What's an old game to you?

[AdamReith]

Tried to play Master of Orion and Master of Magic during lock down and they are completely on the edge for me.

It's not so much the looks but the clunkiness of the UI. Very frustrating because they are clearly both fantastic games.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Anything pre-2000 is definitely old; anything pre-2010 is fairly old by now. Anything post-2010 is still fairly recent in my mind tho, it's kind scary to think it's been 10 years since 2010 already.

 

[Lord of Riva]

this shit is one of the oldest games i remember playing, look at it (EDIT: worse, listen to it), feel the pain.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

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

this isn't an amiga game. it's a cinemaware game. fucking amazing people those guys, they did on floppies what others only dreamt of on cds.
lately i've been wishing for a remake of reunion and deuteros :/

to me, the relative age (and quality) of a game goes on par with its interface and controls: c64 games were downright retarded, often making little sense, sometimes making none whatsoever, thus they're ancient prehistory. amiga games had to have just better, being the joystick (with a single button) preferred over the mouse. somehow games on pc went the other way, chasing cryptic interfaces. modern times came around 1997-2002/3, because the first half was a golden age while the second demanded a streamlining of interfaces due to limitations of console joypads over mouse and keyboard. after that, games didn't need complex controls because they were dumb enough not to.

 

[Puukko]

I want to say 2000 is a pretty good cutoff point here, with the early 00s acting as a sort of buffer period before the 7th gen and the following popamolization. I am entirely comfortable playing mid 90s games, but the 80s are a tad intimidating to me still and I'm yet to explore the RPGs of that era.

I do have friends in their mid 20s who are put off by 6th gen games due to their graphics, even.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

If it isn't on ten floppies it's ZOOMER shit, brudda.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

We're further from Fallout now than we were from some of the games that fell into retro gaming in the mid-2000s.

Generally if a game is like ten years old I might call it old when talking about it. When Fallout came out I'm sure most wouldn't have thought twice about calling Pac-Man old, but there's just 17 years between those as opposed to the 23 from '97 and now.

I don't really say things are ancient, and I'm not really sure video games have been around long enough to be "ancient." I guess you could say Pong is. Although it almost seems weird to call it and some other '70s games ancient as they were still stapes of arcades into the '90s.

 

[karoliner]

Anything before 2006.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I want to say 2000 is a pretty good cutoff point here, with the early 00s acting as a sort of buffer period before the 7th gen and the following popamolization. I am entirely comfortable playing mid 90s games, but the 80s are a tad intimidating to me still and I'm yet to explore the RPGs of that era.

I do have friends in their mid 20s who are put off by 6th gen games due to their graphics, even.

Wouldn't they have been playing those as kids? Shit, if they're in their mid-20s they were probably playing the previous generation for a bit when they were little.

 

[Grauken]

Anything before 1990

 

[The Decline]

It's old if it came out before I was born. So pre 1983.

 

[FritzedProcess]

In PC, anything with less than 256 colours, and in other platforms, anything from the 80s or early 90s, such as 8-bit home computer and Master System games. I still refer to early textured polygon model games such as Quake as "new games". By textured I mean actual textures, not Gouraud shading (those have aged like milk... if you had played Chaos Control back in the day, try it now; X-Wing and TIE Fighter still look OK though).

 

[JarlFrank]

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.

A big reason for this is stagnation and codification. Look back at the 80s, 90s and even early 00s and you'll see countless new genres being formed. The first CRPGs and adventure games, then branching out into new subgenres (Diablo inventing the Diablo-like, Myst inventing the pre-rendered first person adventure, etc). Genres such as RTS were newly invented and soon received many entries, many of which were unique and interesting. Genres were combined in haphazard ways that resulted in clunky but genuinely interesting games. Heck, people didn't even think in genres back then the same way we do now. You could easily make an RPG-FPS-RTS-hybrid game with never-before-seen mechanics and just call it a "strategic role-playing adventure" or something like that, and nobody would even give a shit about which genre it belongs to. When Doom kicked off the FPS genre, for a long time FPS games were merely called "Doom clones" because people back then weren't as obsessed with putting games into genre shoeboxes as they are today. It's a game, it's either similar to an earlier game or not similar to anything at all, both is fine. The main question was: is it fun, yes/no?

Today all the genres are codified and mainstream devs have a checklist of things a particular genre requires. RPG? It should have a crafting system these days. Devs don't ask themselves what purpose it would serve in the game's greater context, they just add it because it's part of the genre expectations. And this is true in pretty much every genre: there are certain expectations for RPG, RTS, FPS etc and devs just blindly cargo cult copy all those expected features. This is why we don't get new things. There can't be any innovation when every developer thinks inside the box.

And most of the time, indie devs only pretend to think outside of the box, while actually being as constrained in their design approach as the mainstream devs. You see tons of indie games that promise new gameplay, but it's usually just "roguelike with a twist" or "metroidvania with a twist" or "one-note puzzle game relying on a single gameplay gimmick". They don't create entire new subgenres, they merely take a subgenre they like and put a clever (or not-so-clever) little twist into it, and that's it.

A major reason for this is that a lot of the developers currently in their 20s and 30s grew up with games and have certain expectations based on their experiences with them. Every game developer in his 20s or 30s knows what an RTS or an FPS is, and has certain associations with the genre. That contributes to the "in the box" thinking, because when they look at games they played in their childhood, they always mentally put them into boxes. When they make a game of their own, they think "I wanna make a game of genre X" or "I wanna make a game that's similar to game X".

Meanwhile devs of the 80s and 90s didn't have such a pool of old games to look back to. All they had were boardgames and P&P RPGs (which greatly inspired the first CRPGs, strategy games, etc). Most genres had to be newly invented by creative developers. You couldn't just sit down and think "I wanna make an RTS" because there was no such thing as an RTS yet. You had to think "I wanna make a game where you build a base and recruit military units to fight enemies, and I want it to be real-time and not turn-based like the existing wargames, and I want some resource management too" and then you come up with Dune II and Command&Conquer and suddenly you have created a new genre.

"I want to make a game where you do X" is seldom thought by developers anymore. Instead, it's "I wanna make a game in genre X".

 

[octavius]

That reminds a bit of the pop/rock industry.

The Golden Age (IMO, at least) was the late '60s and early '70s, when white musicians often had classical training, but also were inspired by black music, and the result was the best rock music ever made. It's a bit like how the early CRPG developers were inspired by various sources.

Nowadays in both industries people don't have the same background.
It's a bit like how Tolkien was inspired by ancient sources, while Terry Goodkind Brooks was inspired by Tolkien.
Someone could probably say something eloquent about primary and secondary sources.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

If it came out only on digital, it's new. If it came out on a shiny disc, it's old. If it came out on giant floppy disks, it's really old. If it came out on magnetic tape rolled onto a giant IBM machine, you should try and sell it because it's ancient and probably worth some cash.

 

[deama]

Anything pre-2002-2003 I would consider old. I think I was 7 or 8 when morrowind was released.

 

[Zzz]

Tried to play Master of Orion and Master of Magic during lock down and they are completely on the edge for me.

It's not so much the looks but the clunkiness of the UI. Very frustrating because they are clearly both fantastic games.

Remnants of the Precursors is a nice feature-clone of Master of Orion 1, but with modern improvements to the UI.

 

[Modron]

The oldest game I still play on occasion is probably Sword of the Samurai. Granted I did play through Bard's Tale 1 in that trilogy remaster recently.

 

[Nutmeg]

I play golden age arcade games and some still feel so "future" like tac/scan or major havoc.

So I guess 70a

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Anything before 1990

Something like that.

I started gaming gaming in '95 from arcades and counterfeits of already outdated hardware that were being sold in entire post-soviet area (Game & Watch / Atari 2600 / Famicom) and switched do PC after 2 years. Being PC gamer with 386 and Pentium/3dfx-based PC's up to 2006 has put me in some kin of mental limbo. Last games that my rig would run are from 2001 and that's only if you like interactive slideshows.

Discovering modern gaming in 2011 brought me back but really, I cannot stop thinking of periods other like that:

- pre-1990 - > old
- 1991 - 2001 -> 'current'
- post-2001 -> modern

I know it looks extremely stupid but this mindset lasts for almost 20 years.

I also have similar problem with music, bands that were formed / released first LP's / demos around the time I got interested in music are just anything but old. Entombed, Dismember, Darkthrone always felt like old band (and none of their LP were even 10 years when I went into music) but e.g. Shining, Mastodon, Deathspell Omega, Azarath... they are not old and never will.

 

[Atlantico]

Games which predate 256 color VGA must be ancient, while the 256 color VGA DOS games are definitely old. But old doesn't mean bad, it's not a pejorative IMO. A game ages in the same way as a movie or a book.

Some of them feel old really fast, and some games become classics. They may be old as dirt, but they don't *feel* old.

So there's old in the chronological sense, and that's easy enough to define - and then there's old in the "yesterday's news" sense. Games which feel old and dated way before their time.

It is certainly subjective, but the classics are not old and always feel relevant and approachable. No matter how old they are.

 

[Nutmeg]

1991 - 2001 -> 'current'
- post-2001 -> modern

I don't think you understand what the word current means.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Anything that doesn't run natively on win10 without some kind of fan patch is old to me.

 

[Daemongar]

I don't know. As they said in the day "Gold is where you find it." I still play Gateway to Apshai and that came out in 1983. I'll say that Basic/Expert D&D - that feels old. Everything after that isn't so bad.

 

[Metronome]

I was going to make a joke about playing the original Halo, but then I realized it was released almost 20 years ago.