battlefield 1942 came out in 2002. i remember playing it as soon as it was available (pirated it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
crysis came out in 2007. i remember playing it some time after it came out (pirated it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
the witcher 3 came out in 2015. i remember playing it two years after it came out (bought it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
looking back, i now think that battlefield 1942 looks like an atari 2600 game. and i knew that, at the time; i knew it looked Like A Videogame. i knew what a polygon was in 2002, and i knew it didn't have a lot of them, but fuck, it just felt so organic and big and real. now it would feel like i'm walking around inside a portapotty; for christ's sake, i've played Open World Games, wake island is a postage stamp.
crysis... feels like a 1991 honda accord. dated, sure, but honestly still pretty solid. a looker, even, and that was 17 years ago. people played that game on fucking radeon x1350s. and the witcher 3, which is coming up on a decade old, looks breathtaking. it's been patched, sure, but the original still looks great. i don't look at it and go "lol, old." yet in 2012, BF1942 already looked like an atari 2600 game.
i realize it's just a nonlinear curve of improving quality made even more nonlinear by comparison to Real Life. but the thing that always weirds me out is this: i was there for all of it.
i know that I - the entity with this name and unique identity - was there in 2002, yet the past is a foreign country; 2002 feels impossibly far away. i know that i used daemon tools to install battlefield_1942.mds in 2002, but it might as well have been some jerk on reddit talking about it. it's not any more actionable. i can't reach back there and go "self, take notice of this thing, and this one. look at it from this point of view. stand up and look around, compare to other things. notice, observe, remember."
i was just doing what i was doing. it was not important that i was playing a game that would someday seem incomprehensibly old fashioned, and thus fascinating; it's just what was on the docket, what was on the table, what was next. it was the next thing to do. so i did it. and it feels like i did it about six hours ago. it feels no more distant than what i did last weekend, except that i had learned to pay attention to what was going on around me last weekend. i hadn't in 2002, and there's nothing i can do about it. i am someone i wish i could interview about a place i was and a thing i did, except that, being me, i know that i wouldn't have anything to say about it. it didn't matter enough to notice when i was doing it.
every time jeff gerstmann or jeremy parish talk about getting excited about seeing like megaman 4 or M.U.S.C.L.E. at the store i think about this. it's impossible for me to imagine someone remembering super mario brothers 3 coming out. but i'm someone who remembers battlefield 1942 coming out; i'm someone who remembers picking it up at fry's electronics and asking my parents to buy it; i'm someone who remembers excitedly inserting each disc, but it doesn't feel that way. it feels like it happened to someone else, even though the memories are there. i have them, i'm recalling them right now, i can see through my own two eyes, yet a forum post or a magazine article feel more real
how will i feel about 2024 in 2046? will it be any more real in retrospect?
i am watching a 30fps gopro video in my head of a hand inserting the doom shareware disc into a CDROM caddy, i had to put it in a caddy because our CDROM didn't have a drawer, and then i push it into the drive, and then i start doom and i am playing doom and i am scared of doom. and yet when i play doom it feels like something i got off homeoftheunderdogs 30 years after the fact, as distant as anything else that predates me. i've been continuously playing doom since it came out. why aren't these my memories? or maybe it's just that memories don't count for much.
I think the issue is that we (people who were alive in the 80s-90s-00s) lived through the singly most sudden, thorough, global restructuring of everyday life in human history — there have been many occasions where one culture suddenly came into close contact with another and life changed a lot for some specific city or province, but this was everyone, everywhere, at roughly the same time. If you’re young enough that you can’t remember before “internet on my phone, which fits in my pocket” then you really have no idea how much things have changed even if you can contemplate the idea in the abstract.
The only way to emotionally keep up with such profound changes is to mentally box off the past as a thing that’s over, done with and not relevant. Nobody remembers the nineties even though we’re all pretty sure it happened.
It did have some great video games, but in general, I don't remember it fondly.
The big difference between Then (Encompassing Early 00s) and Now is not the end of video game piracy (for me), but Indie Games and The License For A Game To Look Old.
As far as I remember those days, it was either AAA gaming, shovelware, or Non-English Speaking Euros Trying To Make An FPS [abject failure]. Probably the big indie game that blew up for me is Mount & Blade. Some Turkish folks just went and made it.
Some people still complained about the visuals, though.
And that leads me to another point. Back Then, it was constantly a race to make a Better Looking Game. Better graphics. More realistic. Particle effects. Pixel Shading, which cut me off from video games until I got a GPU that supported it.
Meanwhile, whatever you have today, - 4K RayTracing AI Turbodildosampling - is nice to have, but not entirely necessary. Play your cards right, and you can release a game that looks like CnC Generals++. Oh, sure, AAA studios will still lie and fail to deliver visuals . But if you're not Ubisoft, EA or ActivelystealingBreastmilk, you can do whatever. Cruelty Squad is trying to be a braindance sequence and people love it.
Boomer shooters and blooming - you can do sprites as long as you draw sprites well. Having the newest tech doesn't matter as long as you know how to use your old tech. You will not be lambasted for releasing a 2D RTS in a 3D RTS era (I vaguely remember at least one game being blasted for that).
More than that, fuck you, Armored Commander II looks like it predates what we had in gaming in 1997. As long as it's playable, as long as it's obvious that you have artistic vision and skill, do whatever the fuck you want.
