Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

by gSathe

One of the commonest rants I’ve seen of late is that games just aren’t what they used to be. That the golden age of gaming is behind us, that there is now so much focus on the polygon count and the framerate that the game itself is forgotten.

If you spend a little time thinking about it though, you might decide otherwise. For one thing of course, the heyday of gaming, as most of us remember it, also had a large amount of really crappy games that none of us want to think back on and remember.

When we think back on the games of the day, we remember the classics, which had it in them to last. I remember adventure games, something modern gamers wouldn’t have even heard of, works of art like Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango (LucasArts what happened to you? You used to be cool!) and of the heady rush of Wolfenstein.

But the thing is that I’ve been gaming since around the age of 10. I’ll be 25 this year. That’s 15 years of gaming, across multiple platforms.

I assume I’m not the only one.

I suspect once you’ve been playing games for that kind of time frame that, like many things, your tastes begin to refine. We expect more and more from our games, because our experience gives us a huge breath of titles to compare with.

I wonder, if I put a 15 year old in front of Bioshock what they’d think? Is it that the games are becoming less, or that our expectations of what a game should offer has grown.

Think about Doom or Quake by today’s standards. How about the original Dune. These titles birthed entire genres, yet by today’s standards are grossly limited.

I agree it seems like the industry is less willing to take risks these days. With so much money at stake, I can understand why.

There are a few moments of brilliance to be found, if you search hard enough. Portal comes to mind. The brilliant games are out there, they’re just getting harder to find in the mainstream. There are a few companies which are willing to stake a lot on a single product, spend years polishing it and readying it before feeding it to the hungry gaping maws of the public.

The games I remember weren’t highly polished works though, carefully balanced to satisfy everyone in the audience. And also, perhaps as importantly, they weren’t digital interactive entertainment experiences either.

They were games. Which made them a completely different thing. But what really mattered was that they were completely new. They weren’t part of a genre, Doom wasn’t another FPS, Warcraft wasn’t another RTS. They were the not the first ones of their kind, but they were the ones who got it right and defined the genre.

And now people are making more games of the genre. That’s why the real winners, the games which will be remembered years down the line, and will be played by people who are running emulators to play games which were made to perform on today’s cutting edge (and then’s rusted obsolescence) are the ones which don’t try and fit in, but stand out as something completely different.

So if anyone out there is listening, here’s another tip – that’s where you’re making history – and that’s where the big money is. And both are important.