Commentary
Nonlinear: Gaming
- by Shankar Gupta , February 23, 2006
But everything that's shiny and new isn't always the way to a gamer's heart. On some days, movie buffs want to watch "The Lord of the Rings," other days "The Breakfast Club," and still other days, "Casablanca." Likewise, game buffs get the itch to play the games of old. It's a kind of nonlinear media consumption: gaming with the oldies.
And gamers don't just want to play today's installment. Developers are finding that telling today's story isn't enough: Gamers want to go back and play yesterday's stories, too, even if those stories are 8-bit and pixilated. Developers of franchises today aren't telling a linear story. Instead they're stewarding a tradition with a mass of old content to draw upon and the insight that even if they don't, their fans have played it and are still playing it today.
Enter backward compatibility: the ability for a gaming system to play the titles made for earlier versions. The current crop of consoles doesn't have much of it; the Xbox doesn't offer a precursor's games to play, and the Nintendo GameCube was the first in its product line to switch to discs rather than cartridges, making backward compatibility with the Nintendo 64 impossible. Sony's PlayStation 2 is the only system that recalls its storied past: Every PlayStation game is playable on the PlayStation 2.
The next generation, in addition to moving the gaming industry forward, is also taking a frog's leap backward. The PlayStation 3 will be able to play all games for previous generations of that system. And the Nintendo Revolution takes the idea even further. Not only can it play titles from the GameCube, it will also download and play the system's ancient ancestors -- games produced for the original Nintendos and Super Nintendos at the dawn of console gaming. The Xbox 360 lags behind; only certain games from the old Xbox can be played on the new platform, and some of the most popular titles -- Halo 2" for example -- aren't compatible.
Even in the last generation of gaming systems, players found themselves returning to the 1980s and storied franchises like "Metroid," "Mario Kart," and "Prince of Persia," all of which included unlockable content that harkens back to the games' earliest versions. "Metroid Prime," released in 2003, allows players to unlock and play the entirety of the original "Metroid," released in 1986. Stepping through a secret door in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," also released in 2003, takes players into an updated version of the very first "Prince of Persia," released in 1989, a game I remember watching my older brother play. At 7 years old, I was "too little" to play it.
Conventional wisdom was that old games didn't have much value until the gaming community started to covet them. Innovative gamers with perhaps too much free time wrote PC programs that could play 1980s console games, which were downloaded in droves. Old PC games were revived, as well. The open-source movement recoded the cult hits "Star Control" and "Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters," adding all-new content, graphics, and audio, and The-Underdogs.org hosts a massive library of "abandonware," old games that are no longer sold by their copyright holders and can now be downloaded for free.
In the gaming community, playing "retro" games is almost a badge of honor. They're often much harder than newer games, perhaps because the controls are archaic and the graphics are unclear, or maybe because back then, game designers didn't feel much pressure to make a game easy to complete for the "casual gamer."
