The period of my childhood gaming is strongly connected with the first half of the 1990’s and with Commodore 64. Naturally, I have many favourite games, but the most memorable ones are International Karate and its sequel, International Karate +.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that I remember particular events rather than games. Therefore, even if I manage to recall concrete titles, they are not the blockbusters of the 8-bit era, but games that I associate with certain situations. For instance, Scramble is the very first game I ran on my home computer. Ninja had this ridiculous level, my friends and I had been trying to complete for the whole day, pushing a button at the exact moment. While playing Tom on the other hand, my neighbour and I spent two weeks drawing a map (I have no idea why exactly). And of course Sensible Soccer, which for me is the mother game of all the later football games and an archetype of collective gaming, but that was a bit later, on Amiga.
One of my favourite games was Valdgir’s Swords (1991), a Polish adventure platformer.
Although not my first games, the most significant were doubtless King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown (1983/4) and its 1985 sequel, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne (1985). The graphics were amazing; I could not wait for the next screen to load . . .
I would be remiss if I did not also mention, although I’ll focus on King’s Quest here, that when I first saw the original Bard’s Tale (1985) on an EGA, it was breath-taking. I could not believe the amazing graphical ability. It was absolutely stunning.,
I have always been a console addict and when at Christmas 1990 I received my first console, a Sega Mega Drive, which at the time came with a copy of Sonic The Hedgehog included, my life reached a new level. Obviously at the time I had played Super Mario Bros and a bunch of other games at my neighbour’s on the NES but with Sonic it was love at first sight. Sonic is also the official mascot of the Japanese software and hardware house SEGA, and historical rival of Mario, Nintendo’s mascot.
The biggest joy was the possibility to transfer real passions into the gameworlds. At that time I watched a lot of films, such as Karate Kid and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I also trained martial arts. The biggest challenge for me was to strike a blow and to collect a point for it (which was not that easy after all, especially in the case of later opponents). The game’s mechanics was based on rules similar to the ones used in real karate.
The challenge was manipulating the simple parser interface – figuring out an appropriate word combination (usually an imperative-verb/object command) to get the program to do on the one hand what I wanted it to, and on the other, testing its capabilities (to see what I could get it to do, whether related to the game/story or not). The delight was the latter – exploring what the program could and could not understand and how it would respond to either. (That and the enormous glee in seeing the next screen, when it eventually loaded).
Quite recently I played International Karate on C64 emulator for the Android platform. Apart from sweet-bitter nostalgia I had the feeling of the simplicity of gameplay, particularly when compared to contemporary fighting games. Lack of dodges and blocks makes it impossible to develop any complex strategy. The only thing that counts is reflex. You can also notice a distinct and disproportional efficiency of one blow over another, which is characteristic for many older fighting games.
Do those simplifications and imperfections disrupt the reception of the game today? Not necessarily. International Karate is still unique due to its animation and sound. The sense of humour implied in the game is also significant – stars over the characters’ heads, a fighter massaging his fist after a successful blow, breaking the brick wall with one’s head, trousers falling down and other similar zesty bits.
I am not a fan of retro gaming. I have a few old consoles and emulators at home, but they have been gathering dust for some time now. The problem is not the graphics but the schemes those games are based on. They are too predictable, and what follows, too irritating.
The only games I gladly went back to were the re-editions of Space Invaders and Pirates for the PSP, but I guess it was more of a sentimental journey rather than pure pleasure derived from a good game. Therefore, if I have time to play, I prefer newer titles so that I can shorten the list of backlogs.
Nostalgia, more than anything else. I loaded it onto what was then (and comparatively) a super-fast computer (which ran at an approximately 20 Mhz clockspeed or so) – King Graham (King’s Quest) would veritably shoot across the screen (as opposed to the original step-by-grueling-step progress he made during my original gameplay) to the extent that my reaction time was not always adequate just to get him to stop “walking.” The game certainly didn’t seem to take as much time, either; as is common in childhood recollection, the time was different: I remembered it being extremely lengthy, with an in-depth story unfolding. Not so. Still entertaining, though. I explored the world much more completely than I originally had, making certain to get the full total of points available and uncovering easter eggs (in that respect, it was a more “complete” experience).
With King’s Quest I, I had a special opportunity, too, in that it was rereleased with an updated game engine and graphics/sound in 1990. I played through the enhanced version once again, and got just as much enjoyment out of the game, even if it did not hold the same sense of awe. Games merely redone with new engines, I think, could be a huge market (I dream, for instance, of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 being quickly remade and released with the Fallout 3 engine . . .).
Of course, some of them simply got old and even infinite layers of nostalgia (which diminished our perception of imperfections) will not help. Other reasons are more objective. No all the games have been converted to newer platforms and the access to them is limited.
Also, our taste and expectations for games change with age. There are of course exceptional situations, when, for instance somebody fell in love with Sensible Soccer and up to this day plays football games exclusively. Or quite on the contrary, somebody might have become prejudiced against the first text adventures, which makes them suspicious towards games with a few longer dialogue lines. All in all, I would not overestimate the influence of old video game genres on the current gaming choices.
The vast majority of games that I played as a child I did not return to. This was merely practical, though. Game releases had been steadily increasing (I have played games since 1980), and so there were always more and new games to acquire and play; my friends and I would exchange titles, and so we rarely got back to ones we had previously played through. This was an advantage, though, as I experienced so many games, that I started to become rather picky (and have remained so); while at the time I would try anything, now I primarily focus on RPGs and “adventure” games (with some notable exceptions). The breadth of my gaming, the diversity of the games I played helped me to focus in later years.
Sacred Armour of Antiriad - I loved it also because of the graphics, but never played it again, knowing that it would be a massive letdown.
Yes, there are games I never went back to. Not because nowadays they look childish or outdated, but because they weren’t appealing even back then. I remember that once my neighbor gave me one cartridge (yes, at the time games were stored on cartridges) named Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. Well, since the first time I played it in my Mega Drive, I hated the game so much I can’t even think about it right now. It was a platform game on the same shape of Sonic and Mario games. I think the reason for so much hate resided in the main character, this anthropomorphic bobcat wearing a white shirt. I think it is one of the worst games I’ve played ever.
Many. One of those was Pole Position by Atari Corp. While it was an amazing thing to play in 1983 and to feel immersed in this pseudo-3D environment, sports games have always for the greater part lacked long term appeal to me. Unless a game had a healthy dose of the unreal (sci-fi technology or magic) I found it could rarely hold my lasting interest. In support of this, of the racing games I've since played, there is always some quirk or another: In SuperCars it was ordinary streetcars with guns and missiles; in BC Racers it was racing with cool, unique characters in a prehstoric cartoon world; in Re-Volt and Micro Machines the cars were little, being toys, and the world was big. Ultimately I became aware that one of the things I expect from all games is a dose of the unreal -- to me, a game without that does not qualify as entertainment.
Childhood is a peculiar time when you absorb everything with uncritical enthusiasm. It was no different with games. The imperfections of some of my favourite titles are evident to me from the current perspective; back then, they were insignificant.
I cannot recall any game of my dreams. I remember though, what a big shock it was for a gamer brought up with C64 to see productions, using full motion video technology, such as Gabriel Knight II or Phantasmagoria. All of a sudden, it turned out that games could have complex plots and film-like quality. Those games epitomised the magic of productions for adults, which turned out to be an important aspect for an adolescent.
I wish I could have played Guitar Hero, when I was a teenager. Although I don’t think, I would be fully aware of that need. I have never had a dream game. I guess my demands, when it comes to games, are limited after all. I don’t expect to gain any finite experience from them. I like to be surprised, so I am fond of titles that fulfil the genre conventions and at the same time add a bit of innovation to them.
What lacked (at the time, and still, largely, in many games) is the ability to merely explore environments and interact with them. Games were merely too limiting (in a large part due to space constraints on disks). Starflight (1986) is a notable exception: Starflight enabled one to roughly follow a storyline, but the main component was merely to explore star systems, making contact with alien life, collecting materials for trade, and so forth. Fabulous.
Interactive environments, however, would take some time to develop. If I shot the wall, I wanted there to be a hole. If there was a book on a table, I wanted to be able to read it, to pick it up (whether or not it was useful for the game or unfolding narrative or not). Such sophisticated environments did not happen until comparatively late. (The player-character’s ability in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, for instance, to pick up a candle, place it in a dark corner, and have that corner actually light up was overwhelming.)
A lot of games lacked the ability to be creative as a player -- to shape one's gameworld. What was, and still is the game of my dreams? A game where as the player, you could not only shape a world, but also be a living, interacting part of that world. Certain games (post 2000, especially) began to fulfill that, for example BattleZone and its sequel by Activision, Savage, The Sims, Black & White, and others. There was also a pair of sister games released in the 1990s called Steel Empires (Cyber Empires) and Fantasy Empires in which the actions of the two players (commanders) in the strategy part of the game would actually shape cities, battlefields and forces, so that in combat mode you would be able to walk through and fight amongst (even destroy) parts of what you or your opponent had built, which again had a knock-on effect on the strategy mode.
I don't think I had a "dream game", but I did wish very much for more and better female characters :)
I don’t think that contemporary children and teenagers would, out of their own will, go back to the titles from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The gap between the old and the new games is immense, not only in terms of technology and audio-visual effects, but also in terms of adjusting the needs and capabilities of the young gamer to the mechanism of the game. The titles developed 20 years ago have a lot less in common with contemporary video games than, for instance, animated films, books and other media for children from the same period.
It is an interesting question. Much as I would like to familiarise my children with old cinema, I don’t perceive video games the same way. There are a lot of games I try to play with my son (although we’re not very successful as he is only 1.5 years old), but these are new titles, such as Flower for PS3 or Endless Ocean for Nintendo Wii. I don’t really see any interesting equivalents form the past. It might be my bad memory, but the reason may also be quite different – although we gladly moan about the commercialisation of games, they are just better than they were in the past. And the sentiment towards old titles is connected with nostalgia rather than the games themselves.
As I’m certain many responders to this survey feel, there are far too many to recommend. Mystery House, the King’s Quest and Space Quest series, Maniac Mansion (and its sequel), Starflight and Starflight 2, the original Bard’s Tale, Ultima VI. Naturally, I would avoid games that are too realistically violent (stylized violence of fantasy role-playing games, for instance, don’t cause harm, I should think . . . I turned out okay, it seems), such as wargame simulations (that which makes the conscious attempt to duplicate reality).
TheTI recommend Mission Impossible. I do not disapprove of absolutely anything, even Samantha Fox Strip Poker has value, if play is contextualized and supervised.
Chess, or something similar to it, like Archon or even StarControl, both of which teach strategy and appropriate use of limited resources. I would probably disapprove of GTA -- not the original/early GTA games, but the latter ones, as human beings are portrayed as obstacles to what is essentially a misguided adolescent fantasy where the world exists solely to fulfil the individual basest needs, i.e. the player adds no value to the world in which they participate, they only take from it and consume resources, including innocent human lives.