There are handfuls of readers that probably believe games were solid and robust in the early 1980’s with birth of Nintendo of America or even Atari. Although these now classic games did break new boundaries and road the bleeding edge of technology they were of a simple time when a game may have one or two developers working a project. This was a time where music was composed by the developers. The dialog, the storyline, and the animation were all designed by the software developers. Internationalization of a game was the job of a handful of very inexperienced folks (or developers) that barely spoke the target language (i.e. “all your base are belong to us.”).
So why are today’s games ridden with bugs and imperfections? Are the developers less experienced or do they just not caring about the customer needs and desires? Well realistically we’re not talking about a “few developers” but a team of software engineers working with a team of quality assurance engineers across one or more divisions of a game development empire.
Have you ever taken the time to sit down and read through the credits of a game at the end of a manual (or read the manual at all)? There is a team of documentation folks just to compose that manual, add screen-shots, edit and re-edit and internationalize in four plus languages. But I digress. Read the credits for your manual of Call of Duty 2 and you’ll notice a layer of test teams at parent companies, and contracted companies, and at the core development centers. You may notice that they also give thanks to the groups of ‘regular folks’ that play tested the game while software folks watched behind closed doors to see how gamers experienced the game from the ‘common man’ perspective. The game even takes full video shots from the Military Channel and gives credit to them for the footage (old games had a string of still photo’s with text footers). All this and we’ve not even discussed the music scores composed by real musicians or the cinematic, post-production, and hired character voices recorded in sound proof rooms for best quality. This sounds very much like the behind the scenes footage for BraveHeart or The Lord of the Rings? With all these teams working together to make a top of the line game of today there will always be chances for error. We’re all human and for every engineer we drop on the scene we add more layers of complexity and more chances for bugs or tech support calls. But this market is what we’re all eating up for when we look at the game box at Best Buy and hope for “awesome graphics” and “stellar sound scores” and “above average game play” with a great support staff to handle our incoming calls when things just are not doing what we think they should do.
Did you ever call tech support for Zelda? Do you think they would be half as helpful as the staff for Dead or Alive 4? You’d be lucky if they spoke German or French twenty years ago while talking with tech support.
So before you go screaming about how your new game requires a patch when it locks up on a specific level go read the credits of the game and recall just exactly what hell went into creating this game. If that is not good enough perhaps you should do some research on how Electronic Arts has been treating their software development team and see if perhaps that could be the cause of games released before they are ready. Twenty years ago we were excited when we heard a new release of The Legend of Zelda was coming out (even if it was not nearly as good as expected) where in today’s world it is forced out earlier then desired to meet the demands of Christmas or because the parent company wants to realize revenue before the end of a quarter.
So what did the old classics have that newer games do not? Think hard about this and you may see the one huge factor that existed then that does not exist today: we were young. You can call it your “inner child” if you would like. When you were young your view of the world was much simpler, your time to play games much greater, and your ability to add imagination where it did not need to go was greater. When you first burned a bush in The Legend of Zelda and the little goblin gave you 10 rupees and told you it was a secret you were overjoyed. Or that stupid wizard that made you pay him for destroying his door?! Frustration! Perhaps you were like me and went around lighting any green shrubs on fire like it was your job. You had a huge map to explore and endless possibilities for secrets! Where was that red ring? How can you possibly afford the blue ring and the large shield? Life was so complex yet so simple to our immature minds. Yet we ate it up like it was candy. Today I believe our dialog would be something like this: “WTF? 10 rupees! That’s it! How about some silver arrows bitch!” In the world of today we would have to debate between completing labyrinth nine and changing a few diapers or putting the kids to bed. We just do not have time to go through half the labyrinth and die just to start back at the entrance. Frustrating as that would be now it was heaven back when we were kids. So what exactly makes us compare every adventure game on today’s console to The Legend of Zelda? It’s like comparing apples to oranges because our mindset has changed over the years.
What we really would like is a game that we can buy today that makes us feel like we did twenty or more years ago. Will that game ever exist? I am not sure.
As we move forward from 1972 to 2006 it becomes clear that those nostalgic gamers of yesterday are demanding new games for today. That means games must save quickly so that we can game for twenty minutes and go pickup the child at grandma’s or pay those bills that have been stacking up on the counter. Games must take advantage of every ounce of processing power, utilize 3d graphics and 3d shaders, support Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sounds, 1080i and 720p High Definition, play mp3’s from our iPod, online 24x7, and of course all be done on high speed DVD/Blue Ray or better.
What does that mean for ten to twelve year old kids today? No longer will they be able to experience the classic gaming like Super Mario Bros. 2, Ninja Gaiden, Ikari Warriors, Gauntlet, or Double Dragon. Sure they may be able to play them on their mobile phone, a pen, or some cool emulator but it just will not be the same for them as it was for us. I believe game design demands will continue to focus on what we, the older gamer, wants and less on those childish long drawn out silly plots that we once craved. R.C. Pro-AM has been replaced by Project Gotham Racing 3 and Wizardry by World of Warcraft. Even I must admit I pushed aside Shadowgate for such games as 7th Guest. Our children will suffer for the demands of the parents. My parents thought a ‘console’ was the storage compartment in their Datsun so they could hold their sunglasses and drink. Today ‘console’ is synonymous with Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft (we’ve all forgot Sega existed haven’t we?).
We must all remember that when we start up a game like Call of Duty 2 that the games entire foundation was built on other first-person-shooters of similar design. The historical context and progressive scenario ‘story telling’ are that of The Red Baron on the old i486 PC with a perspective set to the likes of Wolfenstein 3d which combined together makes you feel like your playing the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers!
Gaming had been around for many years before the creation of Nintendo and Sega which begin with games such titles PONG and Space Invaders brought to our homes via Atari and the later Atari 2600 along with other early console systems. Everyone 25+ has experienced some level of gaming on some older generation systems each and everyone of us eagerly awaiting the next generation systems (Super Famicon was a good example). Everyone can related to “what it used to be like” in some regard and there is always room for our elders to speak up with the obligatory “8-bit gaming? When I was a kid all we had was …”
I’d also like to touch upon interacting with child gamers online. It’s a known fact that most adults will, at some point in their online gaming experience, have to join a party with the likes of a “Timmy” (Agonizing_Gas should add a wiki-entry for this persona). Some brat of a kid that has to follow each word with a curse (while his mom is out of the room) and must substitute “you are” with “ur” change “because” to “cuz” and speak with such eloquence as “I t0tly pwn n00bz so ZOMGWTFBBQ 2 u.” This is just part of life in the world of online gaming. This concept is new to us that grew up with our only source of community being Nintendo Power and a local BBS (if we were lucky to have a modem on our old junk box DOS PC.) The world has changed and with it comes a networked community of all ages. For good and for bad we’re going to have to hope that the new generation of “n00bs” grows up to respect and play games as we do here at 2old2play.com.
Would we, as youngsters, acted out as much as those we meet in our online communities today? Yes, I think we would (especially considering some of us still do). Our children will grow up with consoles that are networked and have constant communications with the outside world. When we were young our community was our neighborhood friends and local family members in our age group. Now that we’ve grown up and moved out of the parents house (some with full families or retirement plans) we must substitute that gathering of close friends with an online community of close friends from all over the world. Perhaps the world of online gaming was a demand that we older folks created because we couldn’t sit with our three best friends in the basement; our Nintendo loaded with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and a square controller leaving calluses where not even prehistoric man could have guessed.
Hopefully in reflection of our roots we can continue to enjoy gaming on the newest consoles that are released and build up an archive of great games and great memories. Although gaming will never be the same as when you were nine it does not have to stop trying to achieve new heights and new expectations. The reason I became a software developer in the first place was based on the fact that I truly wanted to create a game far superior to Pro Wrestling on the Nintendo using real WWF wrestlers. Later this idea would be taken and implemented hundreds of times over before I ever entered professional software development. Gaming has changed how I view technology and has emptied my pockets of many dollars that could have been spent doing something more “productive” but, in the end, I would not have changed it for the world.
CodeMonkey
All historical references brought to you by WIKIPEDIA (http://www.wikipedia.org).
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