As should be obvious from , my latest pet project [currently languishing], I am fairly interested in exploring simple alternatives to the big-budget ultra-real 3D games out there at the moment, for reasons both aesthetic and pragmatic.

You can look around the net and find loads of people doing cool retro games, but I worry that an enormous amount of talent is being spent on recreating old games rather than coming up with new ones. If you brought a 1984 game designer/programmer forward in time and showed him Pacman running in Flash — on a web page, in a browser, on a 32-bit 1280 x 1024 desktop — I think that after he finished gawping and picked his jaw up off the floor, he would ask you why the hell you were playing a game like Pacman on a machine which is clearly capable of doing a thousand times more.

My feeling is that while recreating a game from 20 years ago is an interesting exercise, isn’t it perhaps more interesting to wonder what 1984 guy might come up with if presented with a P4 running at 3GHz on a 1280×1024 monitor? Even with all that pixel-pumping power I’ll bet you wouldn’t see much in the way of photorealism, since the graphics and animation we see in games today are the culmination of the evolution of a whole set of disciplines — both technical and creative — which simply weren’t around back then.

So, maybe that’s what Drivey’s really about: I’m trying to be smalltime 1984 guy with 2004 hardware, and I’m trying to pretend I’ve never heard of texture mapping. And maybe not hardware acceleration either… [showing hardware accelerated 3D to 1984 guy could make his eyeballs explode]

I want to make it clear that I am glad that people take the time to faithfully recreate classic games [some nice recreations of classics can be found here, including Flash source code if you’re keen], but there can be something of the collector’s fetish about it, such that a crappy looking 2D game where a ship slides back and forth blasting aliens out of the sky suddenly becomes worthwhile if it happens to look exactly like Space Invaders .

Slightly more interesting to me is the much more hardcore idea of creating a new game which will actually run on an old system. A challenge I definitely have not the mettle for. describes the activities of the Atari 2600 Homebrew community, and features an original 2600 game called Qb, written by Andrew, an old workmate of mine who I hope is still having fun with this stuff.

On a final note, something else has occurred to me as I write this overlong entry, and that is that the framing of a game experience is just as important as the game itself. Playing old games on modern computers almost always involves either running a conspicuous emulator or playing in a small window on a cutesy webpage. As a player this extra padding between the game and the rest of your computer is reminding you: "this is some cute old game, which you are playing for nostalgia or kitsch value" . If MAME would let me do drag a shortcut to the desktop and launch Elevator Action as easily as I might launch any other game, I would play it more frequently than just about anything else I’ve got installed.

So my advice to retro game programmers is: Make it easy to launch stand-alone, and make it run full screen, so at least we’ll be seeing it as originally intended.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2004 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Drivey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.