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19 2 Why Old School Is“Cool” A Brief Analysis of ClassicVideo Game Nostalgia Sean Fenty I first played a video game in 1981; I was four at the time. I remember going to my neighbor’s house, where a boy a little older than me asked if I wanted to play PONG. I asked what PONG was, and he showed me a plastic box with wood paneling connected to the television. I am not sure which of the many PONG systems it was, but my best guess now is that it was a five-year-old Tele-Games Super PONG machine. The system did not have a slot for cartridges; it did not need one, because it only played one game—PONG. I was very excited about playing it, but when he booted it up, it seemed unimpressive—just a vertical line down the center of the screen, one shorter line on the far left, and another on the far right. My neighbor gave me one of two detachable controllers with a knob on it and explained that I could move the “paddle” on the right up and down by turning the knob on my controller to block the square “ball” that bounced across the screen. He then proceeded to defeat me in several games before I got bored with losing and left. Video games have come a long way since PONG. Thanks largely to the accuracy of Gordon Moore’s now famous prediction that computing capacity would double every eighteen months, video games have become an increasingly sophisticated, immensely popular entertainment medium. The advances in computer power—which in part have been driven by our desire to play more advanced video games—have pushed the medium from its simple, blocky, two-dimensional graphics and synthetic blips and beeps to richly rendered, photorealistic, interactive, three-­ dimensional environments. All media, of course, are affected by technological advances . The written word, for instance, was changed radically by the invention of the printing press. But new media, tied as they are to quickly developing technologies, change more rapidly. Film, for instance, in just over a hundred years, has developed from its silent, low frame-rate, black- 20 Playing in the Past and-white roots to the vivid colors of computer-rendered animations and surround sound explosions that make our insides vibrate. Television has also changed tremendously in form and content in the past fifty years. In the last couple of decades in particular, both film and television have been enormously changed by the computer revolution that continues to push the boundaries of what is visually possible in new media to fantastical heights. Video games, however, were born in the circuitry of this everything machine that is the computer. It was born and bred in an acceleration engine where rapid change is a constant. Not only do games and technology change rapidly in the personal computer and arcade sectors , but in the video game industry’s primary arena—home and portable gaming devices—the technology of production and consumption undergoes radical changes every half decade when new consoles and handhelds make old models obsolete. It is an industry fueled by the promise of a tomorrow of more—more visual detail, more immersion, and more interactive freedom. One would think that in such a medium (when tomorrow is always better than today, and certainly better than yesterday) that the past would be left behind—“played out,” so to speak—but many gamers’ lists of their top ten favorite games include classic games right at or near the top. In particular, many older gamers view games they played in their youth as some of the best games of all time—“classic” games played in noisy arcades in intervals measured in quarters and skill. In many cases, players have not played these games in years, having long since lost access to the original systems or arcade machines on which the games were played. Or players have played them emulated on their PCs or redistributed in “Classic” bundles on current consoles, but for some reason, after getting over the glee of familiarity, the players could not help but be slightly disappointed . Some say that these games are not the same, somehow, as the ones they played years ago. Something not quite distinguishable is inauthentic —the sounds, the colors, the feel of the controller, and the smells, even—if they, like me, spent hours playing Galaga (1981), Donkey Kong (1981), and Ms. Pac-Man (1982) in a laundromat...

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