The Retro Appeal
Mention the words “retro game” to a modern day IF player and you'll probably see them groan. When they think “retro game” they think “mazes” and “guess the verb” and “mimesis breaking” and “too hard” and “too big” and (let’s face it) “rubbish”.
It’s no secret that retro games aren't very highly regarded by most of the modern day crowd. Why?
Mazes
It’s a common misconception about the retro years that the games were infested with mazes. You started in a maze, solved it, found yourself in another maze, solved that and - lo and behold! - another maze!
Yet were that many of the retro games maze-infested to that degree? I don’t remember that being the case. Admittedly my favourite game of the period - The Hobbit - did have a maze in it (and a particularly irritating one it was as well due to the goblins which appeared at random and threw you back into your cell every few moves) but I don’t recall the retro period of IF games to have that many mazes. Out of every 100 retro games available at the IFArchive, I imagine less than 10% had a maze and most weren't overly difficult to complete once you got into the habit of drawing a map (a necessity back in the days when games often stretched to a couple hundred locations).
Of course, the old saying “once you've seen one, you've seen ‘em all” certainly applies to mazes. Clever game designers might go out of their way to introduce new and inspired maze ideas but at the end of the day what you had was still a maze. There are only so many different ways you can design a game and though some might use some inspired ideas to make them appear different to the rest, they were all the same basic maze.
As an aside, one irony about mazes that never fails to amuse me is the way quite a lot of the modern crowd hold up a game like Zork as one of the few games of the retro years they are prepared to accept was brilliant. Yet didn’t Zork have a maze? I wonder what the reaction from the modern crowd would be if a new game every bit good as Zork came out today. Probably “it’s got a maze so it must be awful!”
Guess The Verb
Another cited reason for just why the retro gaming period was considered such a washout. But then the same criteria could be applied to the current gaming period as well and I certainly finished more games back in the 80’s than I do now. Generally when I finished a retro game it was through sheer persistence and more than a little luck (this being back in the days of yore before the internet came along and people posted walkthroughs on websites or forums; if you got stuck, you could always write to a computer magazine but the delay between writing to one of them and actually getting your letter published and being told what to do (if that ever happened at all) was such that you were often better off trying to finish the game on your own than asking for help.) When I finish a game now, it’s usually because I've either found the walkthrough happily posted on the internet, asked for help or (in the case of many ADRIFT games) cheated and looked in the Generator to find out what I needed to do.
So was the dreaded guess the verb more prevalent in the retro years than it is now? I don’t think so. Show me a retro game with guess the verb and I’ll show you two modern games that suffer from the same problem.
Mimesis Breaking
Who gives a hoot? Seriously.
Mimesis breaking seems to be a phrase thrown around so often these days that you'd think some people only play IF because it gives them something to complain about. The idea that you can ever forget you're playing a game and be completely immersed in the game world is pretty ridiculous and yet the least indication in the game that it’s a game you're playing and not something that’s really happening has people up in arms. They go from one extreme to another in pointing out why such-and-such a game breaks mimesis and seem to go into almost paroxysms of rage at the very idea of it. One amusing post I read on RAIF once criticised a game in which the player checked his e-mail the moment he woke up - “but isn't that breaking mimesis to suggest that someone checks their e-mail the moment they wake up?” cried the anguished poster. Earth to poster: you really need to get out more. It’s a game for crying out loud!
Every day I expect to read a post on RAIF from someone saying that they had to type commands into a game and that broke mimesis to such a degree they couldn’t bear to continue playing.
Here’s a shock revelation: mimesis isn't that important. It’s not completely irrelevant and sometimes a game which continually breaks mimesis can be annoying, if not downright frustrating, but it’s not that big a deal. Try playing a game with the knowledge foremost in your mind that it is a game and see if you can make it through to the end without worrying over mimesis.
Too Hard
Another criticism that could be leveled at modern day IF.
Were the games of yesteryear too hard? It probably depends on your definition of “too hard” but yes, a lot of them were difficult to say the least. But then this was the age of commercial text adventures and when you spent a week or a month’s pocket money on a game you didn’t want to finish it in an hour so games were hard by necessity. After all, if you bought a game today for £10 wouldn’t you be a bit miffed to finish it an hour later? Bit of a waste of money if you ask me.
But were the games unfairly hard? I wouldn’t have said so. Most were solvable if you spent enough time and effort on them and the satisfaction at finally finishing a game after months of struggling with it, particularly a game you had spent your hard earned cash on, was immensely satisfying.
Too Big
The preference these days seems to be for small games, games you can finish in an hour or two. “Big” games are considered those that might take you five hours to complete; “huge” games could take ten hours. The modern crowd experience severe depression at the idea of games bigger than “huge”.
Most retro games took tens of hours to complete.
The lack of patience from quite a few modern day IF players has always struck me as a strange thing. Do they genuinely have so little free time that if they can’t finish a game in an hour then they’ll perhaps die of old age before they get round to finishing it?* What about saving the game position and trying again at another time? Or is the game so forgettable that once you stop playing for a day or so it’s impossible to remember what happened the previous time so there's no point in playing it again if you didn’t finish it the first time? Make a transcript.
* Yet they manage lengthy posts on a daily basis on the RAIF/RGIF message boards so it clearly can’t be a question of not enough time. Maybe they have the time but just don’t use it wisely…
Me, I like big games. I like games I can play on and off for weeks, months or even years. I feel that if I play a game and I've finished it an hour later that the sheer amount of time and effort that must have gone into writing the game was a wasted opportunity. How long did the author spend writing the game? Four months? Six? A year? And then someone comes along and finishes it in an hour. What a waste.
Not to mention the fact that a game which takes you a year to solve is likely to hold fonder memories for you than one that takes an hour. I have fond memories of a couple dozen retro games yet very few modern ones and it’s doubtful, though some of the modern games are excellent in their own right, that I’ll have fond memories of them in twenty years time. I’ll still remember some of the retro games though.
Rubbish
As to whether retro games are rubbish is pretty much down to the individual but the best of them were easily as good as the best of today’s games. Of course, how good anything is down to what you, personally, think is good. Most modern gamers think that Photopia is the best thing since sliced bread. I didn’t like it. I preferred The Big Sleaze but the modern crowd would probably get two minutes into it before they died of a sudden case of broken mimesis. It’s a matter of taste. Casually saying that all retro games are rubbish is a pretty silly statement to make.
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So why is it that retro games are held in such poor regard by modern IF players? Most of the problems attributed to them - mazes, guess the verb, mimesis breaking, too hard, too big, rubbish - can either be attributed to modern day games as well or just aren't that big a deal. Part of me suspects the problem might be that there are so many free games readily available on the internet that people these days just aren't willing to give a game a fair chance. They’ll try a retro game out of interest or novelty value, run into a problem with it after five minutes, and immediately quit. The fact that the game is free just means that they haven't wasted any of their money on it and there are so many other free games out there that they have the choice to pick something different.
But for those of us with the patience to make a proper effort to play a retro game, they can be surprisingly good. Better, even, than the more modern games. Try one sometime. You might even like it.