What do you care about?
I'm not after some philosophical journey of self
awareness. This is a gaming blog after
all...
Think about that last second before you slap down your hard
earned cash for a game.
What are your expectations?
Is it just another toy to be played with and discarded like so
much gift wrap on a Christmas morning?
Or is it the promise of continuing an experience that began long ago.
I'm not getting misty here, I know it's just another
consumable product only slightly elevated above the Family size bags of Doritos
and Red Bulls cluttering your cabinets.
But publishers pour millions into marketing schemes
designed to nurture the belief that the latest triple-A title is something you
can't live without. They further it with
promises that only a pre-order can fulfill and add in an artificial scarcity to
engender the burning desire to spend more.
Even if you're just casually interested, the media blitz is
inescapable. For months before launch
YouTube will be flooded with "leaked" game footage and gaming review websites will literally burst with tantalizing hints of what's to come.
It's all just so much video game razzle dazzle.
Believe it or not, there was a time when none of this was
necessary. For a lot of us, our first exposure to video games was at the local arcade. When consoles came along our preferred platform was largely influenced by how faithful the gaming was to that experience. After that, it didn't take much to prod you into expanding your library. Games almost sold themselves with little more than a few well placed ads and some eye-catching box art.
No raucous launch events, buxom bikini beauties or red
carpet arrivals.
The games may not have been the eye-popping and intricately
designed affairs common with today's titles but there was something in their
simplicity that endured.
Developers didn't have the luxury of gigabytes of memory and computing
power rivaling the Space Shuttle. The
earliest games were written in machine code.
No fancy program libraries or point and click development environments
here. It was about getting the most out
of limited resources that would be laughable by the standards of today's
cheapest Smartphone.
...and it was good.
Some would call it a golden age where the games somehow
transcended the primitive hardware they ran on. By today's standards the games were crude even by smartphone standards! I mean, how many times could anyone possibly get chased around the same maze by
the same pixilated ghosts? How many
barrels would Mario have to jump or alligators would Pitfall Harry have to
swing over?
It didn't matter because it was fun. If it wasn't, you wouldn't bother with it
again and chances are whoever made it wouldn't get another chance.
Remember the infamous E.T. of which thousands of copies were
laid to rest
in a remote New Mexico landfill (along
with Atari's future) 30 years ago?
It was a lesson that almost killed an industry. When your focus is on the business of gaming
instead of the games your fortunes are never certain.
I wonder if history is repeating itself...
Anyone who's been around gaming for more than a few years
will likely have fond memories of their own golden age. Maybe it was the Legend of Zelda, Doom or
Battlefield 1942. Whatever it was it
kept you hooked.
I was talking with a buddy of mine the other day and we were
reminiscing on a decade of lost Saturday nights. When we started the tradition of ruining our
eyesight in darkened rooms, the games were a generation or so removed from
those crude polygon opponents of our youth.
But not so far as to lose what I feel is the real essence of
gaming.
Back then the closest thing to DLC came in the form of an
expansion pack and multiplayer usually meant everybody was in the same
room. Online gaming was still in its
infancy with most folks still on dialup or sub-Megabit DSL connections. Great for email but Battlefield anything was
still a few years off. These days you'll
get kicked from a server if your ping is over 200 milliseconds. You could've seen that in a LAN connection
10 years ago.
As we ran down our personal inventory of games a few
cherished favorites came to the forefront.
These were games that we couldn't wait to play. In some cases it could have been a second
career if we thought to take them seriously.
Unfortunately, professional gaming was still little more than a
curiosity at the time. Besides, most of our
competition probably wouldn't have had to worry about grown up stuff like car payments or rent like
we did.
While I had taken a hiatus from gaming to focus on careers
and college, my friend had stayed faithful to the cause having been active
through every generation of gaming. I on
the other hand was lucky to boot up my old Atari 800 and play a thrilling game
of Star Raiders or maybe a few rounds of Commander Keen on a 486 SX25.
When I came back to gaming I was amazed. The first title I remember regularly playing
was Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer. Shortly
after my friend and I had discovered a mutual appreciation for gaming, he built
a second PC that happened to be identical to his first. As such we were evenly matched except for the
part where I was completely incompetent at anything more complex than the
shareware version of Doom.
Yeah, I always had an excuse for my shortcomings but the
reality of it was that I hadn't taken a game seriously (if there is such a thing) since my high school days. But it was fun and the games I experienced
were mind-blowing compared to anything I'd ever played before. So much so that it was distracting which
explains my poor showing... of course.
Once I got over my euphoria, however, I got
competitive. I played Racer almost every
day learning the nuances of every track till I could almost play by muscle
memory alone. After 6 months I finally
got to the point where I was competition and actually won a few races.
We'd still be playing that game today except that my friend
updated one of the rigs and we soon discovered that size mattered. These were the days when there was a very
real advantage to having newer hardware meaning whomever had the newer rig
usually won the race. It's still a fun
game if you can get it to work with a newer operating system.
Coincidentally that was something we had to deal with a
lot. Gaming wasn't as plug and play as
it is these days and many a night was spent ferreting out drivers and registry
entries.
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