650

I sat down here, an hour or so ago, with the intention of playing a game. I have a couple of new games I have been trying out, but I didn’t end up playing any of those. I played old games.

I know that might make some sense. Old guy, old games. Except these weren’t old games, like nostalgic from my childhood games, these were games from somewhere in the vicinity of the last generation of consoles. Maybe a bit older than that. So, some solidly PS4, late PS3 type games. In the orbit of ten years old.

I do a lot of going back and looking at games that were made many decades ago. Games that feel like they are from a different time. Mostly because they are. Games that have a very different feel. A different sensibility.

Games from late in the PS3 or anywhere in the PS4 lifespan, don’t actually feel that different from games that came out a few months ago. In the entire history of video games, that is a strange thing.

If you picked any two games ten years apart from each other, at any time in the history of this medium, which I’ll admit, only really spans about five decades, they would feel like completely different beasts.

Ten years before Super Mario Bros. Jerry Lawson is coming up with the idea for the first game cartridge. Pong is still a pretty neat thing, and almost every video game is a very simple black and white experience.

Ten years after Super Mario Bros. the selection seems limitless. You could play through a hand painted wonderland in Yoshi’s Island, or pilot fully 3D hovercraft at breakneck speed in Wipeout. If you time jumped from one to the other, the games from 1995 would have seemed like magic.

By 2005, video games had become highly interactive 3D worlds like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Massively Multiplayer Online games let thousands of players connect, cooperate, and compete with one another in shared game worlds. Maybe these games are slightly more recognizable to players from 1995, but how people play them it wildly different.

There are many video games from 2015 that are still running, and still play very similar today. I play Rocket League semi-regularly. It has been tweaked behind the scenes, but it is largely the same game as it was a decade ago. Caves of Qud was released in early access in 2015. It was fully released a few months ago.

For all of video games five or six decade history, technology has pushed forward at such a breakneck pace that the art of the medium never settled. There were no classics of the medium that you could confidently suggest to someone new the video games. A person who has never seen Jaws, will still enjoy Jaws. A person who has never seen The Shawshank Redemption, or The Sound of Music, or so very many other movies could be handed a copy and they will probably enjoy it in the same way that audiences did when those films were new. You can’t give someone Breakout and expect that it will hold their attention for long.

The graphics and sound might be slightly less wowing in a game from a decade ago, but only slightly. And it’s not like there aren’t massive changes in technology and advances in the art of making games, there are. But just like Jaws and Jurassic Park both still land the same with audiences, even with decades between them, I think we have hit a similar place with video games. We have hit the point where the medium can grow.

One of my favourite pieces of art across all mediums and of all time, is a video game. Several are video games actually, but I am thinking of one in particular that uses the medium in such a unique and perfect way, but still has something important and human to say. Outer Wilds came out several years ago now, but I can’t imagine it will be any less potent in another decade or two. That is where this art form is now. It‘s not a gimmick or a diversion or a technical trick. It is an artistic medium where people removed by distance and time from their audience can still make a calculated impact.

Video games are great. You should go play some. New or old, because it just doesn’t matter anymore.