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[archagon]

I don't know about anyone else, but here are a few reasons why I gravitate towards older games:

* More creative settings. Perhaps on account of the fact that games used to be made by much smaller groups of people, their worlds and characters felt more imaginative and mysterious. Nowadays, it seems like there's only a couple of stock settings and characters that get reused, even if the details vary. Zeno Clash is the last "mainstream" game that really intrigued me in this regard. (By the way, my childhood gaming mostly consisted of shareware Apogee games.)

* Less focus on violence and serious issues. I'm tired of conspiracies, gangs, druglords, arms races, insanity, strife, and other unpleasant things. Sometimes I just want to hang out with my talking owl and rescue my castle from the clutches of an evil wizard, y'know? It feels like games are getting more and more aggressive over the years.

* Cartoonishness instead of realism. For instance, I've never seen anything like the insane, whimsical world of Goblin's Quest 3 in a 3D game.

* Better music. I'll take a chiptune with a strong melody over a lavishly orchestrated soundtrack or ambient background music any day.

* A sense of mystery. You never know what you're going to find next. I absolutely loved staring at shareware nag screens because of all the new levels, weapons, and monsters they revealed that were totally different from anything else I'd seen up to that point. Older games are also okay with leaving things unexplained, whereas games nowadays feel the need to meticulously describe every single thing in their universe. Sometimes, I just want to immerse myself in the setting without any distraction. Knowing too much makes the world seem smaller.

* Different  design paradigms. Duke Nukem 3D and many other shooters had non-linear hub-style levels, where you would start on the outside of the level and slowly work your way towards the center. Platformers like Commander Keen had large overworlds with occasional gates, which allowed you to choose which levels to tackle next.

* Easter eggs and secrets. Many games had fairly large sections that were only available to very careful players or players with guides. Most recently, the Serious Sam series really got this right. Most games nowadays are pretty open about their "secrets", probably to avoid wasting money on making content that few people would see.

I dunno. Maybe it is just nostalgia, but I just don't get that fantastic, intriguing, mysterious sense of storybook immersion with most games anymore. And I think that gamers have changed, too. When I was younger, gaming was a time when my imagination could run free. I would ask my dad to turn on our old Windows 3.1 computer, put in my shareware floppies, and then find myself in another world where everything was new and strange. I doubt many teens today would gravitate towards games like Journey, Rayman Origins, or Machinarium over the latest M-rated slaughterfest.

I never really gave it much thought before, but writing all this out made me realize how much I miss gaming in the 90s.

[SirNiko]

I don't think the rise of indies is because of dissatisfaction with the current state of the industry. It is because the advent of the internet and the availability of programming software has made it easier than ever for a small team of programmers to create quality titles and then advertise and distribute them.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Many games are far too "designed by committee" these days(not like it hasn't happened in the past) and they end up bland and same-y. Back in "the old days"(wherein I had not existed...) there were less established conventions, less financial risk, and more experimentation as a result of the previously stated factors. I think this made some wonderful, flavorful games.(also lots of failures, naturally) Lots of great unique experiences. A common charming aspect I find in indie games(but not exclusively to) is the dedicated direction that shows through with something that seeps with character and cohesiveness. There's more of a unique direction and less of a reliance on what a consultant from a publisher would tell you is "the way you do things to make a good game".

Imagine if traditional artists had publishers and all the publishers were saying "your art needs to have a vignette, emphasis on greens and oranges, and hatching." I think that sort of thing is happening far too much right now, and it's limiting potential.

People tend to only remember the goods things in the past. As time goes on the bitterness fades and you're left with the good memories. Ten years from now we'll look back on this console generation(et al) and probably go "man there were so many great games back then" even though we're all being totally cynical about it now. We'll remember the gems and have forgotten the crap. And we'll all still be bitching about Zelda.

Happy 4AM post 

[alastair]

You can notice that too in games made with large teams too, I think Dota 2 has a pretty awesome cohesive style/character to it.

[Jackson31]

I think part of the reason gamers are nostalgic is because games are something they used to identify themselves by when games where new and 'underground' and they needed a something to fill their need for social acceptance, but now that everyone plays games (technically) it's stopped being a trait you can identify yourself with.

I guess it would be like if all of modern society took on camping as something they all did, to varying degrees, the people who identify themselves as outdoor/camper type people would start saying "Yeah, but remember what REAL camping was like? when camping was actually GOOD?"

[baconman]

Because we're all gushy. No, for real.

Because game development before is more of an art form, and nowadays is more of a science. There's time-tested stuff that works, and doesn't work - and earlier games made you wonder what went where. Modern games don't do that, which leads to more polished, but less whimsical titles. You can see stuff like plot twists coming miles before they happen now, which you couldn't before.

It's also becoming increasingly hard to create something that hasn't already been done. This includes taking a basic concept, and simply changing a basic physical appearance trait and what you call something. In spite of how soldier/zombie everything seems, the entirety of mythos is getting pretty well and fully explored right now.

TO THE MAX!!!

Part of it is stylization. Of course anything new created by an established artist (in pretty much any venue) is going to reflect their core style, because their core style is still what it's built upon. And in spite of how many of us consider ourselves artists, there's nearly always subliminal influences involved.

The one thing I don't get over this modern vs. classic debate is where "new retro" fits into the equation. Personally, I consider them "good modern games."

[shig]

Cyril Connoly wrote this in his book, Enemies of Promise:

"Butler said an author should write only for people between 20 and 30 as nobody read or changed their opinion after that.  Those are the years when the artists are promising and the admirers full of admiration; by the time the artist has ceased to be promising and become a good writer, the admirer is a critic whose judgments are flavoured by his own self-hatred or who, taking the author as a symbol of his own youth, refers all his later books back to his earliest.  When an admirer says, "Ah, yes! But if only he would write another Prufrock!" he means, "If only I was as young as when I first read Prufrock."  The sour smell of the early thirties hangs over most literary controversy."

[doctor_roxo]

i'm 29 years old and started gaming when i was like 3, maybe 4. my mom would sit me down in front of the big wooden cased tv on the floor that had an atari 2600 lying on the carpet in front of it. can't remember what games i played but i do have memories of some type of tank or something shooting at enemies in the sky above.

the game to really grab me and take hold of me in those young years would probably be super mario bros. for nes. i was around 6 years old when i first played it and have never looked back, as they say.

i think the reason gamers are so nostalgic is because they want those feelings they had when they first experienced video games. when i play retro games nowadays it brings those childhood memories back to me and reminds me of a simpler time. when the worries of the world weren't on my mind, when i didn't have bills and real life problems to deal with. just my whole life ahead of me and my hands on the controller and i could do/be whatever i wanted. slay dragons, rescue princesses, you know...the usual.

[Jackson31]

It's also becoming increasingly hard to create something that hasn't already been done. This includes taking a basic concept, and simply changing a basic physical appearance trait and what you call something.

I don't think it has become any harder to do things that haven't been done before, I think it's just become socially harder to try.
I think the reason so many people think this about games is because of all this nostalgic perpetuating of the same archaic motifs and mechanics. You even said "This includes taking a basic concept, and simply changing a basic physical appearance" of course this is going to get harder,
if 1000 painters decided they where going to make a beautiful painting that the world would love, but it would take on the base of being a boat in a lake, then of course people are going to scoff and say "I've seen 1000 other paintings of a boat in a lake, I don't care for how yours differs slightly, it's nothing new"

the very idea of "There's time-tested stuff that works" is exactly the thing that is making games a science rather than an art, imitating games when they where considered more artistic doesn't make the process any less scientific.

I think there is a heavy social weight sitting on every game developers' shoulders these days not to explore new territory, and not only on a mental level but on a financial level, games that step out and do something new can't have a scientific measuring of their success before they are funded, made or shipped, so therefore nobody would fund, make or ship such a thing. I would argue that this is no less true in indie circles than in mainstream industry.

[phubans]

It's not just games, but this generation of adults. We're nostalgic because something changed. Look at the media around you today, including not just games but music and films, too. It barely holds a candle to the stuff of previous generations, and this isn't just a sentiment held by new adults who are bitter, but even some kids of this current generation will be the first to tell you that they wish they had been born earlier.

I'm not quite sure why things are held to a much lower, more vapid standard these days, but when I figure it out I'll let you know.

This is the part of the discussion where you ask Paul if he's played X, Y, or Z game from the modern era and he admits that he hasn't heard of X, hasn't played Y, and only watched the first 5 minutes of a YouTube video of Z to decide that it was shallow.

That's simply not true; I've played plenty of games from this era. Was 60 hours not enough time invested in Skyrim before I decided it was an over-hyped disappointment? I think the problem with games today is that they're so over-marketed that they reach a point of never reaching our expectations. Marketing back in the 80s gave you a pretty basic top-down view of things and left so much more to your own experience. You also didn't have the Internet to ruin everything with its fans running every single remotely-quotable joke into the ground ad nauseum; "I USED TO BE AN ADVENTURER LIKE YOU UNTIL I TOOK AN ARROW TO THE KNEE! THE CAKE IS A LIE! BACON!" etc.

I feel like we lost something in the beauty of simplicity; now everything is basically a hyper-realistic (or trying to be) first person shooter with RPG elements, puzzle-solving, 3 different ways to experience the action, etc. It's like the biggest games have fused into one big genre of everything aforementioned, and have the most rich, in-depth systems that are going to be a turn-off to anyone who isn't willing to invest the hundreds of hours needed to become an expert. What happened to more streamlined systems that focused on beefing up the quality of the systems and their nuances, rather than having some huge, convoluted and specific system that requires expertise?

I like how the industry's answer to simplification now is to have everything be bland, stark, and minimalistic. We can't just have fun games with simplified systems and mechanics. I think that's why I respect Locomalito so much for their design philosophy; there is still a place for straight-forward "game" games that aren't attempting to be some hyper-realistic, hyper-macho action-fest, or some equally obtuse "nuovo" art-wank hipster shitfest.

[Blademasterbobo]

you're just so wrong
...
it's crazy y
g you ar
ho w wre
on i odn
understt
and ho w
it is ac
posstual
lyi b
le
.

 

[shig]

i feel your pain bobo

[Dragonmaw]

Old commercials were so simple and straightforward guys.

They weren't weird or interesting or funny at all

They only showed things relevant to the games

Modern commercials don't leave anything to the imagination, nope.

They aren't stirring or interesting or emotional or anything like that

[DavidCaruso]

How does more complexity equal vapidity exactly? Also, aren't your favorite classic games JRPGs, how can you talk about "streamlined systems that focused on beefing up the quality of the systems and their nuances?" Also, which worthwhile single player modern games are you thinking of that require you to put in "hundreds of hours" to become an expert? Also, which worthwhile modern 2D games are you thinking of which have bland, stark, and minimalistic visuals? Also, where does the "beauty of simplicity" factor in when you consider that many of the best classic games still have more meaningful complexity than many contemporary action titles (take Final Fight vs. God of War, for instance), though not the best ones? Also...

[Derek]

I feel like we lost something in the beauty of simplicity; now everything is basically a hyper-realistic (or trying to be) first person shooter with RPG elements, puzzle-solving, 3 different ways to experience the action, etc.

Uh, except for the vast majority of games that are not that.