How I Got Into Old Games

Back when I was in middle school and high school, I spent a lot of time “forcing” myself to play older NES/SNES era games. Yet, despite how much everyone around me seemed to like them, I just couldn’t get into it. That’s until I reached college, and all of a sudden everything clicked.

Videogames are weird. If you watch a movie from the 1950s, not much is going to be different other than that it’s in black and white and some cinematic choices might be different than what you’re used to. Film is not very tech-heavy — nor is any other artistic medium.

Yet, as we’ve mentioned before on this blog, videogames have reached a perfect median between art and tech. A game from the SNES era — early to mid 1990s — is going to play completely different than a game now. Processing power is different, more can be put into physics, UI has been standardized, etc. etc. So you can’t think of an old game and a new game the same way.

Of course, when I was younger, I didn’t understand all this technicality. I was a big progression freak — I enjoyed leveling, finishing quests, getting achievements, and discovering new areas. And while this stuff did exist back in the 16-bit era (mostly with RPGs such as Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy) it was mostly clunky at best. To me, there was no reason to play these games when I could’ve just been playing Morrowind or Dragon Age Origins instead.

Things were even worse for other genres. I tried to get into The Legend of Zelda series probably 13 distinct times, all failing because I just didn’t get it. I didn’t grow up playing games that gave you no guidance, no tools, nothing. It felt like I was throwing darts at a dartboard and missing either shot. It was discouraging.

Then I realized I needed a new mindset.

In college, I tried the gauntlet of retro games again, this time with a new fact in my head — many older games were made such that they could last a user 60+ hours in order to make the purchase worthwhile. But there was a problem: games couldn’t handle 60+ hours of content, because the storage and RAM wasn’t big enough! So there became two ways to solve this problem: pad the game out immensely (boring players and often leading to lower reviews), or give the players no guidance and have them figure stuff out on their own with each successive playthrough.

I realized the style was very similar to that of a modern genre that I did like, that of roguelikes. The point of a roguelike is that it’s separated into “runs”, where you will go through the game a little bit, die, then lose all your progress. However, when you do die, you usually gain something — a skill, an item, a shortcut — that makes the game just a little bit easier to complete. You continue this process over and over until finally you reach the end.

Retro games are roguelikes, it just isn’t built into their code. The design of a retro game is to let you play through it again and again, each time getting a little more knowledgeable and a little more skilled. You don’t literally level up, but you might get so good at the first few levels, or dealing with a specific set of enemies, that it feels as though you’ve leveled up. And in a way that makes it even more rewarding then having it just hardcoded into the system.

So — there are my thoughts on that. A bit weird for a post on this site for sure, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about and might be able to be applied in topics such as interaction design or even as a mindset tool when dealing with something hard. Just think of the roguelike — you gain more experience with every failure.

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