What's an old game to you?

[Nutmeg]

Seriously games from 1983 still look futuristic af to me





Hell even 1981.



Woaaah

 

[laclongquan]

Any game older than Fallout 2 to me.

Even Fallout 1 looks and feels old.

Very late 30s.

 

[AW8]

Games released before 1990 are like a newly discovered buried city. I marvel at the ancient ruins and start picturing the lives they lived, and imagine the dead language they must have talked that is now lost to the sands of time.
Generally, I consider anything released before 2000 to be old. Many of those games require workarounds to start. Lots of games are 2D which looks older, and the 3D games look incredibly blocky and simple.
Games released between 2000-2010 usually start up with no problems, but may require a widescreen patch. NPC's start to look human here. These games are, uh, middle-aged.
Games released in the last decade are new. They just work and have widescreen support. Objects and characters are detailed and you can easily tell what things are supposed to be.

As a kid, I started playing video games around 2000 so I naturally don't consider something like Jedi Outcast (2002) to be old even though it was released 18 years ago, because I grew up playing that game. If you started playing games 5 years ago, then one look at the graphics would make you go "holy shit that looks ancient" compared to the games of today.

 

[Nutmeg]

As a kid, I started playing video games around 2000

I can't imagine what it's like to have skipped the 2D age.

I feel very sorry for anyone who did.

 

[Melcar]

Sorry AW8 , we have to put you down. *click*

 

[AW8]

I can't imagine what it's like to have skipped the 2D age.

I feel very sorry for anyone who did.

The first PC game I remember playing was Age of Empires, so I didn't skip it entirely. In my 20's I've also played Fallout, Fallout 2, PST etc. that came out slightly before my time. Not to mention, all the Gameboy games I played in my youth were 2D. Like I said, it's the 80's that are the real forgotten age for me.

 

[akkadian5]

The opinions so far are inadequate. The real man's point of view is
Ancient: The first hobbyists. Includes Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells. In arcade, it is mainly mechanical pinball.
Old: Age of wargame board games. OD&D is a border. Early game books may also be included. In arcade, it's the age of electro mechanical/logic circuit games, that is, various car games, Periscope, Pong, etc.
Everything after the computer is new.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

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.

And ironically, the late 90s was the time when the current era of hipster soy programmers were born. The decline could literally be charted according to ancestry lineage... if one was so inclined.

 

[Horvatii]

There are 6 ages in the gaym history

pre dos
dos
3d wars
ps2
can it run crysis

Tech has not improved since even though deferred rendering (the 6st age) reduced lightning calculactions from (num of objects, eg vertex count * num of lights) down to the extremely parallelizable pixel shader-esque (screen res * num of lights), it has not been meaningful.

 

[AArmanFV]

A game that's 8-10 years old onwards.

Now, if by old you mean "looks old" it depends. For me a lot of arcade and 16 bit console games look perfect to this day, there are early 3D games that aged well graphically to me, like the early Crash Bandicoots from PS1, on the other hand Tomb Raider didn't age well in graphics, BUT still holds up in gameplay. So I think there are a lot of things to take in account (Gameplay, graphics, user interface, etc.)

 

[Egosphere]

90s

I remember Half Life 2 launching like it was yesterday :/

 

[whydoibother]

To me, a game is "old" if it doesn't natively support features like wide screen, 1920x1080 resolution, etc. Or if it crashes on alt+tab, things like that.
Visual fidelity or art style are not relevant, just quality of life stuff and how much work I have to do to get it to run or recognize a controller.

 

[yooow0t]

I have a rather autistic mental model for categorizing these things. It's not enough to say something is old or new, one must consider the audience. Here on RPG Codex there is a preference for games made between 1997 and 2004 (roughly). These are considered the "Good Old Games" as opposed to the era of decline that followed. Later comes the present period of relative quality (as compared to the 2005-2010 era). Games made before 1997 are shrouded in mystery and are generally the domain of the oldest members or the most hardcore but there are clearly gradations of this. So we have the following categorisations:

• Earliest Times to 1980 -- Pliocene (PLATO and PDP games, first pnp RPGs, high score, no narratives, no RPGs on PCs)
• 1981 to 1985 -- Stone Age (diverse PC hardware, early narratives, text parsers, first franchises, no auto mapping, inaccessible) [Beginning with Ultima I]
  
• 1987 to 1996 -- Archaic Period (early 3D, IBM PC dominance, MS-DOS, much experimentation, stories unshackled from hardware restrains) [Beginning with Dungeon Master]
  
• 1997 to 2004 -- Classical Period (true 3D, realistic colours, Wintel dominance, development of complex narratives) [Beginning with Fallout]
  
• 2005 to 2009 -- Dark Ages (cross-platform garbage, "dumbing down" of RPG mechanics, simplistic narratives) [Beginning with the Xbox 360]
  
• 2010 to present -- Medieval Period (remakes/reboots of old classics, rediscovery of "hardcore" gaming markets) [Beginning with Fallout: New Vegas]

Therefore, I'd say that any game made before or during 2004 could be considered "old" and any game made after is definitely "new". However there were games made during the period of around [2002, 2004] that are more in line with the modern era (such as Deus Ex: Invisible War) because of the compromises they made to be cross-platform. I consider this transitional period to begin after the release of "Halo: Combat Evolved" because it basically cemented Xbox as a major contender and began the era of terrible cross-platform abominations, although this would not start in earnest until the release of the Xbox 360 in 2005. I would definitely consider anything made from 1975 up to and including 2001 to be "old".

This is my perspective as a Zoomer (b. 2000) though, people who lived through it would probably see it differently.

tl;dr -- Most things made before 2005 and all things made before 2002 are old

 

[DraQ]

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

How about a game you consider "recent" being much closer in time to a game you consider old than another game you consider recent?
Daggerfall is closer to Morrowind than Skyrim.
Skyrim is closer to Morrowind now than to newest releases.

 

[someone else]

Chatting with some FO76 players who don't play the old Fallouts cos they don't like 2d games and I got called old cos I played them and the original TES games (Arena. Daggerfall).

 

[Citizen]

There's a cuttoff somewhere in early/mid-nineties for me. I find games Wiz7, M&M3-5, Betrayal at Krondor pretty enjoyable but never could get into older stuff like Goldbox

 

[Xelocix]

Anything made 10 years years ago is aged.
Anything made 15-20 years ago is old.
Anything made 25-30 years ago is ancient.
Anything made earlier is prehistoric.

 

[JarlFrank]

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

How about a game you consider "recent" being much closer in time to a game you consider old than another game you consider recent?
Daggerfall is closer to Morrowind than Skyrim.
Skyrim is closer to Morrowind now than to newest releases.

Oblivion is pretty much the game that started the era of New Shit.

That was 14 years ago, soon to be 15.

And there still hasn't been anything to dethrone the late 90s/early 00s classics. Sure, there have been decent attempts to recapture what made the classics good, but... nothing that surpassed or even reached them.

I just realized that the timespan between Skyrim and today is the same as the timespan between Gold Box and BG2.

 

[AdamReith]

I think it's one of those if it was good it will always be good things.

It's always amazing to go back to something old to realize it has an amazing ui, excellent writing etc. and it's actually easier to play than newer stuff.

Sadly, Gold Box doesn't really fit into this category. It's one of the only older style of RPG types that I've yet to really click with.

 

[DraQ]

I see Atlantico still haven't quite grasped that the buttons are for rating posts, not for self-expression.

How's your toilet training going, Atlantico ?

 

[Atlantico]

I see Atlantico still haven't quite grasped that the buttons are for rating posts, not for self-expression.

I don't recall soliciting the autistic opinion.

 

[Ocelot]

Anything that's 10 years or older is objectively old. I grew up playing games in the early 2000s, so my perception of old is anything released before 2005 or so.

As a kid, I started playing video games around 2000

I can't imagine what it's like to have skipped the 2D age.

I feel very sorry for anyone who did.

First impressions are important. I skipped the 2D age and I still haven't got around playing some well-known 2D games released before 2000. I still haven't played Baldur's Gate 2, even though I have the remastered version on Steam. Same for FO1 and FO2. I feel like I've developed a bias against anything 2D, even though I've enjoyed some 2D games e.g: underrail. Maybe it's time to change that, IDK.

The Codex mentions Fallout 1&2 a lot. I feel like a newbe for not playing it.

 

[DraQ]

The Codex mentions Fallout 1&2 a lot. I feel like a newbe for not playing it.

Should be easy enough to fix.

 

[Luzur]

Look, if you cant sit down infront of DOS and just start typing in commands and directories from memory then you havent played old games.

there is your line in the sand regarding what is old or not.

 

[octavius]

Yeah, if you can't remember the fun of autoexec.bat, config.sys, and Load "" you're a newfag. It brings manly tears of joy to my eyes just thinking about it.