Super Mario 64 was on more advanced hardware, yes, but the differences go well beyond that. Super Mario 64 was an intricately crafted masterpiece that's still just as fun to play today as it was almost a quarter-century ago. But that can be said for a lot of games, many of which came out long before Super Mario 64. It was also a technical achievement. For its time, the worlds were vast and highly detailed. Nothing on the PS1 could touch it technically for another two years.

    Time Killers, on the other hand, was not a generational step back, but two generations. This is a game that wasn't really "made" at all, it was shat onto the Genesis. While in '96 skilled developers like Traveller's Tales were squeezing every last drop of power out of the 16-bit consoles and providing experiences that could compete with the new-generation games, this game could have been done with absolutely no loss of quality on the NES or Master System. It had an MSRP of $55, which would have better been spent lighting that $55 on fire. Seriously, compare this to Super Mario Bros. 3, which looks like a generational leap over Time Killers, and it's six years older on hardware a generation older.
    Last edited by WelcomeToTheNextLevel; 12-21-2020 at 11:09 PM.
    Real collectors drive Hondas, Toyotas, Chevys, Fords, etc... not Rolls Royces.

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