Retro Games Rewind!
Mario! Sonic! Donkey Kong! Even if somehow you have never played their games, you know who these guys are. But if you were like a ton of us, that spent hours and hours playing these games back in the day, then these guys are like old friends. You couldn't wait to come home and get lost in the gaming world with these colorful characters.
I was like 6 or 7 when I got a Nintendo for Christmas one year.
Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and the original Zelda! I had seen the commercials, heard the hype from other kids, and thought I knew what to expect. Very few things in life are even better than expected, but this was! Ah, the rush of excitement!
It was like the doors were open to a whole new world. The games had beautiful artwork on the box, a pleasant plasticky smell, and in the case of Zelda, the cartridge itself was a shiny gold!
There was just a neat allure that went around these games and accessories. Just the excitement of knowing I could control something on the TV was beyond awesome!
From then on, and for many years, it was games, games, and bugging for more games! (Sorry to all the wives and girlfriends where this is still true, even today.) Hours were spent finding power-ups, extra lives, and better shields. The satisfaction and excitement of finding a new weapon, then seeing what it does was so much fun!
It's playing Mario with my brother after Saturday morning cartoons when I was little. It's playing the arcade version of Street Fighter 2 at the skating rink in Junior High. It's blasting away friends with Odd Job in Golden Eye's battle mode back in high school.
I was what today we'd call “an indoor kid.” I didn't really like playing outside unless it was at the park or something, so video games were perfect for me! They were something to take my mind off school that wasn't boring or completely passive.
Video games weren't just one of the millions of ways to distract you from your schoolwork in the 1980s, either. My god man, this was a time of the awesomest cartoons, TV shows, movies, and toys of (in my opinion) any time. There was so much cool stuff; I don't know how our generation can stay focused on anything. Oh, well maybe we can't... perhaps that explains a lot.
Anyhow, all these cheesy characters and toy lines were terrific and great fun back then. But video games were new and brimming with cool mystique. The graphics weren't always great; the music was sometimes repetitive and annoying, but that paled in comparison to the thrill of actually getting to control something on the TV!
The games had intricate stories to learn and secret codes to find out. Half of the fun was talking to your friends about the various characters or how to beat the game, or if Nintendo is better than Sega, and things like that.
There was great merchandise too! Mario lunch boxes, blankets, shirts, posters, and who could forget those McDonald's toys?
One of my favorite things from this era was the Nintendo Power Magazine. The artwork was terrific, and it had strategy guides, game maps, and cool ads for rad new games. Remember, there was no internet to lookup game tips, so it was mind-blowing to see a map of Zelda or learn where the power-ups were in Super Mario 2.
Looking back, the games of the day didn't look that great. Now if it's been “a few years" since you've played an old Nintendo or Sega type game, you may be in for a little bit of a shock. You may think, "whoa, these graphics suck." What was so clearly Mega-Man when you were little, now kind of seems like a little blue blob.
Look, even back in the day; playing these games required a little imagination, ok? Fortunately, the designers had you covered. The old games used to come with beautifully produced instruction manuals. These were more than just illustrating what button does what. These were the game's whole elaborate story, detailed descriptions of the enemies, and hints and tricks. The best thing to me though was the artwork!
There were beautiful illustrations of what the characters and environments were supposed to look like. With this fantastic artwork in mind, it didn't take much for our little pea-brains to imagine the characters come to life and make us feel like we were playing better games than we really were.
Over the years, my family got a Super Nintendo and the great Nintendo 64, as did all my friends. I spent many fun teen years shooting up friends playing Golden Eye 007. I got my own N64 in college and kept on playing. Crystal and I had many fun times playing Mario Kart and Mario Party with friends in college. Speaking of parties, it was wild times making video games into drinking games. Ah ya, those were the days!
Later in college, we got a Wii and had a lot of fun doing Wii Bowling and Mario Party. The other games on Wii were a bit unwieldy though. The wireless controllers that were so innovative and great for tennis or bowling kinda of sucked when playing traditional platformers or action games. They also ate up batteries like nobody's business. Eventually, the whole system pooped out on us after only a year or two. This was around 2008 and, during that time, streaming movies and iPhones came to be, plus we had tons of friends and a Disneyland pass. Let’s just say we had other distractions and didn't play many video games other than mobile games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush, (and from what I've read on the Internet, I guess those don't count...)
Six months ago, when the Coronavirus started, I thought it would be a great time to start playing video games again since we wouldn't be able to go to the fun places that we love so much.
Amazon screwed up my converter order three different times, and I got frustrated and gave up. Around my birthday, I remembered a couple of years back. Nintendo had released a Nintendo and Super Nintendo Classic Mini that were tiny versions of the originals that worked with modern TV's and had a bunch of classic games preloaded in them. Of course, they were sold out…
I gave up again for a while, but then, I saw that Sega Genesis had released a mini-console as well. It was sold out almost everywhere for a bit but one day, it was on sale on Amazon for a reasonable $52 bucks! So I got it, (and I'll be doing a review soon.) But it reignited our love for video games, and we eventually got the Nintendo Switch, so big updates coming soon. It's pretty rad, but it won't take away from the old games for me.
I love retro things, especially from my time growing up in the 80s and 90s. So much about old games takes me back with good memories of simpler times.
At first look though it was hard not to think, "wow, this isn't as good as I remember." The repetitive cheesy music, the pixelated characters, the button mashing difficulty, and other such things are frustrating sometimes as I look at it with modern eyes. So I do understand how one might feel that way.
Back in the day, we always looked for games with the best graphics, the latest hype or the craziest new idea. We wanted games that looked more like… well, like anything. And a lot of old games didn't look that great even then. Graphics were kinda terrible in those days; so we just wanted a game that looked even a fraction as cool as the cover art, or to look as good as it did in the arcade.
It was exciting when a game based on a cartoon or movie came out because there was the hope that it would look just like our favorite animated characters had come to life.
These games were often a letdown. Sometimes it was the limits of the technology at the time, and sometimes it was about a rush to get the game out for Christmas or to align with the opening of a movie that made some games bad.
My interest in old games peaked when I came across a documentary series on Netflix called "High Score". This is a really fun, lighthearted series that tells a different aspect of video game history in each episode, from things like how the companies or systems themselves came to be like Nintendo or Sega, to the story of how different video game genres came to be like fighting games or shoot 'em ups. There are interviews with the original designers, sound creators, competition winners, great old footage, and rad concept art.
The best parts though are the 16-bit video game style animations the show created to illustrate some of these stories told by the designers. The animations are hilarious and creative.
Even if you only have a vague memory of some of these games or characters, it's a really fun watch. Seeing how the designers created these games gave me a new appreciation for the artistry that went into them back in the day.
First, they have to design these fantastic complex stories and concept art. Then figure out how they're going to take these fantastic ideas and cram them into a game cartridge with limited memory. All of this complex coding has to be run on a mini-computer complex enough to handle it but cute and affordable enough to be disguised as a fancy tech toy.
This was a time when anything having to do with computers was outrageously expensive, large, complicated, and nerdy. The designers thought that reputation might scare some customers off. That's why the early home consoles were designed to look like toys and not as high-tech as they actually were.
I looked up how some of the old games work, and along with the stories of how they were created, it just made me appreciate these old games beyond the "is it fun?" or "does it look cool?" mentality I had.
These games were little works of art that were fretted over, and designed by a bunch of geniuses, mostly in Japan.
I searched for tips on some more challenging games and found a wealth of information including gamer blog posts and Youtube movies about all these old games. It's like a whole little community of these old games' fans giving tips, reviewing re-releases, and more. It reminded me of talking about video games with friends and classmates back in the day. Only now it's not a bunch of geeky, nerdy kids huddled over a Nintendo Power Magazine talking about these games at recess, it's a high-tech world of live streaming and video tutorials by a bunch of nerdy, geeky, middle-age people talking about these games still. But that's rad and I'm so glad!
Since living in just about any other time is better than 2020, there's a very similar documentary on CBS to take you further on a nostalgia trip. It focuses on "Console Wars" between Nintendo vs. Sega in the late 1980s/ early 1990s. It's pretty good and has similar animations to "High Score" but to me lacks the humor and fun.
For more 80s nostalgia, not necessarily having to do with video games "The Toys That Made Us" and "The Movies That Made Us" are great! All with entertaining interviews with all the people that brought you your childhood. Alternatively, maybe if you're older you can see the people you paid a fortune to buy all this junk for the kids back in the day. In these incredibly strange days, please make some time for nostalgia. Remember the things you used to love and remember why you loved it. These things are the foundation of who you are.
