719
It’s no secret that I am into a lot of old games. I’m also into a lot of new games, so it’s not like I think old games a somehow inherently better. Some of my favorite experiences playing games were relatively recent. Nostalgia is a trap that can make you believe the things you once loved are better than anything new. Taken to an extreme, it can make you think that the best times are in the past and we would all be better off rolling back the clock. But that’s more of a political conversation than one about games.
What if you don’t have any nostalgia for a thing from the past but nonetheless you find yourself fascinated with it? What do you call that? I don’t know.
Recently, I have been checking out a lot of games that came out on the MSX, a uniquely Japanese computer.
While I am sure that people in Canada got their hands on an MSX machine when they were a going concern, I certainly wasn’t aware of the thing. Maybe I saw it in some game magazine or other, or I saw a game with MSX compatibility on it’s packaging, but none of that made much of an impression.
Now, through emulation, you can play any number of games for the MSX. Oddly enough, not knowing Japanese isn’t really much of a hurdle for most of them either. They either have some info or instructions in English, or they are so simple that it’s pretty easy to get into them.
I think what I am liking about messing around with MSX games is that they are familiar, we did after all have a lot of access to Japanese made games in the west, but because they were made with a different market in mind, they are also subtly different.
So it’s not nostalgia, it’s novelty, but novelty from the past. Like an alternate history to the games I played growing up. This is some other persons nostalgia. Out there somewhere in Japan there is another guy about my age, with older kids and sore knees, and he is getting into playing old North American and British dos games. Or Commodore 64 games. Or Atari 8bit computer games. He has no nostalgia for them, but he finds the idea of exploring the joys of someone else’s childhood fascinating. It makes his world smaller.
I haven’t found any wild surprises, or discovered any games that completely blew me away, but the search is enjoyable, so I think I will keep dabbling with these old computers. Maybe I will play some games made for the FM Towns Marty next. That might be fun.