When I Was Your Age...

I'm feeling a bit old today.

Yes, I'm about to give you one of those "When I was your age...I walked ten miles in the snow barefoot" stories. Ok, I didn't do that. But this is a blog entry in that vain.

When I was your age (you're just a little kid right? Right), we didn't have all these fancy graphics, cool controls, and HD TVs.

We had 8-bit graphics, the NES controller, and television sets that filled whole rooms. Well, they weren't that big, but they weren't thin and the picture would look grainy today.

The point is that we weren't focused on how good the game looked. We cared about the gameplay. From Atari to NES to Super NES, it was all about the gameplay. And then the 64 came about and then the Playstation and things changed. People started to get wowed by Sony's Playstation and star struck by the graphics. Sure, there was a lot of great gameplay too, but if you choose the Playstation over the 64, it was probably over the graphics. I admit thats a big reason that I fell for the Playstation 1.

Yet, there's still this need for retro games. We see Indie developers still creating games that are more about gameplay than graphics. We see Nintendo and some other third parties do this too. Look at Super Mario Maker, thats a game that is all about the retro. We can finally create our own Mario levels! If someone could time travel back to when I was a kid and tell me about Super Mario Maker, I would not have believed them.

When I was your age, the graphics were simple, the gameplay was simple in comparison to today's gameplay, and we loved it.

There are a lot of us that still love the simple, fun games. Of course, there are a lot of new games that are awesome too. We can't live in the past completely. The video game industry, like all industries, most evolve and change in order to still be interesting to young whippersnappers like you.

But we must not forget the past either. We should always look back to the past as a point of reference, "How can I make this game as good as Super Mario Bros?", "How can I make it better?" We must always remember where the industry came from.

Thank goodness for the Virtual Consoles. Thank goodness for the Indies who love retro. Thank goodness for youtube.

When I was your age, we didn't have virtual consoles, indies, or youtube. We didn't even have the internet. Man, my generation will be one of the last to grow up without the internet. I don't know if I should be happy about that or weeping.

(aside: we also didn't have cellphones. No big loss there, imo)

Oh and one last thing: Don't play in the streets kids.

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I'll be back on Friday with something else.