Thanks,
My Flower Delivery

The funny thing about older games, I think, and the reason that maybe they give rise to a bit of sentimentality is that everyone has a pretty personal and unique history of videogames. Especially in the days of early PC games, a lot of what you got to play depended on schoolyard swapping between friends. Games that were major early touchstones for me and my friends (like, say, Aldo’s Adventure and King’s Quest) are virtually unknown to most other people my age today. The bootlegging scene dictated what you were exposed to back then.

You’ll never find that with movies from our youth. Everyone saw E.T., and it was an absolutely fantastic movie, as good as any child could hope to see. But I don’t know many people who are all that fussed about actively remembering E.T. as adults. Most people who watched movies in the early 80s don’t go on the internet to download a movie (that they can only watch via some obscure hard-to-install emulator) from their youth because there’s nothing especially interesting about reliving something that everyone else also experienced.

Likewise, I don’t think you’re going to have people reminiscing about Halo twenty years from now. Since games became mainstream and marketed in a big way, their relationship to individuals have changed. There are good and bad outcomes of this: games today are much better than they ever were and more culturally significant, but the scene isn’t punk like it used to be. The subcultures became subsumed into the mainstream, and as everybody knows, popularity is a clear sign it’s time to find something else to invest yourself in. Not as a faker street cred thing, but it’s harder to have affection for something that is less than terrific unless you got there early enough for even that mediocre offering to be incredibly exciting.

I guess what I’m saying is, I prefer their earlier stuff.

What amuses me is that you miss some gags – you no longer get the flashing “ADVERTISEMENT” at the bottom when you talk to the “Ask Me About LOOM!” guy, and to be honest, most modern gamers might have forgotten Loom anyway. But it felt like something missing. Otherwise: much to be commended.

I do like the newer music, though.