One of the undervalued aspects of the Internet is its endless capacity to enable nostalgia. Whether you had a childhood love of My Little Pony, Dungeons & Dragons or a defunct hockey team, there’s a website (and probably an eBay auction) where you can revisit that pleasure of your youth.
I was reminded of this phenomenon over the weekend, when a friend and I were discussing a new Olympics-themed video game called Vancouver 2010. Like many Olympics computer games before it, it enables you to play a number of the sports from the Winter Games. Here’s a trailer:
It’s noteworthy that the Games’ three sports that are most popular among Canadians–ice hockey, figure skating and curling–don’t appear in this game. It’s not surprising–hockey has its own franchise games, figure skating would be tricky to program effectively (imagine the control scheme) and curling, well, is curling. That said, I think curling would make a great game for the Wii.
The Heady Days of Microsoft Decathlon
My friend reminded me of a slightly earlier sports mini-games-within-a-game for the PC. It was called Microsoft Decathlon, and, believe it or not, it was published in 1982. 1982! The first version of PC-DOS, on which is ran, was only released in August, 1981. I probably didn’t play the game until 1984 or 1985, but I played it a lot. When I watched this video, the sense of nostalgia was visceral:
The crazy midi theme, the four colour interface, the high jump mat labeled “FOAM PIT”–it all came back to me. The whole video is 10 minutes, so don’t bother watching the whole thing. I might draw your attention, however, to the awesome rendering of the shot-put event.
When you compare those two videos, it’s a little shocking how far games have come in 25 years. What will they look like in another 25 years? How much will innovation slow down, as has happened in television and film?
Yesterday I was in Toronto and a dude in a suit and tie rolled by me on a long board. It got me thinking about how often I see men over the age of 25 riding a skateboard. I sometimes see them riding around with their young children, which is kind of charming.
That got me thinking about video games. I remember being kind of shocked to learn, a few years ago, that the average age of a gamer is now 33 years old. That is, that a significant majority of gamers has achieved the age of majority. Having grown up with video games, that shouldn’t surprise me (I still play them), but it does. I guess I always associated games with toys and play, and those were things that adults didn’t typically do.
Are there other ‘childish things’ that our generation exported into adulthood? Also, when I was young, video games and skateboards were mostly boy things. Are there analogous examples from the girls of the seventies and eighties?
I may get pilloried for this, but I’m pretty apathetic about the Halo games. I’ve played and enjoyed a lot of first-person shooters over the years, and I’ve never really seen what makes these games particularly remarkable.
Admittedly, I probably only played Halo: Combat Evolved a year or so after it came out, so other games may have already caught up in innovation. And I only played it on the PC–I don’t know if the XBox version was far superior.
I’ve read articles that sing the praises of its storyline, but I guess that wasn’t particularly compelling for me. The storytelling didn’t strike me as superior to, say, Max Payne or Halflife. Maybe I missed something? It’s a decent game–I just haven’t figured out why people are lining up to buy it.
What do you think sets the Halo games apart from the rest of the genre?
On an unrelated note, that Canada.com article I referenced is under a ‘Games News & Reviews’ banner, but lives in their absurd ‘Share It’ section. I complained about this when they re-launched last year. What rational media organization would put obituaries, e-cards and gaming news in the same category?
Which is Halo’s true gift to the world of games. It did so many things right that designers have been cribbing from it for years. Including, thankfully, the guys who made Halo 3.
I may get pilloried for this, but I’m pretty apathetic about the