There are countless things that gamers of a certain age remember fondly and miss from their nascent gaming years. Those rose-tinted spectacles are often passed down to those too young to actually remember that era. And while those fond memories are often based in reality – some things were just better back then – the retro heaven narrative often leaves out some of gaming’s advances over the decades. In that spirit of bursting your nostalgia bubble, here are five things gamers take for granted these days…
The Past is a Foreign Country
As recently as the mid-2000s, video games consoles released were staggered. A console would get a release in Japan or the US with the rest of the world following suit whenever the manufacturer felt they had enough stock ready.
Read more: The Enduring Legacy of Nintendo 64
Sometimes the delay was ridiculous. SNES landed in North America in August 1991 ten months after its November 1990 Japanese debut. The console finally made it mainland Europe a full 19 months its introduction to its home market.
European gamers tasted the N64 for the first time in April 1997. Dreamcast was 18 months away in Japan.
PlayStation 3 hit stores shelves in Europe in March 2007. A whopping 16 months after Xbox 360 landed in the region.
While there are still plenty of video game releases that never see the light of day outside of their region of origin, worldwide releases tend to happen all at once or at least in a short window.
In the days of yore, this was not the case. Star Fox was released in February 1993 in Japan and in March in North America. Europe got Starwing in June 1993.
Even the move to easily mass-produced CD-ROMs didn’t immediately halt the staggered game release. Metal Gear Solid hit store shelves in its homeland in October 1998. It landed in North America in November that year and crawled into European shops in March 1999.
Read more: Pivotal Decisions in Gaming History – Sega Snubs Sony
These days major software releases occur near simultaneously, avoiding that FOMO is something that gamers these days take for granted.
Game Saves
The ability to save a game state is one of the most obvious advances in gamer QoL over the decades. Anyone over 40 years of age remembers having to beat the majority of their console games in one sitting.
And yet, the humble game save is something that gamers take for granted. The release of Returnal is a good example of how reliant the average gamer has become on comprehensive save states.
Housemarque’s masterpiece stood out from the crowd by swapping that unending feeling of progress that comes with picking up where you left off for an older style of challenge.
Even advances of the save era have quickly become standards that gamers take for granted nowadays.
Practically unlimited saves are relatively new in the console realm, only truly arriving with the original Xbox. Anyone over 35 remembers filling their PlayStation memory card within a week of buying it. Even PS2 memory cards eventually forced some difficult decisions.
Read more: A History of the Game Save – From the Beginning
With the rise of near-unlimited saves and the increase in data saving speeds, auto save systems too added convenience to our gaming lives. Something that revisiting games from just 15 years ago will absolutely show you.
A Fair Challenge
For decades, the influence of the arcade on console and computer gaming was so strong that many of its money-making schemes were imitated in the home. Games were difficult to pad out play time and worse, there were limited lives and continues to prolong the challenge.
Despite there being no more coins to wring from gamers after the game was paid for, this difficulty continued outside the arcade for far too long. A look at YouTube playthroughs of 8-bit and 16-bit classics will show you just how fleeting a £36.99 GBP Sega Mega Drive experience really was.
The expanded development budget and larger capacity formats eventually pushed the idea of unnatural difficulty and limited runs per game into the background.
Tthe aforementioned game save, and the near-extinction of lives and continues are considerations of a player’s valuable time that most modern gamers take for granted.
Gaming Prices and Building a Library
When Sony announced they would be increasing the prices of PS5 games by $10, it caused quite a stir. However, even at $70 USD or £60 GBP, console games nowadays are much cheaper than they were in the 1980s and 1990s.
A new release for the NES cost around $40 in the mid-to-late 1980s. If you bought a game for that price in 1987, that’s $104 in 2022. A new SNES game was $50 in 1992, 30 years later that’s $105.
In the UK, a new Mega Drive release cost £37 GBP in 1991 which would be equivalent of £76 in 2022. A new SNES game at the console’s UK release was £40, a fee which would pass the £80 mark today.
Adjusted for inflation, the price of consoles in the 1990s remains competitive. The $200 price of an SNES in 1991 would be around $390 today. But if you ponied up for an Atari VCS (2600) in 1977, that $200 price is a whopping $977 in 2022 when adjusted for inflation.
It’s often forgotten that the cartridge medium placed a relatively high floor on game prices. Publishers found it more economical to recycle what parts they could from a cartridge than sell it for a steep discount. As a result, older titles that could still sell remained relatively expensive.
These days, all games hit the discount shelves sooner rather than later. Even popular titles can be found, brand new, at less than half the cost of a fresh release within 18 months. Unless it’s on Nintendo Switch.
While pawn shops and second-hand media stores are common nowadays, they were far less widespread outside of large urban areas in the 1980s and early part of the 1990s.
A combination of all of these factors kept libraries small back in the day. A large library of games you don’t actually play is something gamers take for granted these days.
Entertainment Systems
When the first CD-ROM drives trickled into PCs and consoles in the late-1980s and early-1990s, it triggered a revolution in game design. A lesser-remembered fact was that the added entertainment functionality of playing an audio CD was a huge deal.
The role of DVD-video playback in PlayStation 2’s eventual success has also been somewhat lost to time. What were once system-selling features are now furniture as gamers simply take music and video playback for granted these days.
While physical media continues to become less important to gamers and consumers in general, digital streaming services have taken their place.
Read more: Why being the ‘Fastest-Selling Xbox’ is not the achievement you think it is
A modern gamer with just a PlayStation 4 or PS5 and a ‘dumb’ TV can avail of several non-gaming content delivery services. Swap that modern console for a SNES and you would have nothing to do bar play your tiny library.
Double-Edged Mention
Once upon a time, games were released to consumers with a number of glitches and bugs baked in. Some were hilarious, some helpful, the odd one was game-breaking. These days we can easily patch up games to fix bugs, add or update features.
However, this ability has been abused to a point where it’s difficult not to compare the relatively inconsequential bugs of yore to the unfinished messes of games we’ve had in the update era.
