Two non-nostalgia aspects of old games stand out to me:
1) The gameplay is often much easier to pick up quickly without a crutch mode because there were fewer degrees of freedom.
2) The artistry was at times amazing. Orson Wells said that "the enemy of art is the absence of limitations" and I think the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, in particular, demonstrated the truth of that maxim.
I also wanted to say that old video games can be appealing for reasons other than nostalgia. Only recently I played through chrono trigger and symphony of the night, both for the first time, and they are amazing even by today's standards. People enjoy old books, movies, etc because they are still great, why can't video games be the same way?
I've long been a Final Fantasy fan. I was introduced to it with FF7, a game I still continue to love—and am more than a little excited for the impending PS4 remake. It's a gold standard for me. My sons (16 & 12) and I recently embarked on playing through the entire Final Fantasy catalogue. I'm currently on FF4, while they're still finishing the first. We've all been having a blast with the playthroughs, as well as discussing comparative gameplay, art, mechanics, etc. they're just fantastic and timeless games.
Best of all, my boys now want to work together to make a game. My oldest has already made an FF clone on his TI-84. If their interest holds, it could be an awesome project to work on together.
Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time. Its images and music have been part of my life since I was ten years old, so I've often wondered how I would perceive it if the experience were new as an adult. Glad to hear that it held up so well.
To be fair, loads of XIX century novels are considered boring for today's standards mostly because they were born as serials, paid by episode or even by word, and published in newspapers first. After the media landscape evolved, their appreciation diminished; similarly, old games suffer from the rapid evolution of their platforms / media.
Well, we know about a lot of abandonware since the times of Gilgamesh and Ulysses. Even what we managed to preserve is usually executed with emulated languages, because original runtimes are lost or evolved beyond recognition. Some are ports of pirated or censored copies, on completely different architectures, completely reskinned and modded beyond recognition.
The result is, to be brutally honest, that reading Beowulf is a chore; most Shakespeare works need a walkthrough; Dante's Inferno is fun but we'll never appreciate it in the same way as XIII-century political junkies did. And so on and so forth for huge chunks of literature.
In short, most old literature is not as accessible or enjoyable as contemporary pulp. You have to accept these limitations as you consume it; which is why Plato does not sell as much as J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown. Similarly with games, we cannot expect today's kids to appreciate what came before them. Some will, some won't. That's just how it is.
Again, this generalization is not valid for me, there are lot of counter examples like Marcus Aurelius. But apart from that, it's mostly a fashion problem. Sure the fashionable item will sell more (it is usually designed for). That tells nothing on the rest. You are right that we will never have the same context, and that some artworks are starting to be beyond enjoyability, but it's not always the case. For music for example there is folk, not fashionable but enjoyable even for kids, and maybe one day people will play an old Zelda as they could have listened to Stairway to heaven.
>we cannot expect today's kids to appreciate what came before them
Anectodically I've had many opportunities to play old video games with kids and they all appreciated them, in fact I'm not sure they could tell that it was old games (Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi's Island (Snes) on the top my head).
Edit: to continue the analogy with music, it would have been has there was a race to write the symphony with the most instruments, with ads telling you to always upgrade to the next symphony for your listening pleasure. Then one day some people started to notice that some ancient guy/girl with only their guitar or voice was as well enjoyable, and if not a better a different emotional medium. It seems obvious but for video games every time you say that some old games had something that we may be missing you get the usual "you are a nostalgic old fart"
> Again, this generalization is not valid for me, there are lot of counter examples like Marcus Aurelius.
Great example: we don't have the original, we rely on translations of a single XIV century copy written in a dead language (classic Greek). Depending on translations, we may or may not enjoy it -- I'd argue you probably wouldn't read it in XV century Catholic Latin. In other words, we love playing the (excellent) 3D version of Sid Meier's "Pirates!" rather than the original crappy-looking 2D version; in a few years, we'll probably be playing the VR port. That's fine, but it requires some effort -- either by us tolerating the crappy original, or by developers/translators constantly bridging the cultural gap.
Similarly, folk music might require instruments that are expensive or hard to find these days, like an accordion or concertina. Again, enjoying it requires effort at some level.
> Anectodically I've had many opportunities to play old video games with kids and they all appreciated them
Sure, but would they go out looking for SNES emulators on their own, rather than looking forward to XCOM2 or some shiny new MMORPG? Unlikely. Granted, the "side-scroller platform" genre is a bit fossilized, so it's probably easier to approach classic games in that category; but a lot of other genres have aged really badly. No self-respecting teenager would take Double Dragon seriously these days, nor any Atari 2600 game.
In short: like with literature, appreciating old games requires extra work at some level.
I would heavily disagree that kids wouldn't go looking for SNES emulators on their own or playing retro games or what not. I mean, look at the Virtual Console on various Nintendo systems. It's pretty darn popular, even among people who never grew up with most of the games on it. Same deal for Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, Steam, GOG, etc. There's obviously a large number of kids and teens who would prefer playing a NES or SNES game to one of the newer ones.
And hey, enough kids go looking for SNES emulators that the average user age in a lot of ROM Hacking communities is between 13-18. The vast majority of people at SMW Central are well under 18 years of age, and likely didn't grow up with the SNES game:
I 100% agree with this. A lot of older games are appealing simply because they're good games in general, and are seen as a new experience for people who didn't grow up with them. For example, how many people likely played Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask for the first time on 3DS? Or before that, the Wii Virtual Console? Yet for a lot of people coming back to them, they still consider them some of the best games of all time.
Heck, I do, and I'm one of the people who never played either til then.
One more-recent case that really stands out is Command & Conquer - Red Alert 2. This game had much simpler graphics than later RTS games, so the focus was mostly on gameplay. IMHO, this was the best RTS ever created[1], and the reason for this was that it was sort of at the peak of perfection for its level of graphical and spatial limitations.
1. I know Star Craft was epic as well, and Generals from the remaining remnants of Westwood combined with EA was great also. And... Dune. Red Alert, for me, was the sort of Vivaldi[1.1] culmination that built on all these past successes, just before the age of "Moar Triangles!" reached RTS.
1.1 (I heard you liked footnotes) Vivaldi, the Baroque composer, built upon the style of Corelli and others before him, even copied some aspects of their musical styles, but this is what made his music so great.
C&C-RA2 was very good, but for me RTS, the era of Starcraft and C&C was crushed to dust by the 3d terrain and balistics of Total Annihilation, nothing held a candle to it.
I still remember yelling out loud with surprise the first time enemy artillery destroyed some of my aircraft while firing on ground targets further away.
Sadly the 'moar triangles' era began shortly afterwards and definitely abandoned the simplicity of well balanced gameplay and solid game engines, for flashy graphics and other cheap lures.
There's a trilogy of Epic RTS games built Cavedog Alumni. Three different companies, three different "universes", yet a clear line of spiritual succession exists through them thanks to some unsung powerhouses of the gaming industry over the last 20 years.
Total Annihilation
Supreme Commander
Planetary Annihilation
The amazing thing about these games is how much longevity they have due to quality design. There is an active community of players around TA still to this day. Who have done some pretty amazing things over the years... The game is routinely played with more than 10 times the number of units it was 'designed for' with extra large custom maps and LAN games that can take hours to play out.
Supreme Commander came out and upped the ante, TA had scaled to massive RTS battles where micromanagement became nearly pointless. Supreme Commander goes further, units range massively in size, so much so that you often spend most of the game zoomed out, controlling an army of thousands of coloured dots spread out over maps up to 80km x 80km
Then somehow they found the crazy inspiration to go further. Not content with nuclear weapons deforming terrain with explosions so big your units are mere specs on the map if you zoom out to admire the fireball... Planetary Annihilation is everything you imagine when you read the name. Spherical planets swarming with thousands and thousands of tanks robots planes and ships, satellites in orbit, rockets, teleportation and other crazy machines to transport your army between planets and moons, massive asteroid pushing engines that let you push asteroids and moons out of their orbits and use the planets themselves as weapons of warfare.
TLDR: Yep, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, and Planetary Annihilation are three of the best RTS games ever, if not THE best RTS games ever then clearly the best Strategic RTS games ever.
It was released by Wargaming.net on Steam in November last year, and after buying the GoG version earlier last year, much to my surprise when I re-bought the Steam version, the Steam version works fine on my machine which didn't work with the GoG version. Its also so ancient that its basically perfect under WINE.
There is still active development on some of the fan sites on a 3.9 and 4.0 'fan patch', which will also have corresponding groups of players using the patches.
There is online multiplayer via both virtual LAN / hamachi style setups and via a few tools like GameRanger that also help keep these older games connected.
The community is spread thin, but still thriving, since the simplicity of the game makes it so easy to keep enjoying it. I'm looking forward to its 20th anniversary on September 30th next year (2017).
Ah, Red Alert 2. I really loved that game, haven't played in forever. It was before I had ubiquitous broadband so I never really played it online - does anyone know if it is still possible to do so / whether anyone does? I'm sure I'd lose within minutes against anyone still playing today, but a 4 way multiplayer battle would be amazing.
EDIT: figured I could be less lazy and find out myself. It appears you can play online through https://cncnet.org/red-alert-2. Now all I need to do is figure out where to buy it and how to make it work on my Mac. I suppose it's old enough I might be able to play via a virtual machine.
Definitely check out OpenRA, a modern open source and cross-platform reimplementation of the old Westwood engines, with support for CnC, Red Alert and Dune2000. There's a few changes to add a bit of balance but its still got the classic feel and there's an active multiplayer community online with regular tournaments and everything.
On the artistry side there is more : 20 years ago (ouch) you still had mainstream games that were built without too much of marketing pressure. I remember an interview of a Warcraft 2 team member who was saying that they were simply trying to make the best game for themselves. So sure there is nostalgia, but when comparing mainstream the difference is not just technical. Same as in music, the (edit: artistic) quality is now in the indie, and thanks to great tools it's a better time than ever for creativity, at the expense that it's harder to live from it.
Yeah, the artistry in a lot of older games is pretty incredible, if only for the sheer amount of detail and work the creators put into the very tiniest aspects of these games. Like Yoshi's Island for the SNES, where every corner of the game was crammed with secrets, bonus rooms, etc. In some cases, even messages from the creators about the work they put in:
That game itself was impressive in its mechanics too, given that it had situations where enemies behaved in unique ways that were never likely to come up in the actual game.
Or a game which I still remember quite fondly from 2001, Wario Land 4. There, despite using traditional sprite animation, every single level had at least one different tileset and background (usually two or three), its own music (which had things like echo effects added for caves and sped up or slowed down based on on screen events) and tons of details that were exceedingly unlikely for the player to notice. Like a whole tileset for a single room or two, with tons of animations. Or music specifically for part of an ending medley... if the player did really poorly overall. Or a sound test where every single song was exclusive to the sound test.
That's the kind of thing that was more common in older games. A huge amount of attention to detail and small secrets scattered everywhere.
A great thing about Yoshi's Island is that it's possibly the only SNES game that benefits from the fancy pixel-smoothing modes that emulators offer. Rather than looking distorted, it makes it look like a completely modern 2D platformer.
I fully agree with your second point (the Wells quote). It's most noticeable in movie-making, but I agree it also applies to games.
However, I somewhat disagree about your first point. Some old school games are not easy to pick up; some are so punishing as to be almost non-viable for today's standards. Some games came with a complex manual that you absolutely had to read (and it was really hard for those of us living in countries where piracy was the only option).
For example, some 90s RPGs are so untractable and complex I never had the patience to learn how to play them. I'm thinking for example of Darklands, which has many fans in the abandonware community, but which would probably never succeed these days.
Man, we desperately need a reboot of Darklands. Something like the newer XCOM games for the tactical combat, and a little bit nicer world map would be an insta-buy. Especially if the complexity and beautiful menu art of the original was retained.
1) The gameplay is often much easier to pick up quickly without a crutch mode because there were fewer degrees of freedom.
2) The artistry was at times amazing. Orson Wells said that "the enemy of art is the absence of limitations" and I think the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, in particular, demonstrated the truth of that maxim.