Reading 02: Nostalgia?

According to my Google search 5 minutes ago, nostalgia comes from the Greek words 'nostos', meaning 'to return home', and 'algia', meaning pain. I thought it was interesting that the original word involved pain, because that's exactly how it felt to play some of these games: painful.

Nostalgia is a tricky subject to talk about because it's so difficult to pin down what makes something nostalgic. Everybody has their own sense of nostalgia and what falls under that umbrella will vary from person to person (for the record my questionable nostalgia game is Lego Rock Raiders for PC. Fight me, it's good). Having played some of these old Atari games from the so-called "Golden Age," I can safely say I feel like these games belong buried in the past.

These days it's very popular to look to games from earlier eras for inspiration. I think it's pretty telling that there aren't often new games that say Asteroids or Dig Dug are the source of their inspiration. It's almost always games from the NES era onwards. These old Atari games just don't have the staying power later games like Mario Bros and Sonic the Hedgehog would enjoy. There's nothing profoundly special about these games that I can easily point to and say it changed the entire direction fo the industry with what they did.

Fun Fact: This was actually the inspiration for Call of Duty

With all that in mind as I went to play these old school games I was struck by how unenjoyable I found the experience to be. I don't think the issue was simplicity; you can make a really great game out of one or two simple mechanics. What stood out to me was that the games don't seem to have any real sense of direction. Take Dig Dug for example. You start each level on the surface, dig around, and kill the bad guys by pumping them full of air (or something). When you kill them all the level starts all over again. The only thing that changes is the placement of enemies and how many of them there are. At no point in the game are new mechanics introduced or new ways of interacting with the game. It's frustrating, boring, and after a while, not really a game anymore (In fact in the arcade version after round 256 the screen is literally full of enemies, including the point where you spawn. Upon starting this round you die instantly). Obviously it's important to acknowledge the context these games were made in. Game sizes were minuscule and graphical capabilities were all but nonexistent. Because of that games were simple affairs that couldn't just add new mechanics to halfway through the game. That still doesn't change the fact that these games were very basic.

Pretty simple

More of the same, now with fancy new colors

Finally free

Tried as I might to get into these games I found myself losing interest after the first few rounds. Maybe multiplayer could have helped remedy my sense of boredom by introducing a new dynamic element in the form of another player. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by the amount of great retro-inspired games we have right now but it seems as though people who continue to hold these old Atari-era games up as examples of excellent games are a bit delusional. Their nostalgia goggles have completely blinded them of the game's issues and have allowed them to somehow say these retro "games" can hold up to competition from modern game developers. It just sounds like absurd, nostalgia laden nonsense.