Comments on: Reliving an old gaming experience

By: Sarah in Plano

Sarah in Plano — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:55:44 +0000

Nice post. I enjoyed reading your arugements of old games and new games. Technology is changing all the time. I have a friend here in Plano who has still have some old games & I have to say, I still enjoy them. There's nothing like the original

By: Fips

Fips — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:35:54 +0000

Maybe you're right Moritz, and I'm being overly pessimistic. But still, getting a few people together to play an old classic is one thing, playing a game which requires large numbers of players years after it has fallen out of favour is entirely another. Blizzard can keep up the support for old games because they benefit from milking the cash cow that is World of Warcraft. Not all are so fortunate. This post illustrates a good example of a company not so well positioned to maintain support for their games.

By: Moritz Vogel

Moritz Vogel — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:25:30 +0000

Well, old MMORPGs usually have a cult following, and even old games like Ultima Online are still played online – I'm not sure about the exact number, but a few thousand probably. The same holds true for every Blizzard title supporting the battle.net – if you log on right now, I'm sure you would find at least 10 games with dupers in Diablo 1. So I think the question is not "are enough people interested in the future?", but rather "how many thousand will be interested in the future?". Also, something that I had planned to look into but never got around to it (those stupid MMOs ) is multiplayer support for emulated games. If you have ever played Secret of Mana with three people, you know how much fun that was, and the possibility of doing that, over the internet, sounds fascinating to me.

By: Fips

Fips — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:59:21 +0000

Ah, the old joys of struggling to get a game to run under DOS, creating a boot disc to eke every last bit out of 640kb base memory. I suppose that challenge is still with us, in the joy of getting old titles to run under emulators, but it isn't quite the same as it used to be.

I admit that it is still possible to keep many titles alive, and thanks to the hard work put into many of the great emulators and tools out there, it can be a very simple task to achieve. But with many of today's favourites, and MMORPGs in particular, the problem is not so much one of getting software to run on new hardware and operating systems, but rather the question of how you can possibly hope to emulate a game that relies on (mass) human participation to make it what it is?

By: Moritz Vogel

Moritz Vogel — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:24:27 +0000

I'm not sure I can agree with all your points – certainly, old games die out, and they do that not just because technology advances – people want to play newer games, that look better, and have improved game design. Your analogy to the movie industry holds true – better special effects, more budget means more freedom in creating the exact vision the producer / director had in mind. You make the case that you can still watch old movies, but current gaming platforms advance so quickly that old games are a pain to run on most machines – while certainly true, doesn't the same count for the film industry? Like you said, you watched a, until-recently, lost movie – probably not even on VHS. The standards of recording, the different norms like NTSC and PAL, and of course technology with better ways to store and record movies (Blu-Ray, HD, DVD, just to name a few keywords everyone knows) has impacted the film industry as much as the rest of the digital world.

Me, I like a challenge when it comes to getting an old game to work on my computer. I am an avid fan of many an old series, and half of the fun is to get newer systems to work with old code. But that is just me, I suppose. However, I doubt that there will be a time when a program is so old, you could not run it anymore – everything is adaptable, it only takes time and perserverance.