01/26/2025
Retro Games Aren't Boring - We Are
Happy late new year, as far as posting goes...! Hope it's going well so far. Now I'm here to insult you.
Just a burning memory
I'm no retro game fanatic. (Though I am subscribed to Video Game Esoterica, so maybe I am? lol) Anyways, I do dig the infrequent hop back into games from yesteryear, and I got to thinking. Who is more boring between me and a retro video game?
I booted up Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure for the PS1, a game I've been wanting to play for a while. And compared to modern games (and even some other RPGs of its time!), it was going at BREAKNECK speeds. In under an hour the story was all set up and ready to go.
Luckily for this article, this game was made by ATLUS. Looking at another game from the same developer/publisher about 20 years later, Persona 5 - you are getting tutorials in that game like... 10 hours into the main story. Menu after menu, dialog box after dialog box. I enjoy both of these games, but whenever I turned on Rhapsody on the PS1, I was greatly struck by the difference all that time made in video game sensibilities.
Then the thought hit me - there really wasn't a difference in the total amount of information about the game prior to playing it - the medium of that information changed.
The April 2000 issue of Official PlayStation Magazine had a four-page feature over SaGa Frontier 2. SAGA FRONTIER 2 of all games.
Cable TV advertisements. Gaming magazines. Word of mouth. Going to actual brick-and-mortar stores and seeing promotional materials there. By the 2000s, flashy and fun websites. All of the content you saw leading up to a game's release was MUCH more controlled and therefore likely much more effective in getting you hyped up.
If an RPG like Rhapsody released today under modern circumstances, what might you see? A video called "SHOULD YOU BUY RHAPSODY?!" that spoils a bunch of stuff and, while the video itself is basically an ad, also has a Youtube-style sponsorship for GAMERZ EATZ1!1! subscription boxes. Some people tweeting about it maybe. Probably someone drawing degenerate art of the game's characters. All of this would be the first stuff you see along with some basic, unexplained screenshots or gameplay footage - how could any of that make you properly excited for a game?So, the answer is perhaps that we are more boring that these less-flashy retro games.
There is certainly the factor of quantity and environment here also, don't get me wrong. Gamers in the 80s, 90s and 00s saw much less stuff and could be more "focused" on the biggest 20 or so companies that caught their interest, compared to the neverending stream of new games you can find on the Steam/Xbox Store/PS Store/eShop front page. And on top of that, while we were younger, we would probably get fixated on one game for a while, because that's all we could afford or something lol.
All of this adds up to video games just existing in a completely different way in 1990 compared to 2025. If you're wondering why I write of this, one of it is to talk about random fun stuff like retro games, but I also wanted to bring this up in support of better efforts for video game preservation.
I honestly can't blame people who instantly associated "preservation" with simply downloading ROMs and whatnot. Most people boil it down to this. But for the reasons above, many people see retro games and see some decrepit software that we've moved on from, without realizing that the game itself was maybe 70% of the whole picture.
What ads surrounded the game? What was the culture like before and around the time of a game's release? Was it well-received on launch? Was it a hard-to-find game? Was the original a hot mess and now some remaster has rewritten its reception? What was the game manual like? Was it at the start or beginning of a console's lifespan? Was it popular in one place and ignored in another? If it was multiplayer, does no one care about the game anymore now that the hype has died down?
Lots of DVD and Blu-Ray releases of movies tend to come with extra materials for a movie - trailers, behind the scenes stuff, interviews, retrospectives and so on - though video games typically get none of this. Either on release OR re-release. Even very few re-releases come with anything beyond some dinky concept art viewers or something. (Sonic Mega Collection's rememberance is largely due to its presentation with all of ITS extras!)
Click this image to listen to this fascinating GDC talk! There are some good people trying to fight back against this very phenomenon, like Digital Eclipse who has made some good packages for retro games. But even their compilations are not always the full-fledged digital museums that I would hope they'd be. (Why does no one make compilations like the PS1 Namco Museum games anymore?!)
And unfortunately, finding a lot of this supplementary material can be tedious. I tried looking up extra materials about Rhapsody online and found its game manual, some trailers and not much else. (Granted, I didn't search LONG...)
Something similar could be leveled against modern games as well - we don't have much direct insight into the workings of MOST video game production groups. But a heck of a lot of the supplementary materials for games now were FIRST uploaded onto the web. The majority of video games we know about today probably don't even have a non-internet based presence. Most indie games, even notable ones, don't even get physical releases. (Well, not releases that regular people can actually buy without a 200% scalper markup.)
Part of the problem could very well be that a lot of companies don't record a lot of this stuff anyways. If game developers don't even keep the source code of their games around, there's probably little hope that they're holding onto other things like original manual art, ads, development history or anything like that.
I have absolutely ZERO influence over the video game industry, so this post is certainly no call to action. So for the materials that we do still have around on places like archive.org, next time you want to play a classic game, try looking up its release date and finding extra materials from around its time. Magazines, ads, fliers, arcade cabinet art, other popular media from its time, maybe even history. It could very well further immerse you in the game itself and give you a better appreciation for its creation, artfulness and historical value.
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