Retro Thought of the Day
Jan 11, 1:40 pm

I have a burning question for you all…. How did video games ever become popular? And to add to that how (since clearly they did become popular) did they continue to thrive?

Now I know this may seem an odd question combo to be throwing out to the crowd, particularly by someone like me who does enjoy the odd boss fight or ridge race, but when I went to Game On at the London Science Museum it really did get me thinking. They had a great range of games there from ‘the days when a computer filled a room’ to ‘the not quite hit the UK yet’. I started out by playing pong, two directional pong, original Prince of Persia, and a game where I was a black cube… that’s right a black cube.

So in the cube game you had to work your way around a vaguely mapped screen, when I say map I use the term loosely, consisting of a grey background on which you could move and a yellow back ground that seemed to act as walls. I had to collect keys, which then removed the blocky key graphic that had been attached to my cube and replaced it with a different colour one, I have no idea what I was supposed to do with them…..

“Adventure”

So if this is how games started, (with a tedious need to know what you were doing to do it, very little reward, the requirement of an incredible imagination to get into them, and an elite few who could always remember the dos code to access them) how did computer games get their cult following? I can imagine the few who really strived for the ability to use the red key instead of the black one, but then how did these people evolve to like today’s games? Compared to this madness today’s games are so easy and rewarding to play that there is hardly any skill and perseverance needed at all, how do the original hard core cope?

Anyways such was my thought for the day. I vaguely came to the conclusion that the answer to my ponderings is held somewhere in the enigma that Tetris is still going strong…. So do you feel games still challenge you like they used to? Or are save points, maps in the menu option, and enemies that die just for light weight fools of new age fake gamers?