Justin Baker

16-Bit Perfection -

I grew up in a Nintendo house playing an NES. Even after the SNES came out, I played my NES constantly. In fact I can only remember really playing Mega Man X on my SNES, and a little bit of Super Mario World. No, I was an 8-bit kid through and through. This was mostly because I had piles of NES cartridges, and SNES cartridges were slow to trickle into our collection. My mom could grab an NES game at the pawn shop for ten bucks and keep me enthralled for weeks, as opposed to a fifty dollar SNES game at a real store. But, as things progressed into the era of early 3D I began to see the advantages of 16-bit over my beloved 8-bit. I never really appreciated the graphics on my SNES until it was too late.

Anybody that played NES games as a kid probably had the same system that me and my brother employed for more indecipherable sprites that we saw. A lot of my friends referred to the bullets in Contra as tomatoes, and the bullets in Ikari Warriors as marshmallows. My favorite were the small purple creatures from Kung Fu Heroes, which me and my brother referred to as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Of course they look nothing like sandwiches, and really just resembled eggplants with mouths.

But with 16-bit games things became much clearer. Suddenly there was just enough clarity to recognize what every item and enemy was supposed to be, and it did kill a little bit of the magic for me. It was especially disheartening for me because I was the kid that made up his own names for every enemy in Zelda, and decided what kind of creatures they were because our copy didn’t come with a manual. As the guessing game disappeared, we grew fond of the graphical prowess of the 16-bit era. Games looked damn good, and it was nice to actually know what everything was for a change. The mystery had been replaced with solid pixel art and great animation. I remember being shocked when I picked up the SNES Spawn game and he wasn’t just a small block of pixels, but instead a full sized sprite of my favorite comic book character that swayed with animation.

Then the 3D revolution happened. The Nintendo 64 was on the horizon and the Playstation was gaining traction among gamers for its 3D graphics. Those few short years where 16-bit reigned supreme were drawing to a close, and like most other kids I was overjoyed at the prospect of seeing my favorite video games in glorious, detailed 3D. What I got was a mottled mess of blurry textures and hard to see models. Let’s be honest here, it wasn’t pretty. At the time it was the best we had, and we all oohed and aahed but early 3D games can be painful to go back replay. This was a trend that even continued through early PS2 games. It was expensive to make 3D games, and if a studio didn’t have the cash it showed. Even well-funded first party games suffered the transition to 3D. When was the last time you played the original version of Super Mario 64?

Fast forward to now. Games compete fiercely with each other over who can have the brownest, most dust covered levels. Graphical fidelity has reached a shocking high, but major studios want their games to look “real”, even though the real world looks drab and boring. Aside from some of the more majestic parts of the real world, it’s a pretty dust-filled, gray place. Now, this isn’t to put out studios that put out amazing games because there are quite a few, but the big Triple-A titles that get all the hype seem to follow this pattern. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that 16-bit style games are on the rise again even though we have the power to do so much more.

16-bit games have clarity and simplicity while still being able to look impressive. Today 16-bit graphics can be programmed by an incredibly small team, and it gives them a retro charm that gamers look at fondly. Again, I think this is because it was the perfect balance between looking like they were meant to and still being attractive.

Graphics from early video games were representative because the technology simply didn’t exist to make them look like what they were really meant to be. Looking back at any Atari game we can see this, and I’m sure the guessing games were rampant back then as well. 16-bit games, in my opinion, are the pinnacle of gaming graphics. While I have to say that I do play my fair share of 3D games, nothing grabs we and makes me feel at home quite like some well-crafted pixel art. Maybe I’m just getting old.

Title image credit: http://www.drawsgood.com/9923/235356/gallery/pixel-video-game-characters-high-score-society

I want to write about this game, but I don’t want to review it. I guess, in a sense, you could say that really any writing about a game is a review, but I don’t want to just spend time breaking down a game and telling everyone why it’s so amazing/terrible. The practice of reviewing games in general is nearly impossible, since everyone has a different experience with them. With that in mind, allow me to share some thoughts on a game that had a profound impact on me, and spurred a lifelong hobby.

I can remember being a fresh faced sixteen year old, sitting in an interview at my local Gamestop when the store manager asked me: “What is your favorite game of all time?”

Without hesitation I answered, “The Guardian Legend, on the NES.”

Afterwards, I continued to think about my answer. This was the first time I had really been directly, without context, asked that question, and it was immediately the game that came to mind. I was a Nintendo kid, shouldn’t a Zelda, or Mario, or even Pokemon game be my all time favorite? While those franchises to hold a special place in my heart, I realized that none of them were what I based my definition of the words “video game” off of. TGL, as I will refer to it henceforth, defined what video games could, and should, be to me. It is by no means a perfect game, and when I stand back and try to be objective, I can see that it has flaws and blemishes just like most other games.

But still it persisted, TGL is what gaming is to me. For the uninitiated, TGL is a hybrid adventure/shmup game that is very reminiscent of a Zelda and Gradius sandwich. On the surface, it was a competent foray into multiple-genre games, something still very new. Of course, this was back when genres were defined along rigid lines, before games became the grey mish-mash of every genre that they are now.

I’ve stated before that my family took very few vacations as I was growing up, and one of the most well remembered ones was when we went to Amarillo, Texas, to visit my uncle John during Thanksgiving. At the time he didn’t have any children, so me and my brother brought the NES to keep us company in the evenings. We knew we would see snow, which was an exciting prospect for us, but we had not expected the large amount that we actually received. Anyone that lives farther north that us would probably laugh at the paltry amount, but we acted like it was the North Pole. Of course with Texas snow comes the biting Texas wind, and we ended up spending a lot of time inside with the NES.

My brother has owned TGL as long as I can remember, but for that week it was his game of choice. I sat for hours and watched him, sneaking my own turns when he wasn’t around. The main part of the game follows the basic adventure game formula: wander around, get weapons, fight bosses. I was accustomed to this from sneaking into his room before he got home in the afternoons and playing Zelda. The shmup sections, however, were very new to me. The enemies were unlike anything I had ever seen, and the lush (at the time) backgrounds made it the first really immersive experience I can remember having in a game. The music was just as memorable as melodies from the pile of first party Nintendo games we had sitting back at home. Even the box art, ripped off from a scifi movie poster, gave me chills to look at.

For many years I would look back on that week and remember marvelling as the boss monsters, and how they genuinely creeped me out as a child. My handle, Blue Lander, is ripped directly from the game. Blue Lander is a round creature that acts as the merchant, selling you new weapons for chips. This was a game that had it all: and RPG style levelling system, rad monsters, Zelda-esque discovery, and badass space battles. I was hooked.

Miria, the Guardian and protagonist, was also important to me in that she was a female. Samus is arguably a more important female video game character from the NES, but I spent many years with Miria on Naju blasting space fish before I discovered Zebes.

To this day I still pop in TGL and have a blast running around in the game’s world. When I was seventeen I even setup an NES and old TV (the kind with the physical channel knob) at the end of the bed so I could play the game while I was laying in bed at night. My mother wasn’t too thrilled about that. At twenty three, I still find myself humming the corridor theme in the car on the way to school.

Nostalgia For Sale -

For anyone who is in their mid-twenties there seems to be a longing to return to the carefree days of one’s childhood. As far as I can tell this has been true for most generations, and will eventually morph into a hatred for anything new and a love for anything old (AKA being a crotchety old person). With that in mind, as I enter my twenty-fourth year as a human being I’m beginning to realize the strangle-hold that nostalgia can have on my media decisions.
 
I would rather watch a movie from my childhood that I’ve seen a hundred times than a new blockbuster that’s sweeping the country. Of course, at this point many readers will likely be thinking: “Well duh, Ghostbusters is a million times better than any movie that has come out in the last ten years!”

Is it really? Or is it just that you prefer it because it makes you feel like a kid again. Now, obviously, this is the intent behind a lot of marketing. Nintendo, for example, knows how to play to that sense of nostalgia. They dish out just enough fan service to satiate the frothing fans, but they hold on to the best stuff. Things like Earthbound, which fans clamor for, are held just out of reach until Nintendo decides that the demand is high enough. Other companies like Square-Enix  withhold a Final Fantasy VII remake, citing many developmental reasons, until they know they can make enough money off of it to be satisfied.

The joke has been made that Nintendo keeps repackaging our childhoods and selling them back to us; a rather apt description if you ask me. In this digital age companies are able to hold on to assets and products with more ease than before; the simple fact that many of our childhoods can be broken down into raw data is paramount in their business models.

Before this digital age began unfolding children played with physical toys, or became attached to locations from their childhood (parks, houses, lakes). These types of things are harder to monetize. How do you sell someone the lake they used to visit as a child, or the park their parents used to take them to? The simple answer is that you can’t, at least not in any meaningful or easy to monetize way.

Now, for clarity’s sake, I’m not saying that I don’t associate certain locations or physical items with my childhood, of course I do. The point I’m trying to make is that these are in the minority compared to video games and movies. When I sit down and play The Guardian Legend I’m immediately brought back to a Thanksgiving trip I had when I was a kid, playing it all week during a snow storm. I can tell you what game I was playing during important events throughout my life, but not what year it was. I remember the summer I spent playing Buck Rumble and 1080° Snowboarding as the same summer I made a new childhood friend, but I couldn’t tell you what year that was without some research on Wikipedia.

We’ve established the re-selling of our childhoods to us, and we’ve established why this is an effective new technique. But is it a problem? Honestly, I’m not sure myself. I love the fact that my childhood is literally at my fingertips, but I’m very frustrated at the fact that these companies are tight-lipped and stingy with releases. I’ve used emulators, you’ve used them, everyone has used them, but the fact remains that the use of them is illegal unless you own an ancient piece of plastic that the company printed. Jim Sterling pointed out on a recent episode of the Jimquisition [1] how Ubisoft is holding Beyond Good and Evil 2 for ransom until they make enough money on their current releases. Practices similar to this are not uncommon for major developers.

So what’s the point that I’m driving at? Video games are a part of our culture, our everyday lives, and our childhoods. Companies are able to hold them for ransom, and sue any individual that decides to fire up a Super Nintendo game on an emulator. It’s idealistic, but I feel that certain games should be freely available to the public. Nintendo has made truly enormous amounts of money off of Super Mario Bros. 3, a game which according to Wikipedia has grossed “$1.7 billion, inflation adjusted”[2].

Many other games have made incredible amounts of money, and continue to sell for unreasonable amounts. The original Pokémon Red can be found on Amazon used for $20 USD, a game which according to a paper published by Columbia Business School [3] had sold a total of 16.8 million copies in the US and Japan. Keep in mind, this was just four years after the game’s original 1996 release date and doesn’t account for the remakes on the Game Boy Advance.

Now obviously it would be ludicrous for me to want these games in the public domain. These companies have a right to the product they have created, and things like the source code of the game are understandably protected. But, that being said, is it too much to ask that I be able to play these games without having to track down a cartridge from the late 80s or early 90s? Again, the idealist in me wishes they be released on existing platforms as free downloads and the ability to be played on a current console. I could argue that free copies of Pokémon Red and Tetris on the 3DS would massively increase sales, but I’m sure there would be some businessman standing behind me telling me why I’m wrong.

One could again draw a comparison with movies, and I would agree with that to a certain extent. Movies are a huge part of popular culture, but they have the benefit of not being tied to a specific piece of hardware. Movies are constantly released on new and different mediums (I personally own the original Star Wars trilogy multiple times on multiple types of media), and I can watch a movie on any brand of television. I don’t need a Sony television to watch something that Sony Pictures produced, but if I want to play a first party Sony game I better have a console that bears their logo. I could outline differences that also exist with books, action figures, and many other things, but I think the point is clear.

A skeptical business man would wonder where we draw the line in this ideal world of free classic games. Which games get released and how old do they need to be? My answer is one of personal opinion, and I don’t think it is a very hard riddle to solve. I think any game that is over twenty years old should be playable and available for free. Again, this is my opinion, and one that will vary from person to person.

The problem here is that companies will not give away what they can monetize, but many of these properties are not being monetized. For someone like Nintendo to release a game on the Virtual Console that is the exact same ROM as the one they sold me twenty years ago is absurd. I have already purchased this product, and they have done nothing but repackage it and call it new.

Of course these opinions come from a place of nostalgia, and any business would tell me that my sentimentality over these old piles of bits should have no bearing on their business practices. After all, they’re here to make money, not pander to my reminiscing. That is, they could tell me that, but I would tell them that I have a right to these games. I’ve spent more time with Mario than I have any movie, and I’ve marveled at the landmarks on planet Zebes more than many. These games were my childhood, and I take a deeply religious offense to how they are kept from me. I own the cartridges now, but how long until the chips in them crumble, and how long until a piece of legislature finally takes down the emulation scene? How many times do I have to buy Super Mario Bros.?

Sources:

[1] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/5385-Ubisoft

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._3#Sales

[3] http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content/download/ac:109285/CONTENT/4113.pdf