Apparently it’s going to be July tomorrow. I was sitting at work today, fighting a strong urge to sleep and I began to think about my last blog entry, which I made all the way back in December. Though I seriously don’t think anyone’s reading these anyway, except maybe Jamie, but only through a strong sense of loyalty to his co-presenter. [Nope. Proofreading. - jim]
But hey, it’s a warm evening, there’s shit all else to do, I’m blasting Dennis Law Jr from my broken speakers and I’m feeling mildly creative this evening.
So I bought myself a PSP recently, and one of the first things I got for it was Final Fantasy VII, a game that is now 12 years old. Not that it should bother me, but it got me thinking about old games. I know it’s a cliché, but why should the age of a game come into the decision to play it or not? It really shouldn’t, but I fear it still does.
Let’s look at movies for a second. In the days of old, the only place you could really see a movie was at the cinema, then it was gone. No fancy VHS tapes in those days. So people simply moved on, only ever seeing there favourite movies a couple of times if they were lucky. Then a similar phenomenon occurred with television. The BBC have lost zillions of cultural artifacts because of their policy at the time of wiping stock after it had been transmitted (such is the dipshittery of the past).
For a while we were seeing a similar thing with games. Many gamers were not seeing the point in looking backwards to games that they had initially loved, moving on generation by generation to higher detail levels and sharper edges.
With television, a phenomenon occurred that saved many of the doomed cultural artefacts, that force of nature we have affectionately labelled “The Geeks”. Well, I say “We”, I mean someone else, I’m clearly experiencing that particular phenomenon from a first person perspective.
The nerds did all they could to preserve their favourite programmes, they tracked down and bought film reels sold to foreign TV stations, they saved offcuts of film that never made it past the censors, they stole the tapes, they filmed their TV screens with a super 8 camera, hell they even wired tape recorders to the speaker coils in their televisions in order to get an audio copy of a show! Beautiful levels of devotion to a medium that wasn’t taken seriously enough at the time yet is now established as a fully fledged art form!
Once again history repeats itself. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I made the move to the first Playstation, I found it a little difficult to let go of my mega drive so I never did, and why should I have? A lot of the games I played on that machine held a lot of good times for me, so I kept a tight grip on it that has scarcely loosened to this day. I did notice that people around me were putting their old consoles in their attics, or selling them on! You fools! You callous bastards!
A few years after this, more and more people started to feel the same way. What did they do? They turned to the domain of the geek - the internet. Just like the army of television fans that make up the Doctor Who Restoration Team, the sweaty, nerdy masses set about archiving what would become quite important cultural artefacts in the form of roms, and built some impressive emulators to run them.
Technically it was piracy, but when the alternative is touring every charity and second hand shop in the land for a cartridge, or paying excessive amounts on ebay for something that isn’t even produced any more, any argument that emulators were making a dent in the gaming industry are flat out idiotic and misguided. But I digress.
Of course, what started as a fairly obscure pursuit has now become a common pastime. Retro games are now everywhere in the digital realm, and roms have been commercialised by the very people who fought against the practice - with Nintendo’s virtual console, you can now purchase 27k rom file of a game you loved from your childhood for just £3 (sure it’s a bit of a rip off, but that’s not the point). The phenomenon has now reached the stage where there are full on but quite faithful remakes of classic games on XBLA or PSN. Games like Bionic Commando: Rearmed, not just a re-release of a 20 year old title, but a complete ground-up redux with a proper development budget and everything. Retro gaming is big business now, not a bad result for a gaming renaissance movement instigated by small internet communities!
Now I can play Final Fantasy VII and experience what was an important moment in gaming history without digging out my PS1 or paying £20-30 over the odds for a used copy of the game. It’s an exciting development in the ever evolving gaming medium and culture, and just like with television, people are starting to look back with interest and realise that older titles represent specific eras of gaming. Eras that many people want to relive and many new gamers want to learn about for the first time and it’s all thanks to the geeks.
Maybe as the significance of video games continues to become more universally accepted, older games will become as accessible as older movies. I hope so.
After all, could you imagine getting into films and then never watching Jaws? Back to the Future? Planet of the Apes?! Star Wars?!!?
Inconceivable!
Incidentally, if you want to listen to listen to Dennis Law Jr through broken speakers - buy a Marantz SR4400, give it 3 years, then go to this site – they’re really rather good
