The other day Pike and myself were looking back with fondness on a certain videogame company. It was quite stunning, once we actually sat and talked about it, just how many games they were responsible for, and not just games, but true classics, things that defined – even created – genres.
Which company am I talking about? Well, which one came to your mind when you read the above? In this case we were discussing MicroProse, but there are quite a few companies which could have been mentioned here and all would fit; Bullfrog, Rare (Of old), Codemasters (ditto), Psygnosis, etc. (And these ones are just examples from the UK!)
Tally ho, chaps!
Where are the equivalent companies today? Who are even candidates? You can point to people who have had huge impact – Bungie for instance – but one series of FPS games, however brilliant and however influential, does not put them in the same league as these giants who bestrode the 80s and 90s. Nobody that I can think of today has the ability to put out X-Com, Transport Tycoon, Master of Orion, Civilization, and Rollercoaster Tycoon. Now, okay, you look at any of these companies and they tend to have something of a narrow focus, at least in the games that really stand out, but still, nobody today seems to come close, regardless of focus. Maybe Blizzard and Valve, but the former seems to be determined to fall from grace, and the latter hasn’t released something that isn’t a hat since the Bally Astrocade was new. I’m not trying to say there are no good companies anymore or anything, but none seem to really have the scope and grandeur of some of these old-timers we so fondly remember.
Who is your favorite game company of yesteryear? Am I overlooking someone modern?
I don’t remember my first video game. Not because it wasn’t memorable, but because I was, quite honestly, playing them since before I can remember. They were introduced to me very early on in my life. A story I am fond of telling about this involves a scrapbook my parents kept when I was a baby. There is a segment for “Baby’s Favorite Games” which supposedly is dedicated for stories about Peekaboo and Pat-a-cake. My section details Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Donkey Kong, and Pitstop.
Mister Adequate has a similar story– he doesn’t remember what his first game was, either!
We do have very early memories, though. A few of mine include:
Video games popping up suspiciously in dreams (and nightmares.)
Getting in trouble for saying a swear word during a particularly scary part of a game (I had no idea that it was a swear word! Also, that game was called Lunar Outpost, and it really did get scary after a while.)
My dad holding me up so I could reach the controls of a Super Mario Bros. arcade machine at a store somewhere.
Greatly enjoying a “game” about Christmas on a tiny monitor– I was very, very young for this, because we upgraded to a much bigger monitor in short order. I must have still been in diapers.
Staying indoors during recess of Kindergarden year so I could play Word Munchers on a green-screen IBM. I also merrily did this to occupy myself during a Parent-Teacher Conference, and I overheard my teacher remarking to my parents that I was the class’s “computer whiz”– the first time I’d ever heard the term.
These are some of my earliest memories. I remember more and more as I get a little older, but picking an earliest is hard to do.
Do you remember your first game? What are some of your memories?
On the one hand, I would LOVE to see an update of, say, SMAC, with an engine and graphics akin to Civ IV with all the stuff that made the original game great kept intact.
On the other hand, when we get a new X-Com that is more like Mass Effect with the X-Com name pasted on it, I’m not sure what to think. Sure, the game looks interesting and might even be pretty good, but I have a difficult time believing it’s really X-Com without all the turn-based-tactics-want-to-smash-your-head-into-the-wall-it’s-so-hard action.
"Hidden Movement" is arguably the most terrifying phrase in video gaming.
But then I wonder if I’m just either being a crotchety old gamer telling the kids about how games were HARD back in my day, or simply refusing to take off the nostalgia goggles. Or both. Can it be that my knee-jerk “do not want” reactions aren’t justified, and are purely emotional?
Well, sure. But as a wise individual in a classic film once said, “Whoever said the human race was logical?” We are emotional creatures who get emotionally attached to things we care about– and if you’re like me, you care about your games. We care about our memories of them, and we want others’ first experiences with our favorite games to be like our own.
So yeah, I want an X-Com reboot to be just as maddeningly difficult and involve just as much tactics as the first. I want everyone who hasn’t played the game to experience it like this. I want to see the keys flying off of your keyboard when you smash your face into it in frustration. I want you to lean forward when the “HIDDEN MOVEMENT” screen comes up because you actually have to listen to the game sounds as a part of the experience and I want you to jump in your chair when you do hear something. I want you to see how terribly genius this game was and why it managed to enthrall me some fifteen years after it was first released. That’s what I want from an X-Com reboot. That’s why I’m not so sure about this new one.
…oh, and yes, I am a crotchety old gamer wearing nostalgia goggles. I have no shame.
Yesterday I had a really weird, specific gaming urge. Namely, I suddenly felt the urge to gather up a party of stereotypical fantasy characters and go around and hit monsters in the face with swords and fireballs.
…you guys DO know what I’m talking about, right?
Aww jeah.
The original Final Fantasy is straightforward and to the point. You don’t pick up new party members as you go along, you get all of them before you even start. The “story”, as much as there is one, is pretty much laid out at your feet in the first three minutes. Oh, and there’s grinding. There’s a lot of grinding.
Playing the game yesterday went something like this:
“Oh hey, I can buy all this armor and magic spells. It’s going to cost a few thousand gil. Kay, guess I’ll go grind monsters for a bit.”
Spend about a half hour grinding monsters. Buy all the armor and magic spells I want.
Spend about three minutes traveling to the next town.
“Oh hey, I can buy all this upgraded armor and new magic spells. It’s going to cost a few thousand gil. Kay, guess I’ll go grind monsters for a bit.”
Spend about a half hour grinding monsters. Buy all the armor and magic spells I want.
And it was at that point that I’d filled my oldschool JRPG grinding quota for the day and I saved and quit for the time being.
Now, you’d think that a system like this wouldn’t have a whole lot of appeal. I mean, if you’re gonna spend the game grinding, you’d might as well pad it with some story and character development, right? That’s how most later RPGs work, right? I mean, if I was gonna play some classic FF, I should’ve picked IV or VI or something. Right?
Maybe.
But there’s something deliciously simple about forgetting all of that and, just, I dunno… throwing lightning bolts and fireballs around for no reason at all, other than to buy some Potions.
I actually made these, a long time ago.
And besides, who among us can listen to this song with dry eyes?
It was the late 80s and we did all sorts of things on that machine. I can’t even begin to count the number of games we had for that thing– boxes and boxes full of big floppy disks that looked exactly like this, even down to the “Memorex” logo:
It would take a very long time indeed to recount every single game in our possession, but suffice to say there must have been a few hundred, at least.
Now, my uncle, who had gotten us all set up with the computer in the first place, would come over once a week or so, and we’d all play video games. It was a family affair. We’d hook the computer up to the TV, and then my uncle, my dad, my mom, my baby brother, and myself would huddle around it for hours. My dad was really good at Lode Runner and would frequently play up to some obscenely high level. My mom, meanwhile, was unbeatable at H.E.R.O. Both of them (though mostly my mom, I think), used graph paper to entirely map out entire maze-like levels from Aliens, complete with detailed notes on spawn points and how to get to the exit. Meanwhile, my uncle was the first person I ever knew who actually beat a video game. It was Jumpman, and he got to the end, and I quickly decided that he must have been some sort of godlike figure for doing such a thing:
He was my hero for a long time after that.
Now sometimes he wouldn’t come over, but we would still play games with him. How? Easy. He’d coded up a Battleship game that could be played over modem, and we’d play that. Online gaming? I was doing it in 1989!
I also played games by myself, of course. I knew how to load them up… typing LOAD”*”,8,1 would boot up just about anything. Or, if you had a disk with a bunch of games on it, you could pick which game you wanted, by typing LOAD”DIG*”,8,1 for Dig-Dug, for example. Yep, I was a pro at this. Then, I’d go play outside or play with toys or something while waiting twenty minutes for the game to load, because that’s just how things worked back then. Of course, when the game did finally load, sometimes I wouldn’t even play it, because I’d be busy holding my tape recorder and microphone up to the speakers and filling cassette tapes up with game music to use as a soundtrack for the epic adventures my toys went on.
You are missing out if you never heard this theme.
Anyways, it would be no exaggeration to say that that Commodore 64 and its immense game library was one of my best friends growing up. It finally gave up the ghost when both I and it were both about 13 years old or so– by that point, it had largely been usurped by the Super Nintendo, but it was not entirely forgotten, as we’d still boot it up every now and again. I’m not sure what my parents did with that old machine. I know what happened to the boxes of floppy disks, though. See, I begged my parents to let me keep them. So they’re in storage now. I’m not sure if they still work or even if they’ll ever run again. But I wasn’t about to let my childhood friends– Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Mancopter and Dig-Dug and Lode Runner and so many others– be thrown away.
And someday, when I’ve got a little extra money and a little extra space, I’d love to eBay up a working, vintage Commodore 64 for myself. Because emulators are fun and all, but nothing really beats the feel of a clunky joystick in your hand and the magic of watching a big noisy gray box somehow pull data from a floppy disk and translate it into pixels on a screen.
