As time passes, it is confirmed for me, again and again, that the simplicity and pick-up-and-playability of "old" video games is vastly superior to the glitz and graphics of today's three-dimensional offerings. Sure, one may marvel at the visual explosion of garish hues of any PlayStation game, or guffaw at the side-splitting and muscle-tearing action of XBox Kinect or Wii games, or even be wowed by the audio saturation emanating from one's quadrophonic sound system as one plays games... well, on any of those consoles. However, I find that it is difficult to trump the quaint jaggedness of 8-bit or 16-bit sprites, the plip-ploppiness of 25-year-old game sound effects, or even the mind-bending elegance of one D-pad and two, three, or six buttons.
The reason why I am waxing nostalgic and gushing with needlessly verbose prose is because I experienced a moment of peculiar lucidity today. During a work training session, rather randomly, I asked one of the attendees (who happened to be my age) if he remembered the infinite-life trick in Super Mario Brothers for the NES. For a few seconds, the attendee (who was attending via WebEx, actually) admitted some ignorance, but then corrected himself and recalled with impressive clarity that if you jump on a certain creature (in this case, a Koopa) a certain way (on the edge of its shell as it descends stairs made of blocks), you can set up an infinite loop of life gain. Floored by his apparent recall of that tactic, I filled in the blanks of his description by noting that it happens in World 3 and results in cryptic symbols replacing numbers next to the Mario life indicator that is displayed before the start of each level.
As this moment of lucidity passed, I was reminded that though games like Super Mario Brothers were easy to learn and somewhat challenging to conquer, there were arduous aspects of the gameplay that made even seasoned gamers pause, such as trying to advance anywhere in Legend of Zelda; also, there were wondrous moments of revelation that etched indelible impressions in our psyches, such as the infinite life trick. What was revealed to me was that while the simplicity of those old games lured us into becoming fans, it was the hidden and the discoverable that kept us returning to play over and over. There was something eminently rewarding about unearthing such tricks or conquering levels of ridiculous difficulty. I contend that games today, even with their Easter eggs, hidden levels, and downloadable content do not have the payoff of the infinite life trick, of setting the correct tree on fire, or climbing the once-inaccessible tower to find a 1-UP (a la Knuckles the Echidna). I suppose it's because these games live in the rosy-tinted world of my memories. However, when I watch my sons play the old games or I hear a co-worker describe his son's admiration of Super Mario Brothers, I realize that if we all bring up our children to appreciate the things of the past, we bless them with the gift of discerning what is great from what is derivative.
