Why Do We Play The Old Games That We Play?

The first game system I owned was a black Nintendo GameCube that my older brother and I got for Christmas when I was seven. Along with the console and matching controller we got Super Mario Sunshine, Star Wars: Rogue Leader and Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure. A year and a half later we got a PS2 Slim on which I played my beloved Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper, alongside hours of Dragonball Z: Budokai 3 and Star Wars: Battlefront 2. That was, is, my generation. I grew up in a post-polygonal world where Kirby was a perfect circle, Mario’s overalls were denim and the 3D platformer had been finessed down to a science.

I also hail from the Modern Warfare generation, from the age of killstreaks and rage-quits where no multiplayer game of any sort was complete without three perk slots. My brother bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3 right around the time first person shooters began to hold an allure for me. Four months later Call of Duty 4 came out and nuked sci-fi shooters back to the 90s. Thankfully they seem to have come back in vogue. Everything old is new again.

All this is to say that I, like anyone ascribing to games culture, identify my place in it with a specific point in time. That’s true of all fanbases of all media, but games are still burgeoning. They’re old enough that I’ve missed a lot of history, despite being deeply engaged in the industry for over a decade. They’re young enough that, even in my brief time, changes have come fast and steep. I find myself lately with very little money to buy games or time to play them (pity the poor collegiate lifestyle), yet I remain enraptured by the medium in large part because of its dynamic nature and constant evolution.

So why do I love Final Fantasy VII so much? It’s not exactly an exotic condition, you may have noticed that several people hold an affinity for the game, but why me. Why did a kid born to dual analog and consistent character models fall way too late for a game plagued by poor localization, infuriating minigames, Lego people and Cait-Fucking-Sith? Why do I own Advent Children on DVD? Don’t think too hard about that second question.

I could ask the same thing of Metal Gear Solid, a game whose franchise I played through backwards. Forgive my sacrilege, but yes, Guns of the Patriots was my first outing into Kojima’s pervy, nanomachine-riddled alternate history. I then ventured into Snake Eater and Sons of Liberty before finally procuring a copy of the PS1 original and a memory card to save it on. And even then, after procedurally stripping away every mechanical system that made that series feel the least bit modern, after knowing every narrative twist and turn ahead of time, I loved the game. Recently I tried to get my little brother to play through the series in proper chronological order, but he threw in the towel after besting Psycho Mantis. He said the game design was old and frustrating. He’s not wrong.

Instead, my brother prefers to play Super Mario 64. He knows all the weird glitches that let you beat the game with 16 stars and has cleared every objective multiple times. A couple days ago he referenced the game as the greatest 3D platformer ever made. I couldn’t disagree more. I’ll always appreciate it from a distance, but every time I try to play Mario 64 I feel ruthlessly bullied by the game’s loose momentum-based character control and incongruously precise platforming demands. My platformers were designed for a dualshock 2. Sly snapped to landing points with a press of the circle button, Ratchet had big guns, and every character who ran and jumped turned on a dime. On the PS2 platforming was tight. You didn’t skid when you turned around, and the graphics were smooth and crisp, not at all like the muddy blockiness of Mario’s 3D debut. I won’t deny the game’s quality or importance, I just didn’t grow up with it. It’s not of my generation.

But it’s not of my brother’s generation either, who is in fact far further removed from c-buttons than I. So why does he hold such adoration and reverence for Mario 64? Why do I love MGS1 and FFVII, why do I keep returning to the burning frustration of the NES’s original Ninja Gaiden, all games far before my time, but scoff at Banjo Kazooie for antiquated design? Why do we have retroactive nostalgia for games before our time, and why do we dish out tht nostalgia so randomly?

When I read a book that’s a century old I don’t notice. If I go through the Oscar winners from 1964, there’s not much but camera angles and hairstyles to remind me of the time gap. But games are different. You can’t drop to 32 bits in 2017 and pretend you’re playing something modern. Most of the PlayStation library, if your childhood was dominated by Smash Bros. Melee like mine, feels antiquated. But inevitably, if you’ve ventured back to that time to learn your history, you find something that sticks. Maybe it’s Super Metroid, or Ocarina of Time, or Chrono Trigger, but it likely won’t be what stuck for me, or him, or her.

It’s just as easy to watch Casablanca as Inception. Games don’t work that way. So why do we like the old stuff that we like? Ultimately I think it’s a testament to the medium’s continued promise of originality. Things change so quickly in this industry that every generation, every console, every game is an island unto itself, mechanically and stylistically diverse. Personal taste plays a massive role in a medium with such vast differentiation. Generations be damned, there’s something to love and hate in most games.

Maybe that’s why we play the old games we play. Maybe that’s why decades don’t strip away relevancy, despite advances in design philosophy. Maybe not. Maybe I’m the last person to ever care about Custom Robo. But I hope not. I hope new people discover Custom Robo every day. It would be a damn shame otherwise. Custom Robo’s a pretty good game.

When I read a book that’s a century old I don’t notice. If I go through the Oscar winners from 1964, there’s not much but camera angles and hairstyles to remind me of the time gap. But games are different.

That is a fantastic point I had never considered. Though lot of media dates itself (music is a pretty clear example of that) I do see generational shifts in games in a way I don't normally see in other industries. That could be because I watch the games industry so close, or it could be because it's such a young medium and is still, in many ways, in its infancy.