By Kelly Breckunitch kbreckunitch@kansan.com
Photos by Caleb Sommerville
ccommerville@kansan.com
The living room of my apartment is littered with older systems: A Super Nintendo, an N64 and a Playstation (as well as an Xbox 360 and Wii) rest beside the TV.This, I reason, is a testament to my sense of video game history. I grew up with a Super Nintendo, so I know how far games have come. The capabilities of the Xbox 360 and PS3 systems are amazing, but sometimes you have to appreciate where everything came from. That's why I still go back to play those older systems time and time again.
The set-up in my living room is nothing compared with that of Overland Park senior Joe Noh. Noh has almost every Nintendo system ever made. (He even has a Famicom, the Japanese Nintendo, for crying out loud.) Noh doesn't just keep these systems as collector's items, though. "I'm not like a museum collector. I don't want to put them on display. I want to play them; that's why I own them." Noh says.
Video games are quickly accumulating a celebrated history.The popularity took off with original arcade games in the 1970s. Pac-
Man was the original video game icon to be popular in his own right, which furthered the popularity of games. The Magnavox Odyssey brought video games into peoples' homes in 1972 and in 1977 the Atari 2600 system made home video games popular and laid the groundwork for the Nintendo and Sega Systems to come. Even those arcade games are still relevant.The film The King of Kong:A Fistful of Quarters is a testament to that. It outlined the battle between two men to get the high score in one of those old arcade games, Donkey Kong.
People still own those arcade systems, too, and Adam Bowman, Concord, California, graduate student, is one of them. He says he and his wife have a mutual love of older games, so he broke down and got her an arcade game with multiple games on it such as Ms. Pac-Man and Galoga.
Video games continue to steadily progress That old Donkey Kong video game gave birth to one of Nintendo's most famous video game characters, Mario. There are a lot of older games
to choose from, so variety is not a problem. Noh says there are games he may have missed on his initial time spent with a system and he goes back to play older games because of the limitless possibilities."If you look at the back libraries of games, you'll find that there's a treasure trove of games," Noh says.
Casey Baker. Andover senior; sticks to her bread and butter, though: the original Super Mario Bros. game. Baker says it gives her a sense of past experiences playing games. "It's fun to remember how I played it when I was little," Baker says.
Yes, nostalgia is a driving force of the popularity of older games. Gene Nutt, owner of Game Nut, 844 Massachusetts Street, attributes nostalgia as a factor in sales but also sees the popularity of older games continuing to grow. What makes people keep coming back to the older games, though? Well, for all the progress in current video games, there are some characteristics these games lack compared with the older games.
This era of new games immerses players
in realistic environments, but it can't make up for some characteristics that older games still have (and gamers still crave)."The plotlines, the stories, and the game itself aren't as quality as the older games," says Sean Pesnell, owner of Game Guy, 7 East Seventh Street. Games used to be simpler, but now it seems as if newer games push the "too much of a good thing tendency." They have to fit one storyline into three games. So, complexity in games may have hurt as much as it helped.
Noh notices that effect since games transitioned from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. "I think there was a loss of innocence between that transition," he says.
The simplicity is what was lost.The controllers on the older Nintendo systems, the Atari and the Sega Genesis, had just a few buttons to press, which made the learning curve a lot easier on players. Bowman compares that simplicity to that of brain teasers."It serves a similar function to Sudoku.It's puzzles,it's strategy,it's working your mind,but it's not a ton of buttons and it's not over-complex," he says.
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) - 1985
Super Nintendo - 1991
Sega Genesis - 1989
Nintendo 64 - 1996