What's an old game to you?

[Sigourn]

Just now I saw someone call Morrowind "super old", and that reminded me of other discussions I've had in the past where some people would call Fallout "ancient" and the like.

I personally make a distinction between PC and console games here. To me, a PC game is old if it was released before 1995. And a console game is old if it was released before the fourth generation of videogame consoles (SNES, etc.).

It would help if you posted your age as well. I was 10 when Morrowind released, but then again never got around to play it until five years ago, so it's possible I don't think of Morrowind as "super old" since it's still fresh to me.

 

[Silverfish]

I count anything released before I got into the hobby (1999) as old.

 

[JarlFrank]

For me the late 90s is the cutoff point. Anything running exclusively on DOS is "old", anything that runs natively on Win95 isn't.

"Ancient" is 80s.

Games from the 00s don't really feel old to me, and whenever people remind me that they are, in fact, old by now, I despair a little because it reminds me of how fast time flies and how old I'm becoming.

 

[Butter]

If I haven't played it, it's new to me.

 

[JarlFrank]

I realize I'm getting old when a game I consider "recent" turns out to be already 5 years old.

 

[Thunar]

I generally have issues playing most games released before 1990. Don't know if that answers your question.

 

[Falksi]

I personally make a distinction between PC and console games here. To me, a PC game is old if it was released before 1995. And a console game is old if it was released before the fourth generation of videogame consoles (SNES, etc.).

I totally agree with this, and I think that a lot of the releases in those eras seem fresher because they were mastered format's (e.g. platformers were better in 2-D, hence the more recent upturn in such games)

The 8-bit console era was sorely lacking buttons, and the DOS era was a pain in the fucking arse most the time to get working.

 

[octavius]

Plato games: ancient.
Wizardry 1 (1981) up until Doom (1993), and 8 bit games: old.
Diablo, Fallout and Baldur's Gate are like the first "modern" games, where the UI was no longer something you fought against (later, it would be the camera you would fight against in certain games).
What came after mainly increased resolution, budgets and voice acting.
"New" is games with that ugly art style that is so popular nowadays; like paintings with a limited palette and saturation.

I'm old enough to call the OP a punk.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Anything before 2000 is old.

 

[DalekFlay]

This is pointless semantics but my first instinct was to say anything release more than 10 years ago is "old."

 

[Nano]

Everything released before 2005/the Xbox 360 is old (before graphics started getting more realistic), everything before 1995/Windows 95 is ancient (before game design really started to become standardized).

 

[janior]

anything before 2015 is old

 

[JarlFrank]

In the end, it's not really about age in years as much as it is about era. The difference between a 1985 game and a 1990 game, and a 1990 game and a 200 game, is much greater than the difference between a 2005 game and a 2020 game.

You can still comfortably play a 1996 game like Quake on a modern computer (with patches/sourceports) and easily get into it due to its interface and control scheme not being too different from what you're used to, even if you never played it before. WASD, mouselook, jumping, etc. Meanwhile older first person games like System Shock or Ultima Underworld are harder to get into as a newbie because the interface and control scheme is so different (and more cumbersome).

Late 90s/early 00s is when interfaces became relatively standardized and usually comfortable to use. Both mouse and keyboard were used as input devices, and you could generally do most things you wanted to do with a couple of clicks.
It gets a little more cumbersome in the early 90s DOS era, but it's still overall manageable as mouse-driven interfaces became common at that time. Nobody will have any problems playing a game like Monkey Island, for example.
The 80s is where it gets too esoteric for most people. RPGs and adventure games rely heavily on text parsers in dialog or even for most actions you can perform in the world. Mouse-driven interfaces are rare, and if they exist they're weird because they're new and experimental and don't really work as well as they should. Keyboard-based interfaces make you remember lots of hotkeys to navigate various menus and submenus. 80s games have a very high learning curve to get into - not because the games are hard, but because the interfaces are so much more cumbersome compared to later games.

 

[MpuMngwana]

The cutoff point for me is around '97 (Fallout and Diablo don't feel old to me, Daggerfall does). I'm 24, but I actually didn't play much games as a kid, I mostly played emulated Pokemon and only started getting more into gaming around 2014 or so, and even then I was playing them on a shitty laptop (so I couldn't play newer games, and was thus trying to get into older titles - this is how I discovered Codex and started lurking here).

 

[Melcar]

Old game? Anything not released the current year. But "old" is too broad a term. There are many tiers of "old".

 

[Syme]

Anything that requires a community patch made by some crazy Russians that comes with instructions to install additional 3rd party software like DOSBox or dgVoodoo2 to even run.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Anything more than 3 years old.
Witcher 3 is an old classic by now.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Two points.

This image is relevant to what I'm about to say:

Although the image doesn't show it, each image corresponds to a decade, starting with the 1980s and ending with the 2010s. And Point 1 is that it doesn't just apply to graphics, but every aspect of gaming.

The 1980s had limited resources and tried it damn bestest to make them count. Every game that got released had a fair shake at succeeding based on its merits, even the oddball ones. Especially the oddball ones.

The 1990s had improved resources and people willing to put them to the test, but it also had the Men in Suits with the Big Bucks coming in and starting setting the tone and direction of gaming. The goal was Realism, because They decided that was where all the money was. To attain that Realism, gaming actually had to take a couple of steps backwards to accomodate the new technology coming in. It's around this time we really start to see old ideas being rehashed "in 3D!".

The 2000s was a blend of technological perfection and stagnation. Things both improved overall... and yet didn't. Games became easier to access, easier to play... but didn't bring anything new to the table. Originality was not rewarded, daring to be different was punished. The Playstation 2 was the last bastion of such mindsets. Those backsteps in the last decade never amounted to a forward charge or anything like it. Only at the end of the decade did this regression change with the rise of the Indie Games, which brought us to...

The 2010s, where gaming became a free-for-all smorgasbord of opportunities within a proverbial endless sandbox... and yet it was almost immediately filled to the brim with shit. Looking for worthless coins on a beach with a metal detector is a good analogy for how this decade of gaming turned out overall.

And Point 2 is that to me, "old" goes the other way, the newer games are the Old Shit, and the Old Games are the New Stuff. I've been finding games made between 1984-1995 that dared to be different and I'm having loads of fun with them, despite their faults. They feel fresh, as strange as that may seem. Simultaneously I'm seeing new games released every day and it's a Cold Day in Hell I find one that captivates me in any way. It's 40+ years of gaming being reheated and served to us on a TV Food-tray. It not only feels old, it feels disgusting.

Perspective goes a long way, and I have it in spades. I'm in my 34th year of gaming, and up until this strange year of 2020 I was certain that it was not going to deviate from its downward spiral. But right now? Uncertain. It may continue along the same path, or it may change. I do not know. The gyre may be shifting the other way. And for the first time in a LONG while, I am optimistic about the future.

tl;dr I'm with octavius Especially on calling the OP a lousy punk.

 

[Howdy]

 

[octavius]

And Point 2 is that to me, "old" goes the other way, the newer games are the Old Shit, and the Old Games are the New Stuff. I've been finding games made between 1984-1995 that dared to be different and I'm having loads of fun with them, despite their faults. They feel fresh, as strange as that may seem. Simultaneously I'm seeing new games released every day and it's a Cold Day in Hell I find one that captivates me in any way. It's 40+ years of gaming being reheated and served to us on a TV Food-tray. It not only feels old, it feels disgusting.

Funny, that's how I feel when watching old movies (30s to 60s) which I started doing a couple of years ago. Many gems there, but newer movies (90s and newer) are nearly always "haven't I already seen this exact same shit in several other movies?".

tl;dr I'm with octavius Especially on calling the OP a lousy punk.

Well, I didn't call him a lousy punk. I think he's a rather nice punk.

 

[Humanophage]

There was a huge leap around Fallout 1 time when there was a switch from seriously low resolution with huge bright pixels to essentially modern resolutions. For example, Dark Sun feels fundamentally different from Fallout even though it's only slightly older chronologically.

Games in the style of DOS would be very old, something reminiscent of Windows 3.1 would be transitional, Windows 95 and later would be essentially modern. So old would be something that doesn't incorporate Windows elements, such as the liberal use of the mouse or right-click functionality.

In terms of ages, I'd perhaps distinguish the following:
pre-1990: very old, especially pre-VGA
1991-1994: classically old; a fundamental genre-defining age, the early stage of modern gaming
[1995-1998, 1999-2004]: modern Windows 95+ style games - the golden age before the console invasion, big boost around 1998
2004-2011: the dark age of the console invasion, game quality and complexity take a dramatic nosedive outside maybe strategies
[2012-2016, 2016-]: PC fights back with kickstarter (1); later and more efficiently with steam (2), the sun kings reign again in their chariots of fire because AAA is now as irrelevant as in music

Early 30s, for reference.

 

[Momock]

If it's painfull to play (or worse: to launch) or has stupid mechanics that should have died centuries ago it's old, if not it's new. Some games are born old while others will never be.

 

[DalekFlay]

Assassin's Creed is a great example of diminishing returns. Compare the very first game to the very latest and of course the latest looks better, but is it some amazing difference that blows your socks off? Not for me, not really, and the first one came out 13 years ago. So maybe I'd agree "old" is something from before such minor differences.

Resident Evil or Final Fantasy's "3D characters on pre-rendered backgrounds with static cameras" would absolutely be "old."

 

[Crispy]

I'd consider this to be p. old:

I'd consider this to be ancient:

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Amiga games aren't old; they're prestigious!