#oneaday Day 93: Beyond the "Known"

I happened to "overhear" a conversation on Twitter earlier, such as you do, among some retro gaming enthusiasts. The question posed was something along the lines of "which of these is your favourite: Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario Bros. 3?"

There was, of course, plenty of discussion of the matter, but my immediate reaction to it was, I must confess… "I don't really care".

To clarify, I'm not saying that I dislike either Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario Bros. 3 at this point. Quite the opposite, actually; I very much enjoy both games. My response was more to the discussion itself; this feels like one of many questions that has been discussed many, many times over and over, and it's just not a very interesting one.

Everyone knows by this point that Super Mario Bros. was revolutionary, and that Super Mario Bros. 3 was the perfection of the NES platformer formula. Any time I see something like this — or indeed, say, a respected games writer reveals that a "secret project" is something like a "deep dive into Super Mario Bros. 3", I just can't help but feel a bit bad for the thousands of other games out there that don't get discussed nearly enough. It's as if music critics only discussed Beethoven, or if literary critics only discussed Shakespeare. I'm sure that happens, but in each of these cases, the respective media are much broader than just a single, well-known example.

This is partly what I've always tried to do with MoeGamer. With only a few exceptions — I covered Final Fantasy XV because I was excited for it, and I think it was a noteworthy and interesting game to talk about — I've deliberately tried to explore these lesser-known games in the same amount of depth that the Super Mario Bros. 3s of the world get on a regular basis. Because they're absolutely worth it.

Okay, some of these games may not be innovative or genre-defining, or anything like that. But there are tons of fascinating things to delve into, discuss and contemplate. I've consistently felt since… probably the PS2 era, perhaps even earlier… that the most interesting games are the ones that people aren't talking about. It's why the first PS2 game I bought was Shadow of Memories, not whatever the "big" games around its launch were. It's why my PS4 library doesn't have any triple-A games in in (except, arguably, Nier: Automata, FFXV and maybe The Last Guardian). And why you're almost certainly never going to see a modern EA game on MoeGamer.

To reiterate: I'm not saying the more well-known experiences don't have any value, or aren't worth talking about at all. What I am saying, however, is that I wish a few more people would talk about a few more different games… both from a modern and from a retro perspective.

Oh well. I'm doing my bit, anyway! 🙂