Are Old Games Better?

I would like to address here a common and recurrent question in gamers’ communities: are older video games better than the new ones? If you are as "old" as me, you might have asked yourself this question at least once. Type it on google and see how many discussions this topic has spawned. Before trying to answer it, let me tell you: this question is not correctly formulated. What do we mean with older video games? How old? What games? We need to reframe it if we want to formulate any significant answer to it. Let’s see… are contemporary video games produced and designed differently in comparison to games from the previous generations? That’s better but still not precise. Are we talking about indie or triple A games? As you can understand, answering the question is not an easy task but I will try to report here some facts that might make clearer why some think that older video games might be considered a better version of the new ones.  

I once asked my grandfather how was living during the second World War. He replied, “better than now”. It sounded strange to me that a period marked by bloodshed, poverty, and destruction could be any better than 2017, when I posed the question. As we grow older, nostalgia gets a tougher grip on us. We remember the days when we were young and carefree. It was not necessarily better, but we remember it as a great time. Because of this trick that memories play on us, we tend to idealise the good old days. So, older games that we have played in the past tend to appear extraordinarily emotional to some now. And the first time you play a video game which is unique in its genre, it will be recorded by our brain as sensational. No matter how many psychological horror games I played after Silent Hill 2, with better graphics etcetera… that is still my favourite, the one I always come back to if I have to describe a genre.

The second element to consider is the feeling of discovery that was associated with older games. Finding information on video games when the internet was not there, or was not populated as it is now, was difficult and this added to the excitement of the discovery. It was like being an archaeologist and finally finding the entrance to the ancient tomb. It was also harder to install games and make them work! There always was that geeky friend who had a talent for these things and had written down on paper how to do it as a series of mysterious instructions. Romantic, isn’t it? We created external narratives on top of these mysterious things called video games that trapped us in our room for hours, to the disappointment of our parents who did not even know what a video game was. Today all is explored in countless videos, tutorials, reviews… There are no more secrets and therefore older gamers feel less excited.

The gaming community in recent years has expanded enormously, and this is good. But we have lost along the way the pleasant feeling of belonging to a little tribe, to be the different ones, the vanguards of a new breaking technology. I made friends for life back when gamers were treated as freaks. We had each other’s back.

And what can be said about art and the beauty of rough graphics which left leeway to the imagination? The brain had to connect the dots then! Developers could go wild and experimental with the game design; nowadays a video game must perform well in terms of sales to cover the huge production costs and thus it must be appealing to a wider audience. Contemporary games tend to be well polished but also bland and repetitive. They have to guarantee a smoother experience to all players, also to the ones who never played a video game before. Some YouTubers suggest that contemporary games are more cinematic than the old ones and remove agency from players. I personally disagree on that, but I think that it’s a matter of opinions.

Furthermore, the market has changed. The production pipelines have changed. Teams for triple A games are bigger, made by specialised artists who are great at their craft, but they cannot see their artwork from afar. A game such as Silent Hill 2 has been made by fifty people in two years. Have you watched the full credits of any contemporary triple A game made nowadays?

As a final word, subjectivity comes into play when we try to address our initial question. But it’s totally understandable for older gamers to claim that back in their day, video games were better. Sorry, I am one of those.