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My 2-year-old nephew's possibly the most adorable kid on the planet. He says "peeze" and "thank you" at the dinner table, thinks that the middle portion of the alphabet song goes "M and N and P," and cries "I did it!" when he puts a basketball through his toy hoop.
Now, when I think back to the big happenings in the videogame industry when I was born in November 1978 -- the Atari 2600 had been around for a year, and Space Invaders, the first worldwide megahit arcade game, had just been released in the U.S. -- it staggers me to think how far games have come.
By the time my nephew's old enough to start playing games, motion control will be common across all major platforms, high-definition graphics will have been an established phenomenon for five years, and gameplay design will have 30 years of refinement behind it.
Compare that to the early '80s, when graphics were composed of a bunch of colored rectangles, controllers had one button, and sound effects and music were nothing to write home about -- when there were any!
But put a video game from the same period up against today's games and the differences are so huge that they're ludicrous. Let's take, for an example, video game golf. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, released in June, allows you to play simulated golf on over 25 real-life courses that have been accurately reproduced in 3D.
The game has accurate physics and wind, dynamic weather, the ability to play along with actual PGA Tour events as they happen -- and the Wii version allows you to stand in your living room, swing your controller like a golf club, and have your shot accurately reflect your swing.
For comparison, I give you Golf for the Atari 2600, originally released in 1980:
Yep -- that was a real videogame that people actually sold as a consumer-entertainment product. I remember playing it as a kid, and it didn't faze me in the slightest that the golfer only had one club, dislocated both shoulders every time he took a backswing, or could hit a golf ball on the ground by swinging the club backward over his head.
You wanna know why? Because I was amazed that I was playing video game golf in the first place -- that's why! And you know what else kills me? The very first comment on the above Tiger Woods 10 video reads -- and I quote -- "dont buy this game it is so shit."
Excuse me? Let me see if I've got this absolutely clear -- the Atari version of Golf has a dude with no arms and some sort of magnetic prehensile appendage sticking out of his chest floating around a series of green castles, and the 3D game where you can play golf as a reasonable likeness of yourself is "shit"?
You want to know the best part? When the 2600 was released in 1977, cartridges retailed for $30, which is over $100 in today's money.
Thrilling, isn't it? I've played this one, too -- I actually bought a copy off one of my older sisters' friends for 5 bucks or something, and even that was $10 more than I should've paid -- and it got pretty boring after about 5 seconds.
My mind's literally boggling right now. I know that I sound like your typical "I walked to school 20 miles every day, barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways" kind of old-timer -- but seriously, does nobody else see the irony in how we completely lost our perspective when gaming went into the third dimension?
Gamers have it absolutely fantastic these days. Developers have learned from 30 years of mistakes and technological limitations, and we're all better off for them. When was the last time you actually had to write down a password?
The lasting impression that I'd like to leave you with isn't one of denigrating gaming's history but of appreciating it and exposing today's gamers to it despite its faults.
Due to the fact that I'm roughly about the same age as the home videogame industry, the console technology that I experienced my games through was roughly equivalent to my own maturity.
When I was 4, I started gaming on the Atari 2600; at 8, we got an NES; I was 13, we got a SNES at Christmas; at 17, I bought a PlayStation; two months before I turned 21, I got a Dreamcast; at 23, I had a PS2; and at 27, I got an Xbox 360.
Now, I know that kids today are incredibly fast learners and take to technology like ducks to water -- but is that really a good thing?
A 4-year-old kid is going to have just as much fun playing Pac-Man as they would playing Lego Star Wars, so why not start them off with a one-button joystick, as opposed to a 12-button controller with two analog sticks and a D-pad?
Do we really need to overcomplicate things?
Plus, in addition to giving them valuable perspective on all of the improvements in games over the past 30 years, starting a kid off with the classics is going to teach them some very valuable life lessons -- the depth of loss when the power goes out 2 hours into their record game of Missile Command, the importance of diligence when their Metroid password doesn't work, and the pride in accomplishing a difficult task like beating Ninja Gaiden (if they even can -- I know that I never did).
Of course, restricting a poor kid to nothing but prehistoric systems until he graduates college isn't particularly practical.
So, if I was going to advocate something that could actually work in real life, I'd say start a kid with arcade classics when he's in kindergarten, get him an NES when he hits grade school, move up to an SNES in third grade, and go for a PS2 in middle school. And when he starts high school, then you can get him the latest and greatest gadget.
Not only would a regimen like this engender a true appreciation for the refinements that so many gamers now take for granted, it would introduce a new generation to gaming's history and prevent the growing pains that all of us children of the late 70s went through from falling to the wayside.
I don't know how many people might agree with me on this, but I'm going to do what I can for now. For example, I know exactly what I'm going to give to my nephew for his birthday next year.
If, of course, it's OK with his mom.
