Retro Gaming And The Curse of Adulthood
Hoping to bring back a piece of your childhood? You might be disappointed.
I grew up playing a lot of video games.
I started with Nintendo (NES) in the early 90s, playing Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Megaman, Dr. Mario, Paper Boy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and endless hours of Duck Hunt with the Light Gun. I was also one of those lucky kids who had a Power Glove, which made Mike Tyson’s Punch Out an incredibly fun experience. Later on, my family had a Sega Genesis where I became addicted to Sonic the Hedgehog, and my parents even sprang for Sega CD and Sega 32X—the full lineup of 16-bit, 32-bit and CD-ROM Sega products of the time. By the age of ten, I had spent as much time playing video games as it takes to get a Ph.D. in medicine.
I was even lucky enough to experience the allure and thrill of the arcade, back when Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat created a brief renaissance in what was historically a declining cultural phenomenon. Back then, these games turned movie theaters, bowling alleys, local pizzarias and anywhere else you could find an arcade cabinet into the place to be. The newest, most technologically advanced games were on display and nothing you had at home came close. Even though I never had enough quarters to play very long, I remember watching the older kids line up to play Mortal Kombat II while crowd of onlookers cheered whenever someone nailed a gruesome fatality. While I’m glad to have seen it and felt the awe of the arcade, I wish I had been old enough to have some of my own money for more practice and access to strategy guides to have been a serious competitor back then. But like the snows of yesteryear, the arcade era is forever gone from this world.
We also had a Windows PC in my house, on which I started out with black-and-white DOS games, then the classics from id Software: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Later on, I came to love Diablo, WarCraft and StarCraft, all produced by Blizzard Entertainment, whose franchises have lived on for decades and who still makes top-tier games in today’s market. I spent so much time at the computer that even as I kid I knew I had to stand up, stretch my legs and give my butt a rest.
Once I graduated college, I got my first full-time job and finally did have a few hundred bucks of disposable income. One of the first things I did was buy an Xbox 360 and a bunch of games, plus a 47-inch HD TV to play them on. This generation of consoles was one of the first to offer truly incredible 3D graphics that still hold up well today, complete with millions of polygons, high-resolution texture mapping, realistic lighting effects, cast shadows, etc. I mostly played Rockstar Games’s lineup of Grand Theft Auto IV and Read Dead Redemption, as well as gems like Red Faction: Guerilla, Mortal Kombat 9, Left 4 Dead 2, Batman: Arkam Asylum, Gears of War, Dead Space and Bullet Storm. But this wasn’t quite enough for me…
Five years into my career as a software engineer, I had more money than I knew what to do with. Among other irresponsible purchases, I spent $3,000 on a custom-made Falcon Northwest gaming PC with an overclocked 2nd-gen Intel i7 processor and a 4GB graphics card—the kind of machine that allowed me to play every game at maxed-out graphics settings on a 30-inch, 1440p monitor (sold separately). With this incredible gaming rig, I played hours and hours of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Max Payne 3, Spec Ops: The Line, Diablo III, StarCraft II, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine, Borderlands, Need for Speed: The Run, Rage, Dirt 3 and many, many more games, each at $60 a pop. Oh what a wonderful few years that was…
But since this era, I have found little interest in playing modern video games. The next generations of consoles after Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were nothing dramatic, just faster machines that did little more than catch up to my Falcon Northwest beast that still to this day has just as much raw computing power. We did see some interesting new graphics techniques become commonplace, like hardware-accelerated physics, subsurface scattering, screen space ambient occlusion and higher resolution polygons and textures. But fundamentally, the games were nothing new. And thus, my lifelong interest in video games quickly and dramatically waned.
The Rise of Retro Gaming
Then came the retro gaming renaissance of recent years. Sega, Sony, Nintendo and a few others have released mini consoles preloaded with our favorite games from when we were kids. Many fan favorites have also been ported to iOS and Android devices, a very cheap, quick and convenient way to enjoy a bit of nostalgia (though without the feel of the controller in my hand, it’s not quite the same). And if you have a bit of technical know-how, the world of emulators and ROMs will let you play damn near every game ever published from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, as well as some that were only available in Japan or Europe, and others that, though completed, were never published at all. Finally, I was drawn back into gaming, and once more, I spend hours and hours of my life enjoying the same 16-, 32- and 64-bit adventures I had as a kid.
But there was a problem. These retro games are so freakin’ difficult—it drives me nuts! Some might call that replay value, and to some degree that’s true. But most of the time it borders on sadism. I like a difficult puzzle, powerful boss or confusing maze of a level—I really do. But games from these “retro” eras were so cruel in how they punished you for failing. You have to go all the way back to the start of the level and repeat 5–10 minutes of identical gameplay for one more crack at that long jump or another few seconds to figure out how to defeat that tricky boss. And if you die too times and run out of continues, that’s it—you are returned to the title screen and have to start all over again.
It’s no wonder that I spent so many countless hours playing these games when I was a kid; the feedback loop for building enough skill to beat them is so painfully time consuming. And it’s also no wonder why my older brother and I frequently got into trouble for screaming, throwing controllers and scuffling with each other in the traumatic aftermath of some event on screen. Just yesterday I tossed the controller and screamed, “Oh, fuck you!” after losing my last life trying to beat Mortal Kombat II for Sega Genesis. I did not try again.
The Curse of Adulthood
The problem, as I realized, is that I’m an adult now. For every hour I play video games, there’s a little voice in my head suggesting that I should be doing something else with that time. How about cleaning your apartment? How about working on your novel? How about going for a jog? How about going to bed before 2:00am tonight?
Adult life makes many claims on your time, including work, family, your health, pets, car maintenance, laundry, doing your taxes, etc. And the older I get, the more precious and valuable I consider my time. I want make more money, publish more novels, advance my career, get in better shape, be a better father, read more books and learn more things. Time is running out, and it makes the time-sucking difficulty of retro games too unforgivable to bear.
But when you’re a kid, time is an unlimited resource. You can’t work and you have no skills, anyway, so your time is essentially worthless. Homework can be done easily (or just as easily blown off), soccer practice is only once per week in the fall and it’ll be years still before you care about parties, drugs and girls. So what’s a kid to do? How else besides pouring hour after hour into extremely difficult video games would I have killed all that time? I read books, watched TV, rode bicycles and played little league baseball, too, but I still had enough time to play a mind-numbing amount of video games.
In the end, I do get quite a kick out of replaying retro games from my youth, and discovering new ones that I never knew about. Being a Sega Genesis kid, I am now able to enjoy the full library of Super Nintendo games that some of my friends were playing. But my interest is casual at best. I never make it past the first or second level, and once a game punishes me with a restart, I never pick it up again. It makes me wonder how I might fare if there was some kind of retro revival of the arcade scene. Would I really make the most of it as I had wished as a kid when I dreamt of having a bottomless sack of quarters to keep the fun going without end? Or would my adult brain consider that, too, an impertinent use of time and money?
Bridging The Gap
I think there are only two answer: YouTube and my children. Instead of actually playing games—retro or modern—I mostly just watch gameplay videos on YouTube. Not only do I not have to bother with the (possibly expensive) hardware for the best quality graphics and sound, I don’t have to get emotionally invested in the quest to succeed. If I want to see what the next level looks like, I just scrub forward and there it is. I get to see all the same amazing graphics, hear all the same great music and pretty much get the whole experience of a game—and for free. It might sound sad, like the wind has gone out of my sail, my once burning passion for gaming having fizzled out and now I have only the energy for a facsimile of the real experience. And to some degree, that’s true. But that’s where the second answer comes in…
For young kids, modern games are much harder to approach than retro games. The controllers are made for adult hands and have too many joy sticks, buttons and levers, a lot of which are now pressure sensitive. That’s too much for a kid. And an immersive world with a film-quality music score, professional voice acting and ultra-realistic graphics is a lot to manage when playing games for the first time. Retro-era games were so much simpler. On Nintendo, for example, the games require one D-pad and two buttons to play, and the gameplay is simple as can be. The graphics and music are simple (because they had to be), but within these constraints the developers created colorful worlds with cute characters and delightful music and sound effects chirping away on that old hardware. It’s perfect for kids, and when my own children are old enough, I think it’ll really bring me back to those experiences I had at that age. Of course, right? That’s the point of having kids.
Until then, I will temper my fury with these damn-near-impossible retro games and bide my time until I can enjoy it variously once more through the eyes of a child.
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