Maybe I was too young to "get" Atari games, which I played on a hand-me-down Colecovision with the 2600 emulator/adapter ca. 1986, but I always thought Atari games were kinda lousy. The system was just too primitive (compared to Colecovision let alone C64 and NES) to enable good enough graphics and sound to set my imagination free and really make me want to play the games again and again. To this day, I have the most desire to play SNES and some NES games, but feel no desire to revisit Atari games. This isn't to knock those that do, I just feel like NES and especially SNES and Genesis games really hit a sweet spot in terms of interesting enough graphics and sound without being burdened by 3D or photorealism (which I generally don't want in games, not that I'm much of a gamer). Atari's graphics and sound were just too abstract.
You might have felt differently if you hadn't started out with a Colecovision, the games for which were miles ahead of the VCS. When the 2600 was about the only thing going, people didn't have much to compare against until the Intellivision came along. We just had Atari and we liked it.
Just listening to the sounds from this Myst remake brought back some core memories of playing our neighbor's state of the art Atari 2600, and it was a fun way to spend a cold winter afternoon. I can definitely believe that those that didn't grow up with it would find the graphics (and sound) lacking, but if it was your first home video game console, it was amazing.
The 2600 was also my first game console. I played it a lot, even after the Spectrum 128K arrived home. But, as much fun as I had with it, I have a similar issue with it now: I would happily play a SNES game now, but I have zero interest in playing an Atari 2600 game. I mean, I would play Qbert, but the graphics/sound would put me off enough to try the Commodore 64 version instead, and I have never touched a C64.
In fact, I have the same problem with the NES. For me the SNES is exactly the sweet spot.
This is a fair point and probably a big reason for how I feel. Another factor may be that I never played Atari games socially; I didn’t really have play dates at that age (~7-8), or if I did we pretty much strictly played outside. Also, I was an only child. I did however play NES and then SNES with cousins and school friends.
I feel about the same. I grew up with a 2600, and liked the games when I was 4-7. In more recent times, while I’ve gone through periods where I replayed C64, Sega Master System, Genesis and Amiga games, nothing for the 2600 held my interest for long. It’s simply too primitive.
I've got a 7year old, she loves playing games, no matter the game she will give it a go. She wants to play games marketed for kids, but nothing sticks for too long, because usually they are way too complicated for a 7year old who can't read/comprehend that much English (it's a second language).
So those older games... The ones that we grew up on, that were simple because of hardware limitations... Are kind of perfect.
You could say that our generation grew up in a kind of perfect window for games, they got more complex as we got older, not just because we got older, but also because hardware allowed for more complex games/stories to be made.
My daughter really really wants to play the new Zelda, but I refuse to buy it as we have breath of the wild. She knows if she finishes BOTW, she can have the new game... She played maybe 2 hours tops before tapping out and playing some kind of shovelware sandbox game on Xbox Gamepass. Which allows her to play however she wants, with no complex systems.. just simple gameplay and no timelimits.
I agree; that's insightful. There are many 8 and 16 bit inspired games for modern platforms but they are just not the same.
Emulation is also awesome if you have kids. I don't know anything about modern consoles, but several years back I had a roommate with a 7-8 year old son who was just amazed at my ability to conjure hundreds of video games from their laptop. Sadly he'd go to school and try to talk to other kids about Alex Kidd in Miracle World and they had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
To your last point about kids at school not knowing retro games.. this isn't about you, but about a kind of parent I've seen time and time again.
They are kids, and whilst it's awesome that they want to play the games we loved, at some stage every parent hopefully realises that the most important thing is that they have something to talk to other kids about.
Most parents want the best for their kids, and sometimes that means letting them find things they like themselves. We can for sure point to stuff and say "I loved this when I was your age", but if they don't love it.. it's tough, but it's the best for them.
> You could say that our generation grew up in a kind of perfect window for games, they got more complex as we got older, not just because we got older, but also because hardware allowed for more complex games/stories to be made.
This is very insightful. It makes me think I should maybe start by introducing my kiddo to 2600 games when they are old enough. Thanks!
I thought Beamrider, Jungle Hunt or H.E.R.O were pretty nice to play again. But there's not that much I would revisit otherwise. Funny enough Colecovision barely seemed better than Atari to me back in the days, but I started out with a Commodore 64 before a neighbor kid got that one. I was playing Commando and International Karate by that time.
I’ve been making games as a hobby, but I’m terrible at graphics. I finally found personal success when I went for retro, low res stuff. It’s a lot easier to fake it (but arguably much harder to really nail the aesthetic.)
I'm in the same boat, being in love with making games but really quite terrible at graphics (and with no real enjoyment for learning either, sadly). I tried pixel art several times, but ended up solving my dilemma with parser interactive fiction instead. I lucked out in that a) I'm an excellent writer and b) I'm obsessed with puzzle-y, simulationist games with a lot of exploration and atmosphere, so parser IF is perfect for me.
It’s possible to hire someone on fiverr to make retro pixel sprites for very low cost. I sometimes hire two people, give them the same instructions, then choose the sprites I like better.
If I wanted to write an IF game but needed a very detailed game state (inventory, levelling, stats, etc.) is there a direction you might point me in for an engine or an engine design?
I looked at the popular IF engines and they all felt very focused on story and branches and not really on if you need game systems and a lot of state.
look at MUDs. some of those are fully programmable. i am most familiar with LPmuds, which are written in LPC, which is a complete programming language. (Pike a general purpose programming language is derived from LPC. and there are also a few small MUD engines written in Pike)
though for a standalone game a full MUD may a bit much since they are designed for large words with hundreds or thousands of players. but take a look at the available game engines and see which ones come with decent documentation for you to get started easily.
Can you recommend any mud “engines” that can be used on a modern linux system which are easy enough to get into (both for users and devs) and battle tested for security?
i am afraid that this is rather difficult to answer. the first question is where you really want to go with this?
some of the issues to consider are:
do you want to potentially commercialize the game? that rules out some engines (most notably some LPmuds) because their license only allows noncommercial use.
then you have to consider the size of your future game. some MUDs are huge and their code has a long and checkered history. while they are more likely to be battle tested, i don't know if a huge engine would be a good start for a new game because it would prescribe a lot of game mechanics already, and may not be so easy to get started with.
personally i would rather opt for a small engine that doesn't have more than basic game mechanics so that you are free to develop your own. but those are most certainly not battle tested, and there are probably quite a few that were started but are now abandoned.
finding a small, active and tested engine may not even be possible.
i would recommend to actually play and build with a couple of MUDs that are based on potentially interesting engines to familiarize yourself with how it works and see if that is something that you'd be comfortable to work with, and then take it from there.
> I looked at the popular IF engines and they all felt very focused on story and branches and not really on if you need game systems and a lot of state.
If you need complex game states and world models and object simulations and relational stuff, then you definitely want to do parser based interactive fiction instead of hypertext interactive fiction, the latter of which is what it sounds like you looked at.
Hypertext interactive fiction isn't really so much a game as a choose your own adventure approach to traditional fiction, whereas parser-based interactive fiction is a lot like a text-based immersive sim like deus ex or system shock — the two major engines have very powerful and in-depth relational world models that can do a lot of impressive things such as simulating the expansion of a gas and its attenuation through rooms or fluid simulation or tying arbitrary things together with ropes. Both of them automatically come with very complete and powerful systems for doing all the stuff you listed by default.
The two parser IF systems I'm talking about are Inform 7 and TADS 3. I would personally recommend the latter if you already know how to program, though. Inform is interesting, especially in concept, but it has a huge amount of very serious drawbacks due to its extremely static nature (no dynamic allocation, no creating lists on the fly and appending to them, etc), lack of general programming constructs, and "natural language" syntax, whereas TADS 3 is actually a very excellent little language that's got all the modern amenities and is just a joy to write games in, and has a simply shockingly powerful standard library / world model, a far more deep and extensive one than Inform has even with extensions. It often feel a like everything I could possibly want to model in TADS 3 has either already been done, or is a trivial combination of things. Additionally, TADS 3's documentation is so much better than Inform's I can't even begin to describe it. TADS 3 feels like Ruby/Smalltalk had a baby with C and it specialized in IF.
Also, try the adv3Lite library instead of the default standard library — the name is a bit of a misnomer, as it's just as complete as the default one, it just has superior design sensibilities and a huge host of new features stolen from Inform. Adv3Lite adds basically everything thay was good about Inform 7 to TADS 3.
Don't let the fact that Inform 7 seems more active or gets more fanfare deter you from TADS. There's a very active little community of tads users that are very eager to help and will answer almost any question you have immediately, and the documentation is so astoundingly excellent I've basically never felt the need for a search engine because everything I want is in one of the three 600 page manuals on different aspects of the language and standard library or in the standard library reference manual. also although tads three the language hasn't been updated or changed since 2012 the compiler is updated and improved regularly.
My TADS 3 mode for Emacs (has most of the features of the VS Code one, despite not having an LSP, since the VSC one has very simple auto completion): https://github.com/alexispurslane/tads3-mode
You just reminded me of a comment I saw a dev make when someone posted the same criticism:
“Or your sense of imagination has atrophied.”
Maybe a bit pithy, maybe a bit sour, but what really resonated with me was the idea: graphics can rob us of that role in the production. I’m sure I’m about to say what’s obvious to many but: I just realized that I’ve lost a sensation that was dear to me as a kid: taking the handful of pixels and the box art and building the graphics in my mind.
Still going strong as a niche. Lots of good tools nowadays. Why not give it a go? And coincidentally this book just released. I got the PDF version and am loving it: https://if50.textories.com/#buy
Inform 7 has kinda "won" by popularity, for obscure historical reasons (you can read The Digital Antiquarian's "Teaching the Old Z-Machine New Tricks" series to see what exactly happened to make Inform so dominant), so on a first search that's the tool you're most likely to find, but I just want to plug TADS 3 for anyone interested in interactive fiction development.
Inform is interesting, especially in concept, but it has a huge amount of very serious drawbacks due to its extremely static nature (no dynamic allocation, no creating lists on the fly and appending to them, etc), lack of general programming constructs, and "natural language" syntax, whereas TADS 3 is actually a very excellent little language that's got all the modern amenities and is just a joy to write games in, and has a simply shockingly powerful standard library / world model. TADS 3 feels like Ruby/Smalltalk had a baby with C and it specialized in IF.
Also, try the adv3Lite library instead of the default standard library — the name is a bit of a misnomer, as it's just as complete as the default one, it just has superior design sensibilities and a huge host of new features stolen from Inform. Adv3Lite adds basically everything thay was good about Inform 7 to TADS 3.
I prefer Inform6, a dumb as hell OOP language but you can go to "low level" stuff in order to implement things. Also, it has Spanish support thru infsp6, which is my native language.
Like the other reply to your post said, there is a small but very dedicated, active and most of all supportive interactive fiction community still regularly making very well-made and interesting literary works, as well as producing new development tools, and we would love to have you! There's even a yearly competition for short interactive fiction that you can submit to if you don't want your work to go completely unnoticed.
I really can't stress enough how supportive and engaged and surprisingly active this community is — you wouldn't think it possible for a genre that has been officially dead for so many years, but somehow the community has kept going, producing works of really substantial worth and inventiveness that are genuinely sometimes even better than what was produced when the genre was officially alive. Many of them very long and complex, too. I highly recommend you check out IFDB, check the tags for parser (I find parser IF in the general tradition of Infocom much more interesting and impressive than hypertext, since there's am actual world model and stuff there) and "long-form." You'll see some impressive stuff. You should also check out https://intfiction.org, it's a very friendly community forum for discussing interactive fiction reviews, design, and development, and it's shockingly active — I've posted there a few times and always got several replies, and there's always people talking there.
Man those screenshots are rough - recognizable in some cases because I played the shit out of Myst when I was a kid, but unintelligible I’m guessing for those with no basis for comparison.
