Over the last few years the early cartridge games from the Nintendo
Entertainment System have been making a massive comeback. Starting with
retro gaming stores, and moving on to illegal emulation and back
finally to legal retro virtual consoles on more modern consoles.
Whichever way it happens, extensive efforts have been made to make these
old games readily available to the masses again. And the people who
have seemingly been snapping them up more than anyone else are people
right around my age...born usually somewhere between 82 and about 87.
After thinking about this for a while, I came up with a few possible
reasons why this may be.
A starter is who these retro games appeal
to. A big audience is big time gamers. People who spend money or pool
money to get the highest end video game systems and high end PC's to
play the newest games the day they come out. The same people sit and
wait outside the electronics store and wait for every single video game
to come out overnight, and pre-order every video game that's coming.
Now I consider myself to be a video gamer, but not in this group
specifically. I've never pre-ordered a video game in my life, but I do
relate to these gamers in my desire to try out the newest technology as
it comes out. So why would these horribly rendered fantasies appeal to
such people. A thought to me is that playing these games is a tribute
to what got us addicted. There's enough plot and story to them that they
aren't done in five minutes like older atari games and other consoles,
but simple enough that our parents would buy them for us and knew we
could get into them and be effective.
This leads into the appeal
to the rest of the general populus in my age group. People who used to
tease and ridicule the people who admittedly played the retro games
while they themselves were playing in secret, and now are coming out and
saying they do play video games and still like the old ones. The way I
see this phenomena is the fact of the age we were when we started
playing these games. Now remember that the original Nintendo was
everywhere. Every gas station that rented movies also had video games
abundantly available. Most even had a console that you could rent too.
The newest games were right there and you could walk, even in a small
town, to rent them and afford them with your allowance. So this means
that there were extensive hours spent playing these games by kids my
age, who were like 10 tops at the time. Now that we are getting much
much older, and have a more analytical brain to apply to these games,
along with better reflexes, these challenges of our childhood that
stopped us so hard in our tracks are seemingly much much easier. This,
along with better technology, and the ability to save progress, means
that we will begin to be able to see more of the game that we used to
hit a wall with, and finish it up without having to sit and spend six
hours in one sitting to do so. This means that we can go back to these
games and give them attention now, and think them through, while still
working through our normal routines, and the busy lives that we've grown
up into
Now that we've seen the way these games can still be
appealing, and thought a little about why, lets all take a step back and
enjoy the little guilty pleasures from our youth. Enjoy them freely.
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