Yesterday I took greedy advantage of the Autumn Steam sale and snagged all those old, kick-ass games from my youth.
I think I’m going to love them, but I hope I don’t even more. Games back then were uncompromising and difficult. These were games that you suspect actively hated you. These were games that after you spent your hard earned money on them, you considered it a privilege if they decided to actually run once you installed them.
I miss the dark era of gaming. It used to be that for a game to be considered cool at all it had to be gothic, brutal, long as hell, difficult, and grotesquely violent.
I was really lucky to have been teenaged and nerdy throughout the greatness that was the 92-98 era of PC gaming. I mean, the era that began with Wolfenstein 3-D and ended with Half-Life.
Yes, I was there. I lived it.
This was the crucible that made me, really. So many hours I spent on DOOM, hacking the game and playing the custom WADs. So many hours I spent with my friends playing Heretic and arguing about Diablo, Redneck Rampage and Carmaggedon. We were the pasty, scary geeks that others hated and feared. We were cool. Cool as hell. The coolest people on Earth.
And we knew it.
Back then it was a chore to game. You had to be smart and dedicated to do it. There were so many barriers to getting games to even run, nevermind getting them to run well or to run online with friends.
This pushed out the weak and incompetent. The unworthy. To be a serious, hardcore PC gamer as a teenager was a badge of honor. It was something that awed your classmates and intimidated your friends’ parents.
The games themselves reflected this. Across the board, PC games were all, I mean 95%, dedicated to us, the special few that could manage them. Excepting the odd kid’s game, there were no games for women or girls. At all. And there were precious few for those of either sex older than 35.
Gaming was our thing. And make no mistake, we were powerful. So much so that Microsoft made Windows 95 with DOOM availability in mind.
God, I *loved* DOOM. It was chaos and carnage, but so perfectly executed. The levels were so clever and insidious. It rocked. It was almost addictive. No, it was addictive. DOOM was one of those games that pushed the “fight or flight” response expertly over and over again. You became hooked on the adrenalin rush like a junky. It was glorious.
And, truth be told, DOOM and it’s brethren were more respectable than games today, which seem to be insecure and frankly childish. Why do games today feel the need to award me “achievements” and “badges” for easy, meaningless things? Why do they always include a hand-holding tutorial? Why do games today, even the so-called “dark” ones, inundate me with flashy, candy colored special effects? Why are games today so simple? So short? So easy?
Fuck off, modern games. Give me something worthy or go home.
That the dark era came to an end when I left for college is fitting for me, I think. In a way it bookended my junior high / high school career. Wolfenstein was how I bonded with friends in Junior High, and Jeff Vogel’s extremely superlative Exile series was my own, personal Catcher in the Rye. Finding the rare Hellfire expansion to Diablo was my first great consumer accomplishment, and ownership of Quake was the passcode for entering my circle of friends in high school.
I remember with a heavy heart when I saw the era die in college. It was my Freshman year, and I was playing Half-Life for the first time. The opening scene… it was amazing. Perhaps the best intro in video games up to that point. It was then that I knew it was over. This was something different, and great in it’s own way. This was a game that had one hand in the dark age, but another pointing towards the future. With that scene, the dark era had passed. It’s a good thing that Diablo II and Lord of Destruction managed to sneak by before the door closed entirely.
And then came Bejeweled and Halo, and the accompanying influx of old women and average ten year olds. Yuck; that sucked, because gaming has become infantilized in their wake. Games today must appeal to everyone, even the immature, old, and impatient. Hence the need for constant “achievements”, extreme linearity, and cartoony splashes of color everywhere.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. This weekend, I’m going to pop open a ginger ale, spin South of Heaven, and boot up Blood.
Just for old times’ sake.