“We’ve never had it so good”, or so an article on this very site reads. And while there are some amazing aspects to gaming in the 2020s, there are a few things we miss from the gaming days of yore. Some elements of gaming that have been lost to time, be it to technological advances or the business moving on. Leave your nostalgia at the door, here are five things we feel gamers miss from the olden days.
Pack-In Heat
Pack-in titles still exist these days, many consoles come with choices of bundle for the consumer. However, these usually arrive sometime after the console’s initial release and it’s rare that these bundles last for very long.
Pack-in titles of yore were essentially the embodiment of a system for many people. At a time when games were far more expensive and libraries were smaller, the pack-in titles were often the only game that gamers played for weeks or months after getting their system.
Read More: Five Things Gamers Take for Granted These Days
With literal millions playing the same game at the same time, a pack-in title had to sell the system in the first place. Then keep someone interested long enough to want another game when their next birthday rolled around.
Some were absolutely perfect introductions to a console’s power and potential. Some were decidedly poor like Altered Beast. When a pack-in got it right though, both the system and the game tended to enter the realm of legends.
Super Mario Bros. helped resurrect the US video games industry. Sega Master System made a breakthrough in Europe thanks to Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Sonic the Hedgehog later ignited Sega as a brand in the US. Tetris sold the Game Boy by the million.
Before PlayStation replaced the pack-in title with a demo disc, practically every console to taste success in Europe and the US did so via a pack-in game.
Read More: The Enduring Legacy of Nintendo 64
As optical media proliferated, demo discs spelt the end for the pack-in title. Nintendo, the last ones standing in cartridges, were forced by circumstance to forego a pack-in.
By the time Nintendo got around to releasing N64 in 1996/97, their competitors had dropped their prices to around $199.
The Big ‘N’ dropped their MSRP to match this sub-200 price but a pack-in was off the menu for launch. Nintendo would eventually create somewhat popular GoldenEye 007 and Super Mario 64 sets in some regions but by then, the golden age of pack-ins had come and gone.
The Pack-In got one last hurrah in as Nintendo needed something accessible to ease non-gamers in the Wii’s motion controls. Like Tetris, Wii Sports introduced its parent system to those outside the traditional image of a ‘gamer’. Like Tetris, its parent system sold over 100 million units.
The Whole Game
While we lamented the brief nature of olden games in our list of Five Things Gamers Take for Granted These Days, there was a sweet spot in the elder days of optical disc formats where games were huge, content-filled monsters.
Developers went wild filling the expanded space afforded by CDs or DVDs with gaming content before adding in extras like hidden scenarios, unlockable characters or alternate endings.
Before Xbox and Xbox 360 made console DLC possible, developers threw the extra content in to round off the package. For a sweet decade or so, shaving off integral parts of a game to sell later wasn’t possible.
Read More: The Enduring Legacy of the Original Xbox
If they wanted to ask for more money, they needed a decent chunk of content to sell. Often it had to be big enough to stand alone.
Veritable extra-filled experiences from the time include the Resident Evil series, Metal Gear Solid 1&2, WWF: Smackdown, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1&2. All of which contained the type of content that would be sold online in later years.
Unlockables still soldier on, mostly in fighting games, but they always play second fiddle to DLC.
Cheat Codes
Another facet of gaming’s past that has been erased by economic opportunity is the provision of cheat codes. While cheat codes began as an easy way for devs and playtesters to skip to certain parts of a game or test a mechanic to its limit without having to worry about lives or health, they eventually became a fun extra added, or left in, by devs.
Some codes became part of public consciousness; the Konami code and the debug menu for Sonic 1 are almost as well known as the Lord’s Prayer. Reading a cheat code in a gaming magazine could bring a game back to life for a few more weeks. Finding one yourself was an incredible feeling.
Unfortunately, games don’t carry cheats anymore because the devs could sell the types of things that were previously unlocked with codes. Extra uniforms or characters, an easier or harder mode, special weapons etc., all previous cheat staples now sold on the market.
Three Distinct Libraries
For just over half a decade in the 90s and the very early 00s, three competitors with distinct tangible styles fought for supremacy. Sega, Sony and Nintendo each adopted vastly different approaches to console design for their fifth-gen offerings.
Both Sega and Nintendo had pre-established fanbases who expected certain things from games on their consoles. A huge cohort of Sega’s fans had come from the arcade, the rest had been sucked in by exciting, immediate, arcade-style home gaming. Nintendo fans expected depth, innovation and longevity.
It’s also notable that Sega skewed older in its marketing. The company pitched its 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis as the edgier, cooler system for teens.
Sony on the other hand was the new name in town. Free from fan expectation, they were free to go wild creating an identity for the PlayStation. Nintendo owned your childhood, Sega was your adolescence, Sony wanted to bring you into adulthood.
Their three machines were completely different as the three companies approached the nascent console 3D boom, rather appropriately, from three different perspectives.
PlayStation’s wobbly vertices and jiggly-yet-detailed textures. Saturn’s pixelated mess, quadragonal polygons and love of dithered transparencies. N64’s blur and low-detailed textures undermining its precise polygons and perspective-correct texture mapping.
The dawn of the sixth-gen saw a similar setup. Nintendo’s GameCube would produce vibrant and clean images with games mostly aimed at a younger audience or those who had grown up with their intellectual properties.
Sega continued to mine their arcade hits or produce games similar to arcade experiences, save for some notable exceptions, on their Dreamcast. PlayStation 2’s opening years produced a rounded and mature library.
However, as the sixth-gen wore on, the proportion of exclusive games began to shrink. When Xbox entered the market, it pulled in a few games from Dreamcast to add to its own library.
Later, it seemingly tried to port every single successful PS2 title. Or tried to muscle in on any sniff of an upcoming non-first party PS2 exclusive.
These days, PlayStation and Xbox libraries are mostly the same games with minimal difference as multiplatform games have come to dominate the market. The Big Three is artistically closer to a Big Two these days.
Read More: The Enduring Legacy of PlayStation 3
Sony’s stable of first- and second-party exclusives are the only thing between the blue and green corners becoming indistinguishable as Xbox struggle to release meaningful exclusive content.
Ownership
Probably the least dewy-eyed of the five is the issue of ownership and permanency. With the first generation of consoles designed with digital ownership in mind now long obsolete, the time is already upon us where games you purchased for your console may no longer be available.
A growing number of gamers had previously expressed fears of entire libraries being denied to consumers. The demise of Original Xbox support is only the beginning, as the market was only dipping its toe in the digital pool at the time. Wii’s digital libraries and selection of Virtual Console titles are also long gone.
The day is coming when support for the most basic of seventh-gen console services will cease.
Online support for PS3 and Xbox 360 marketplaces and content libraries are on their last legs.
These consoles were where digital began to carve out a significant market share so it will feel like we have crossed the rubicon when paid-for content on PS3 and Xbox 360becomes unavailable for download.
Read More: Five Superb Console Redesigns that Beat the Original
When you bought a game before the rise of digital, it would work for as long as the medium survived. With careful handling, physical media can last decades or even centuries depending on the tech. Entire industries have grown up around collecting, and playing, games made forty years ago (and counting).
But unfortunately with the average consumer being happy with the idea of games on demand, and little incentive for publishers to maintain their digital back catalogue for free, we may not have much say in the future of the games that we grew up with.
Do you miss any particular era in video gaming? Did the industry just do things better in the olden days? Have the loss of particular facets of gaming been offset by progress in other areas? Let us know in the comments below…
