It is very easy to shake your head at Modern Gaming™ and despair, but at the same time, great things are happening — even at the big-budget, top-tier end of things. They are especially great if you are a Gamer of a Certain Age.
For me, some of my fondest gaming memories hail from the mid to late 1990s. Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake are defining gaming experiences for me. Final Fantasy VII shaped my primary gaming tastes. And, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a wonderful shared experience for all of us who owned Nintendo 64s at the time it came out. Which was, basically, everyone in my entire friendship group.
Now, nearly 30 years later, it's kind of amazing to think that I am still here, still playing games… and still playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Doom and Final Fantasy — albeit not in their original forms. I'm playing the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Ocarina of Time, which is beyond beautiful; I'm playing Doom on a console I helped bring to market, in a release that I wrote the documentation for; I'm playing Final Fantasy in the form of Final Fantasy Resonance, a game which is both an excellent Final Fantasy in the old-school mould, and a wonderful homage to Final Fantasy history in its own right.
It's kind of funny in a way. I often think about games that have come out in the last… 15-20 years, say, and wonder if any of them will ever have the same kind of cultural penetration of things like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Games that, while you might not necessarily want to play them all the time, can be universally agreed upon to be both important and good. The games I've previously mentioned all fall into this category, too; Doom has endured for so long for very good reason, and has seen numerous rereleases over the years; Ocarina of Time is actually on its second remake and third rerelease after the Gamecube port and the 3DS remake; and Final Fantasy is a series that has very much moved with the times — not always in a way that everyone likes, but one cannot deny that it has always done its very best to stay up to date.
I look at something like Horizon: Zero Dawn — which, admittedly, is a game I didn't like very much — and wonder if people are still going to be talking about that in 20 years in the same way that the aforementioned titles are held in complete and utter reverence by both players and game makers. What about Gears of War? Halo? Gears is apparently having a bit of a comeback, but Halo has been absent from many people's lives for so long at this point that it has almost become irrelevant.
I wonder how much of it is down to a sense of universal appeal versus things that are ostensibly aimed at "adults". Of the titles I referenced above, only really Doom can, perhaps, be argued to be aimed vaguely in the direction of adults — and even then, not really. Doom is, at heart, a teenage, heavy metal, power fantasy. Even back on its original release, its violence was almost cartoonish, despite being relatively bloody; its "scary" elements tempered somewhat by a driving soundtrack and a relentless pace. People remember Doom and Doom II a lot more fondly than Doom III because Doom III tried to go all-in on the "this is a scary game for adults" thing, and while it was good — it really was! — you just… don't hear people talk about it any more.
And that's where I kind of fall with a lot of the modern games that seem to be a big hit one minute, then almost completely forgotten about the next. Sure, having a middle-aged protagonist who is sad and says "fuck" a lot is very much a sign of the times… but it doesn't have that same timeless appeal that things like Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy do.
As someone interested in gaming history, I feel like it's going to be very interesting looking back on the last 15-20 years or so in retrospect. It's already interesting to look back on the Xbox 360/PS3 era, because there's a whole ton of stuff that completely flew under the radar on those consoles. That's a different thing from having timeless appeal, of course, but it can sometimes throw up some thoroughly interesting experiences.
That's probably a tale for another day, though. For now, I'll just say that the couple of hours of Ocarina of Time I've played this evening are absolutely marvellous, and I'm delighted that this remake has come out as well as it has. It strikes that perfect balance I was talking about the other day, where it is simultaneously respectful to its source material, and simply a great new game in its own right, for those who have never played it before.
I would play some more but I smell real bad so I better go have a bath.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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