Do young people like/care for old games ?

[Evil Peter Griffin]

I had no problem finishing the game with an Energy Weapons build.
Running around and fucking everything up with my laser rapier was pretty fun. And it felt like I was becoming a scarier monster than the enemies in the game.

The only problem with energy is that its good against robots but robots don't show up that often. Hell the final energy weapon cant hurt living things.

 

[byuu]

The only problem with energy is that its good against robots but robots don't show up that often. Hell the final energy weapon cant hurt living things.

The laser rapier takes quick care of plenty of enemies.
Though I did switch to the crystal thing in the late stages of the game.

 

[skykiii]

When my nephew was three, I sat him down with an NES and a copy of Donkey Kong and just let him go at it.

He played it FOR HOURS.

We also had some intense Bubble Bobble sessions.

Makes me think there is some hope for him.

I tend to think the option that says accessibility is the issue... is correct. Its been a problem with gaming for a long time. Its why great old movies always find a new generation of fans, but great old games get forgotten unless they get re-released, and its something I hate about gaming in general. Like my niece has indicated that she would genuinely like to play Myst but its just so hard to get running on modern PCs.

 

[Fag Albert]

Off the top of my head, I think it mostly comes down to a difference in the 'landscape' of the net.
I'd say there was certainly more of a culture around older games back during the early-mid 2000's. A lot of the cool guys to watch on youtube were ones that grew up with the original nintendo and wanted to share their childhood hobby on the internet. You ended up having The Angry Nerd, Spoony, Armake21, and others of that sort.
Obviously there's always going to be people that want to have a peek back at the earlier days of a medium. But it's not quite the "in" thing to do right now because

 

[Shamino]

I know a 13 yo kid that plays emulated PS games such as FFVII and similar squenix games. It's a matter whether their favorite franchise have a long standing amount of releases in the industry.

 

[Bankingway]

Gonna be repeating the "it's all about accessibility" points, but with a twist: The biggest barrier to teens and younger kids caring about older games is that they aren't taught tech literacy.
Sure, we as adults can find guides on how to set up emulators or get decades-old games running with a single search, but a lot of kids are only given a console, phone or an iPad to "safely" mess around with and aren't being taught to seek out/learn objectively safer ways of having fun online (can't be preyed upon in a single player game with no voice chat or microtransactions).

This is on most millennial parents being less tech-savvy than they think, and the concept of an actual safe space for young Internet users being a laughable concept at this point. There's some solutions to this. Have more parents and relatives educate themselves on working computers in terms of games and have it passed on to their kids, or put out publicized guides on how to play better via emulation or tweaking older files.
For an instance of the last one that's worked really well, look at The Sims. If you don't know, The Sims 4 is a terribad money-milking game that breaks with every patch and is only made enjoyable with mods. It's been that way for so long that people got tired of it, and guides to get older games in the series running and playable on modern systems have gained traction with its playerbase. Thanks to that, a lot of younger players have been switching to The Sims 2 and 3, games that were released before or around the time they were born, because it's simply that much better than the modern slop being given to them.

 

[Tren Shapiro]

Its why great old movies always find a new generation of fans, but great old games get forgotten unless they get re-released, and its something I hate about gaming in general. Like my niece has indicated that she would genuinely like to play Myst but its just so hard to get running on modern PCs.

Myst has be re-released a million times.

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

I pretty much grew up with older computers so I ended up playing older games as a result. I look back at some of them nostalgically, but others not so much. I still occasionally discover an older game to play, the latest example being morrowind.

 

[Screamer_2]

Do younger people even get desktop computers any more? All the ones I know just have laptops for schoolwork. They'll have consoles though.

So it would push them to mobile and whatever the current game releases are.

I wonder if their relationship with gaming is just different. Whereas us old fucks grew up with desktops. Like desktops. Have steam libraries that we've been adding to for 15+ years. With access to older games.

The only younger people I would see that would want or get into desktops are those whose parents were into desktop gaming. Where they get given a parents old PC as hand me downs. Until they're old enough to buy their own.



As someone who has been gaming for a long time. I basically never go back to old games. I'll be nostalgic for a game I played in the 90s. Yet if I fire it up, it looks so shit and is annoying. That said, I was never into arcade type games where this would be less of an issue.

 

[The handsome tard]

I can list them all if you have a few years to spare.

Seriously though, a lot of the classic 90s PC games don't hold up. I didn't get my own PC until after Half-Life 2 was out, and over the years I've been going back and playing the classics. Games like Quake, Doom, Half-Life, they hold up to various degrees, but games like System Shock 2, Marathon 2, and Mech Warrior 2 don't. Some of them are decent, or even good, but they're often insanely overhyped.

Generally speaking any game that requires homework goes in the trash. eg. System Shock 2. Broadly speaking you have three builds. Melee, Shooting, and Psi. I went psi for my first run and struggled. Turns out psi is for experts who know all the enemy weaknesses, where to get specific things, and when in the game specific enemies appear. It was supposedly my fault for being a dumb person who went psi for their first run. Ok, maybe that was my fault. So how about shooting? Guns dissolve on contact with air and are not viable at all. Again, it's supposedly common knowledge that you're meant to change values in an ini file to make guns viable. That's two thirds of the games builds that completely fuck over a new player through no fault of their own.

Or you can play Bioshock. That works too.

This is kind of material for "Unpopular opinions about games" thread.

Not thats necessarily wrong by any means

 

[skykiii]

Myst has be re-released a million times.

Thing is when I say "Myst" I tend to mean the entire series, not just the first game.

I am gonna sit them down with Myst on Switch though, and they have a VR device which has a version of Myst and they better let me play it or they'll never see their favorite cereal again!

 

[skykiii]

I can list them all if you have a few years to spare.

Seriously though, a lot of the classic 90s PC games don't hold up. I didn't get my own PC until after Half-Life 2 was out, and over the years I've been going back and playing the classics. Games like Quake, Doom, Half-Life, they hold up to various degrees, but games like System Shock 2, Marathon 2, and Mech Warrior 2 don't. Some of them are decent, or even good, but they're often insanely overhyped.

Generally speaking any game that requires homework goes in the trash. eg. System Shock 2. Broadly speaking you have three builds. Melee, Shooting, and Psi. I went psi for my first run and struggled. Turns out psi is for experts who know all the enemy weaknesses, where to get specific things, and when in the game specific enemies appear. It was supposedly my fault for being a dumb person who went psi for their first run. Ok, maybe that was my fault. So how about shooting? Guns dissolve on contact with air and are not viable at all. Again, it's supposedly common knowledge that you're meant to change values in an ini file to make guns viable. That's two thirds of the games builds that completely fuck over a new player through no fault of their own.

Or you can play Bioshock. That works too.



The problem with a lot of the pre-NES consoles is the games are so primitive they barely hold your attention for more than 5 or 10 minutes. High scores are nice and all but they only work when there's a point of comparison.

I mentioned Goldeneye but a better example might be the Tony Hawks games that were everywhere when I was a teenager, but without that social element the high scores feel meaningless beyond what it needed to progress.

Mechwarrior 2 definitely still holds up, and this is speaking as someone who had no interest in the franchise until recently and thus has no nostalgia for it.

I agree with most of what you said though, particularly pre-NES consoles. Despite growing up with the Atari I rarely ever find myself wanting to play it again because the games are just so mindless. Weirdly enough the game I go back to the most is Big Bird's Egg Catch just because of its catchy jingle. My niece and nephew watched me play it and were like "why do we feel like a purple guy is gonna come and kill you any minute now?"

 

[tofudelivery]

Seeing all this talk about System Shock 2 (still on backlog), I played through System Shock (Enhanced Edition) recently since the remake comes out soon and it's really incredible for a game that came out even before I was born. The game is just fantastic.
Almost got filtered during my first hour and a half because I set it to classic controls No wonder it sold like shit.

I'll get to Mechwarrior 2 eventually because I have played the later games, though afaik it doesn't have something like SSEE to clean up the controls.

Talking about the thread title though, a large majority of zoomers won't even consider touching old games because "they look bad", even though they enjoy their Robloxes and Minecrafts.

I'm so tired of over monetized garbage that I would rather put up with all the annoyances of old games.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

I think it depends on the system, the platform, and the accessibility. I know that I’d be playing a lot more horror games made before 2000 if Windows post-XP hadn’t made it so damn difficult to run old games in another compatibility mode. Planned obsolescence at its worst.

Getting emulators to run can be daunting as well, and finding the actual ISO/ROM for the actual game can be just as difficult. So unless a game dev like NightDive Studios re-releases a classic game to run on newer hardware, a lot of these older games get left untouched.

Seeing all this talk about System Shock 2 (still on backlog), I played through System Shock (Enhanced Edition) recently since the remake comes out soon and it's really incredible for a game that came out even before I was born. The game is just fantastic.
Almost got filtered during my first hour and a half because I set it to classic controls No wonder it sold like shit.

I'll get to Mechwarrior 2 eventually because I have played the later games, though afaik it doesn't have something like SSEE to clean up the controls.

Talking about the thread title though, a large majority of zoomers won't even consider touching old games because "they look bad", even though they enjoy their Robloxes and Minecrafts.

I'm so tired of over monetized garbage that I would rather put up with all the annoyances of old games.

System Shock 1 is imo one of the best games ever made. Incredibly immersive experience that most games nowadays don’t even reach in scope.

It sold like shit for a lot of reasons, one of which it was far too large for a lot of computers back then to manage. When it was released it came out on multiple floppy disks that didn’t even have proper voice acting. The game ended up getting re-released on disk months later with voices added, in which they made the revolutionary decision to give SHODAN a female voice despite the dialog boxes in the game referring to SHODAN with male pronouns.

But yeah the og controls are absolute ass. As much as I adore the game there’s no way in hell I would be able to play it like that.

 

[Timmy Jolsen]

Spoiler: Nostalgia PL

Zoomer here, mostly played 70s, 80s, and some 90s arcade games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Pong, Battle City, Dig-Dug, Nettou the King of Fighters 96, and Felix the Cat (which is a platform, not an arcade game), on a pirated gameboy cartridge and gameboy advance that previously belonged to a friend when I was a kid. Not exactly the best of old games or what most people are probably thinking about here, but it's old.

My peer group in my generation is mixed. Some play older games, some don't.

 

[Back me up!]

Seeing all this talk about System Shock 2 (still on backlog), I played through System Shock (Enhanced Edition) recently since the remake comes out soon and it's really incredible for a game that came out even before I was born. The game is just fantastic.
Almost got filtered during my first hour and a half because I set it to classic controls No wonder it sold like shit.

I'll get to Mechwarrior 2 eventually because I have played the later games, though afaik it doesn't have something like SSEE to clean up the controls.

Talking about the thread title though, a large majority of zoomers won't even consider touching old games because "they look bad", even though they enjoy their Robloxes and Minecrafts.

I'm so tired of over monetized garbage that I would rather put up with all the annoyances of old games.

If you don't have that much time I would suggest going straight to MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries. While I love all mid 90''s MechWarrior games MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries is the clearly the superior product.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Do younger people even get desktop computers any more? All the ones I know just have laptops for schoolwork. They'll have consoles though.

I don't know. The few zoomers and gen alphas (or whatever they're called) I know have them, but they don't use them. Mainly because parents get suckered in to buying a £800 "gaming PC" that is an old i3 and a GT 730, but it's "gaming" because it's covered in RGB LEDs and has water cooling. It'll play Minecraft and the like, but anything more demanding and it won't run it, so they go back to consoles where games just work.

 

[Shroom King]

I have had this exact same feeling about TV. I never appreciated most TV shows older than I am until just recently.

A lot of old games did age very poorly, and as much as I love the NES, I really can't recommend more than a handful of games to someone who has never played one before. I will relish the chance to get to sperg out about StarTropics, but I absolutely would not recommend it to anyone, due to the clunky controls and obscene difficulty. As for a kid, if I had a 10 year old in my family that eagerly wanted to see the NES, I'd stick to Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man 2, and Duck Hunt. If they found those palatable, I might graduate them to Lode Runner, Contra, and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.

I have a friend whose youngest is asking about the older Nintendo games, and asked me for recommendations, and now his kid is complaining about how ball-crushingly hard the games are. I didn't even troll the kid with masochistic shit like Castlequest and Deadly Towers, he is getting filtered by Rygar

 

[Two Dollars]

I think it depends on what games/systems you like.

Nintendo gamers are basically obligated to play older games. I grew up with Nintendo, and thus, I have been playing NES and N64 games since the early 2010s, when I was in elementary school. I used to buy all sorts of N64 games from the Wii Shop such as Mario 64, Kirby 64, Smash, Majora’s Mask, and Mario Kart. I also bought tons of GC titles. I practically owned every Mario game for the system along with Air-Ride, Pikmin, Prime, Viewtiful Joe, and more. The Nintendo fandom is one of those fanbases where, if you wanted to be a part of it, you had to get some exposure to all their consoles. Not sure if they are still like this, but the late Wii and U era certainly was.

In comparison, XBOX has like no retro game scene and PlayStation has a split audience meaning it both does and doesn’t. Nowadays, if you are part of, say, The Ratchet fandom, you will probably be coaxed into playing PS2 and PS3 games at least. PlayStation has a growing retro scene given their graveyard of IPs, connecting the fanbase like never before to shill PS3 and prior. On the opposite side, PlayStation’s modern base thinks retro titles are shit and wouldn’t go back any further than PS4.

Finally, you have PC in which I will just say yes as Steam makes shit easily accessible and the people who use it are gamers, not normies like XBOX and PlayStation users.

It also has to do with how much attention is given to older games officially; not just in making those games accessible, but how they’re referenced in modern titles and events. And whether you want to call it respecting their past or milking nostalgia, Nintendo does this in spades. Just looking at three of their most popular series: Half of the tracks in every Mario Kart since DS are remakes of past tracks, Pokemon constantly brings back old Pokemon and only recently stopped remaking the entire national dex in each game, and Smash thrives on bringing back/remixing music, stages, characters, and obscure references from games dating back to the NES, along with trophies/spirits/stickers. Earthbound’s fanbase alone probably wouldn’t be half as big if Ness weren’t in Smash. Add on Nintendo frequently talking about announcements related to old games through Directs, and it’d be difficult to find a Nintendo fan who doesn’t at least somewhat care about their older games.
Compared to that, Microsoft has a strong back catalog in Game Pass and backwards compatibility though they don’t really draw attention to it, and Sony barely cares about anything made before the PS4. I could go on, but I’m rambling.

I agree with most of what you said though, particularly pre-NES consoles. Despite growing up with the Atari I rarely ever find myself wanting to play it again because the games are just so mindless. Weirdly enough the game I go back to the most is Big Bird's Egg Catch just because of its catchy jingle. My niece and nephew watched me play it and were like "why do we feel like a purple guy is gonna come and kill you any minute now?"

I think audio is an important but overlooked part of it. The NES era marked the transition from occasional bleeps and bloops to actual music and (more or less) unique sound effects in games. I’ve liked NES games my entire life but could never play Atari for more than ten minutes without getting bored.

 

[Lone MacReady II]

Never grew up with the SNES/N64 (my first console was the GC), but playing Chrono Trigger for the first time last year was the shit. So many little details to love, and good music can bring anyone around to a game.