I hate confessionals, so let's get the confessional part out of the way: whenever I go home for a visit, the first thing I do is not to call my friends or spend time with my parents — I head straight for the local video game arcade. As with most addictions, this is not because my love for parents and friends has vanished, but because the arcade speaks to me and I must heed that call. There are no arcades in podunk Williamstown, and there are in Boulder, and that's that.

And as with any long-term addiction (you can trace this one back to my experiencing Pong for the first time at maybe age five) it's gotten stale. The new video games have gotten smoother, flashier, faster, and more realistic — it's undeniable. But somewhere along the way something got lost, and here it is tempting to wax poetic (which should set off all sorts of warning bells) and yet it's true: Video games just ain't what they used to be.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks so: just take a look at the scads of video game emulators running around the Web. Defender, Zaxxon, Dig-Dug; pick your sprite-based poison, it's yours. It's free, too, as long as you own a copy of the original — but emulators are the Traci Lords of downloadable vids, and nobody's checking. The vintage gaming fad is seeping into the video game parlor, too; old Galaga and Battlezone rigs haunt the back rooms, oldsters huddled at the one-joystick, one-button controls.

So is it really true — are the new video games truly inferior, or is this just some nostalgia kick for twenty- and thirty-somethings who are starting to feel old? The answer is, well, both.


Nostalgia

Here's my theory, half-baked maybe, but with some good ingredients: Gen X, that generation without a label, isn't truly happy with having no unifying identity, no rallying call. And so we appropriate old fads and styles with aplomb and a certain amazing rapidity. Wasn't it only eight years ago, maybe less, that the '60s were in and hip to copy? Well, we moved on to the '70s pretty quickly, reabsorbing disco and funk and swinging cocktail times — and while some of that interest is still with us, you can see a fascination with the early '80s beginning already. Breakdancing is coming back, along with old-school rap; in this time of retro consumption, even aberrations like a Tiffany comeback album (this is real, or so I hear through the grapevine) seem normal or possibly inevitable. And with this in mind it's no wonder that we should find old-school video gaming reappearing too.

In the '80s, video games formed the basis for a classic subculture. Vids formed the fantasy world for the bright geek, who was perhaps the preeminent character archetype and consumer of that time; witness WarGames, The Last Starfighter, and of course Tron, visions from '80s movie execs who caught the zeitgeist. Most video games were underdog good vs. evil battles, with never-ending waves of enemies coming at you, the single lonely ship/tank/human left to fight off this onslaught; indeed, as Gamesta' Pod member HaveADay points out, "the challenge in most of these classics comes from the fact that they don't end." Armageddon games ran rampant, and I don't think it is too much to read both a Cold War mentality into the games and an invitation to that geeky gamer to participate in a world he (almost certainly he) appreciated all too well — one vs. many, except this time with a chance to fight back, if only a doomed one. Perhaps all the better for being doomed. We have to appreciate too that this is a time when computers were still sort of spooky, and those phosphorescent screens disconcerting — prehistoric beasts in this pre-Macintosh, pre-Web time. Interacting with these video games was participation in something arcane. And all of this made the whole experience vaguely subversive.

Video games got mainstreamed over time — perhaps the development of competitive home video game platforms was responsible, taking kids out of the always seamy, wild arcades and transforming vids into the stuff of slumber parties. The Berlin Wall came down, we all started using e-mail, computers became a lifestyle. Video games, now part of the home, are no longer either cool or uncool, just everyday. It is no wonder that we miss them so.


Mortal Kombat vs.
Donkey Kong

The other half of the theory comes from the games themselves, and the ways in which they have changed. Today, it's obvious that a lot of stock is being placed in producing games with the slickest new graphics, the most excellent sound, etc. The first thing you do when you see a new game these days is to ooh and aah over the smoothness of the motion, the clever 3D panning, blah blah blah. Then you settle down and play the game, and probably figure out pretty quickly that it's basically the same as X other game, with this and that new feature thrown in, but basically and updated clone. That's no good because, as Gamesta' member Braddock notes, "People don't just buy games for breathtaking visuals or mindblowing sound, they get games to play games." Nevertheless, if you pick up any game in the store, or try any at the arcade, you'll almost certainly have this experience. This is because nobody is coming up with original games anymore. Well, almost nobody — there are a few notable exceptions, like the genre-busting Parappa the Rappa, but the broad-strokes conclusion must be that the video game makers have run out of ideas.

Consider: The current audience is the first to have grown up with MTV, and while it's cliché to say so, that means a shorter attention span and an expectation of constant progress of production values. They own computers capable of running TV-level video and sound. They have Internet access, meaning a huge array of gaming options, and huge competition between those games; and they have now have adult incomes to dispose of. All of that has driven the gaming industry to transform from a group of artisans cultivating a craft into yet another strain of standard Japanamerican corporate capitalism. To win that audience, you need to be operating on the level of a movie studio (indeed, you may have your own movie set), which means that there are a relatively small number of gaming companies responsible for most of the games out there. This is a trend that will only increase with time; companies will merge and buy each other out, until we have an oligopoly of gaming companies, just like the oligopoly of airlines — and with just as many bright ideas.

It also means (and this is where we come back to the causes of Nostalgia — don'tcha just love it when everything finally dovetails?) that both the players and the makers have something very different on their minds than did their counterparts fifteen years ago. Players are not really identifying themselves in the game that they are playing; they punch in codes from their code sheets to make the characters do cool things, and that's the basic thrill, watching the carnage as a movie might be watched. The video game becomes a plaything, an experiment, not an adversary or a world, except in rare cases like the record-breaking Myst and its sequel Riven. Involvement usually occurs only when there is the chance to compete against friends. And they don't identify themselves because the games themselves are faceless, craftless reproductions of one another — which occurs because they get produced by huge corporations for a pretty bland consumer base.

In the end, that kind of gaming experience leaves you feeling kind of empty after a while. And so we turn back the clock, and dig out the old games, whether as downloads from the Web or in the back of arcades, or even setting up old Atari 2600 systems on our stereo TVs. We do it because we are nostalgic fools who have still clued into something: the games really were better back then.

BACK TO RETRO VIDEO GAMES

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Nick Branstator is a Tripod techie and founding Poderator of the Gamesta' Pod.