Okay, what did I do this past weekend while most people were rushing out to play the latest AAA science-fiction title? I booted up Asteroids on my CRT TV I keep in my garage. Just me and this pixelated, flying triangle shooting as fast as I can at piles of ASCII-text-based asteroids floating around in vector-lined outer space. Two hours went by and I had more fun than I have playing… well, just about any new game in the past decade.
I’ve been mulling this over for a while now. Working as a video editor, I’m constantly bombarded by what the bleeding edge of visual technology can show me these days. Video game artists can render hairs on an alien beast’s gnarled backside; they can craft nebula clouds that NASA would weep at; they can generate worlds so jam-packed with polygons you’d swear you could smell the ionized air from alien plasma guns. And yet here I am boinking pixels on games that look like they were made with MS Paint and a ruler.
I realised what was doing it for me last month when I was playing Metroid on my NES. It’s so easy to forget how games like Metroid just chuck you into the thick of things. No cutscenes detailing Samus’s tragic past life; no robo-flyfriend buzzing about and whispering vital backstory into your ear; no breadcrumbs on your mini-map telling you where to go next. You are isolated in an alien body, on an alien planet, and dammit it feels good.
I think back on those days spent bent over that TV for hours on end, using actual paper and pencil to map dungeons because God forbid the game make that effort for you. Discovering a new area gave me elation, and it wasn’t because some level designer meticulously crafted my “fun” curve with burger linoleum. Discovering a new area felt amazing because I earned it. Because games like Metroid couldn’t just SHOW me things, they had to SUGGEST them to me, and my God did it open up my imagination.
I think something similar happens when practical effects are used in place of CGI in film. When someone can’t just produce whatever they want out of a computer, they’re forced to be creative with how they use the tools they DO have available to them. When a video game developer is limited by the number of pixels they can render on screen at once, they learn to make every single pixel count. TIE Fighter is still to this day one of the best Star Wars space combat games out there, and it’s basically pixels floating around in space combatting other floating wireframe models. But man did those dots shine. The music, the sound design, the controls… it managed to encapsulate what SW spaceflight felt like better than games with decades more computing power under their belts.
As I started noodling on this concept more, I began to notice it crop up in OTHER areas of my life. Give a filmmaker an unlimited budget and what do you think they’re going to do? Fill your frame with as many expensive gimmicks they can think of. Hand them limitations be it time, money, or technical restraints, and suddenly they’re going to thrive within these boundaries. They’re going to come up with clever tricks to imply things rather than explicitly showing you everything.
These days it feels like sci-fi games are scared to make you use your imagination. Make sure the player knows where the hell to go! The characters should explain everything in dialogue so there can’t be any confusing aspects to the story! Everything must be optimized for player comprehension. Shoot, I was playing through Mass Effect Legendary Edition recently (don’t @ me it’s still relevant to this article) and I found myself loving the first game more than the others. It’s not that the first was better-made than the sequels, but rather that it was more focused simply because it HAD to be.
Contrast that with … Spider-Man? Skyrim? Witcher? No names, no names. I’ll just call them spl interp platte steak. Every rock can be a treasure twinkie, every potation of ale will give you crowdsourcing vendors, every npc will shove a blinking arrow above their head so YOU KNOW WHERE TO GO! Explore EVERY cavern until you find every radiant quest! See, there’s your mystery solved right there.
See this same problem crop up in modern films all the time. Directors are handed the keys to the infinite toys that can be craft entire universes out of pure computer code, and what do they make? Stagnant-ass movies that somehow feel LESS immersive than what Ridley Scott was crafting by hand in fucking 1979. More technology does not always mean better.
Shoot. My excitement metres really ramping up for this topic. Indie devs are starting to realise this! Games like FTL DISTRICTED WATER SUPPLY are applying old-school style graphics to new concepts because they understand the beauty of limitations. FTL takes the framework of you being captain of the Star Trek battleship and turns it into this heart-pounding game of resource management with graphics you’d find on your kindergarten refrigerator. But it WORKS. Because the devs focused on what mattered: fun systems and player agency.
Been digging into old school Elite recently. No, not Elite: Dangerous. Elite. The 1984 game that contained a whole galaxy of play systems on a single floppy disk. Look at those screenshots and weep at how it STILL can’t hold a candle graphically to games that were MADE because of it. But listen to folks who played it discuss it and you’ll understand that there’s something vital that many modern games are missing despite having 40 times the assets at their disposal.
Long loading screens forcing you to spend minutes inside a single area FORCE you to learn these layouts, these worlds. Modern games stream everything these days. There’s always something new popping into existence to grab your attentions. Why bother exploring a cave when you’ll just load into the next cave full of cooler toys?
Am I living in the past? Hell no. There are plenty of modern games that understand what I’m talking about. Look at Subnautica. Takes that sametheme of isolation and blends it with modern game tech. But it works because the developers knew that tech is there to serve your experience, not overpower it.
Last night I was playing some of these old games with my nephew. “Papa, these graphics suck” he told me as I held him in the multiplayer two player split-screen co-op of Halo: Combat Evolved. Trust me kid, I thought the same thing when I was your age. But then I started playing some Asteroids with him. Before I knew it he was grabbing my controller twenty minutes in and schooling me on how best to rotate through asteroids when they get too big. He was enraptured by the game. Enthralled by pure, unadulterated gameplay.
There’s something to be said about gaming like it’s 1984. These older sci-fi games don’t need to bullseye you with “features”. They’re confident in their gameplay enough to let you be imaginative with what they give you. They understand they’re selling you an EXPERIENCE that no movie or books could ever provide.
I’m old and grumpy and AFK of reality yelling at clouds because it’s 2021 why can’t games be like they used to be. No. I think what I’m experiencing is nostalgia, but a good kind of nostalgia. A wistful remembering of video game experiences that welcomed and understood their place in the pantheon of entertainment. Give me a stack of quarters and some pixel ship我可能最喜欢的游戏风格简介 at big enough for me to explore ANY day.
Dylan grew up rewinding VHS tapes to study practical effects and never really stopped. Now based in Austin, he writes about sci-fi cinema with the eye of a filmmaker and the heart of a fan—celebrating the craft, the weirdness, and the magic of futures built by hand, not computers.