How do young(er) people feel about 8 and 16 bit games?

[Anayo]

I grew up playing games on my Dad's 386 IBM PC, NES, Sega Genesis, and arcades. So games from that time period really appeal to me today. It's probably why some of my personal GOTY's are retro indie games like Shovel Knight or Undertale.

I've noticed some of my coworkers and friends born about 5 years later than me don't seem to share that enthusiasm. Most of them associate childhood with N64 or Playstation 2, and they're fond of those, but I perceive lukewarm interest when it comes to SNES or Neo Geo and so forth.

This leads me to ponder two possibilities. 1) I'm just fond of a 8 and 16 bit games because they remind me of growing up. Therefore someone with a different upbringing couldn't relate to that. For instance, I remember my grandpa telling me about how he grew up with the 50's radio horror show "Suspense". It sounded interesting when he explained it to me, but as a kid in the 90's wasn't really sure I could relate to it.

Or, 2) there is some enduring quality to 8 and 16 bit games. I could wax rhapsodic about the artistry of programmers and musicians working within the memory and CPU limitations of the time, but I'm talking more about how certain genres were discarded in favor of others as graphics grew more advanced. For instance, compare the 2D Castlevania and Contra games to their 3D adaptations. The 2D ones are better, but that didn't prevent that genre from falling out of vogue.

Do you think 8 and 16 bit games decline in popularity as time marches on and there are eventually fewer and fewer people around to remember growing up with them, or do you think younger people who never grew up with them will rediscover them and see them as worthwhile?

[Erik_Twice]

I think most people simply have some kind of prejudice towards old media. Most people don't want to watch old movies, not because they are bad or look poorly, but simply becaue they are old and watching them would require some rethinking of priorities.

That said, this effect is at its smallest in gaming. Interest in old games remains very strong and many young poeple are introduced to those titles. They are just good games, the aesthethic is kind of in vogue and I think opinion is favourable.

[Exhuminator]

Do you think 8 and 16 bit games decline in popularity as time marches on and there are eventually fewer and fewer people around to remember growing up with them, or do you think younger people who never grew up with them will rediscover them and see them as worthwhile?

I'm not sure what age "young" qualifies as. I can only speak as a not-particularly-young 38 year old to your questions.

>Do you think 8 and 16 bit games decline in popularity as time marches on

Yes. As evidenced by the growing lack of interest in actual retro-gaming on this very retro-gaming site.

Modern gaming: It's true that we have occasional indie releases that hearken back to yesteryear's design aesthetics. Shovel Knight is the current gold standard for this concept. However, although those games can be popular, they are almost exclusively popular with either legit old gamers, or to a much lesser extent open minded younger gamers. In the grand scheme of gaming, even the rare popular retro-aesthetic releases are still just a drop in the ocean, compared to what 99% of modern gamers are playing, be they young or old.

Classic gaming: The only young gamers who are playing 8 or 16-bit games, are gaming hipsters. Now there's nothing wrong with being a gaming hipster, but a gaming hipster is hardly indicative of their peer group's gaming tastes in any meaningful context. I believe you will always have a very small subset of young gaming hipsters, who will go back and pay retro games out of curiosity, or just to be "cool". You see this behavior with movies, books, and music as well. As for older gamers who grew up playing 8 and 16-bit games, yes some of the continued impetus to play these 8/16-bit games is born of nostalgia. However, I do believe sincerely that there are quality styles of game design which are only found in 8 and 16-bit games. Those proprietary designs keep me interested in playing them. Sometimes that "quality" is one of mechanical interaction, and sometimes its more an aesthetic/atmosphere thing.

do you think younger people who never grew up with them will rediscover them and see them as worthwhile?

Erik_Twice said it right when he said: "I think most people simply have some kind of prejudice towards old media." This is universally true, sadly. The only young gamers I know who have played, or do play 8 and 16-bit games today, only do so because their parents introduced them to the games. As time goes on, that will happen less and less. I don't think 99% of coming generations of gamers will have any interest in 8 and 16-bit games. But there will always be that 1% of gaming hipsters who will. And god bless their little elitist hearts.

Let me add a personal anecdote:

I have a 19 year old daughter. When she was a kid, I introduced her to 8 and 16-bit gaming. She had a SNES and tons of games for it, for example. Today? She still loves to game, but has zero interest in 8 and 16-bit gaming. She only cares about mobile and PC gaming, period.

[Anayo]

Exhuminator,

Your 19 year old daughter is fairly close to the "young" age range I'm referring to. I'm 27 myself. The coworkers who don't "get" 8 and 16 bit games are around ages 20 to 24.

I like your word choice of "mechanical interaction" in reference to game design from that time period. I was trying to describe it that way, but those exact words wouldn't come to me.

[Gunstar Green]

Like any medium I think the classics will remain classics though the people interested in the classics will be a niche compared to general audiences and the people interested in older games beyond the classics will become an increasingly smaller minority. There will always be someone interested in the early days of video games just like there are people interested in the early days of Hollywood and Gold and Silver Age comic books but the majority will always want what's new. There's only so many hours in a day and there's so much entertainment media that you can't really fault that.

A lot of the "classics" that survive into the future will probably also not so coincidentally be earlier versions of franchises that are still kicking around leaving curious new fans to explore their earlier incarnations. Again, we already frequently see this in things like movies and comics as well.

We have nostalgia for what was essentially a limitation, like how older generations still felt a fondness for black and white film even though color is objectively superior. The style of intentional black and white images will continue to exist because it evokes a specific feel and a callback to another age and as such I think the style of pixel graphics will also continue to persist even if we will likely eventually see it being used less and less.

[chuckster]

I think the 8 and 16-bit era games have a lot going for them today, especially after the retro-themed indie game surge. Many top franchises started during this time, and it was a time that the gaming industry started to really mature in more ways than one. This means games that people love today (Mario, Zelda, Sonic Mania, Metroid, etc) can be traced back directly to that generation, and that makes the connection and interest those systems strong. However, I don't think that 8 and 16-bit games (by and large) are as impervious to time as they may seem to you and I. After the bulk of the bit-boomers (you heard it here first, folks) get out of the scene, the market will be much much smaller and overall interest will wane until it's just a fraction of the already niche market we see today, with only a select few classics living on in most people's playlists. Of course the recent boom of retro gaming has exposed a lot of younger gamers to these games, so I feel it will be a while before we start to see this happening.

Just look at Atari 2600. I know many die-hard fans of the NES and 16-bit consoles that disregard it as being primitive and ugly. Even now, all but the most rare and interesting Atari games are very cheap to buy originals, contrasted with NES. As alien as it is for me to think of it that way, I'm sure many younger gamers look at NES and SNES in a similar light, or as Erik_Twice said, just consider it old and crusty.

And now for a tangent that sort of-kind of reinforces my feelings here.

I'm 25 and I recently had a conversation with one of my coworkers (23) that drove a point home for me. We were talking about Star Wars, because he had recently watched the original trilogy. In the middle of the conversation he said " Yeah man I love all the movies, it's just hard to go back and watch the old ones after Rogue One because they look so bad."

I was floored. I never once in my life considered someone would think that the OT movies looked bad in any way. After asking another girl I work with (19), she basically agreed, having never watched a black and white movie because she "just couldn't do it."

It really opened my eyes to how some people just have very different perspectives on media. I'm sure it's not just young people (I'm young too, darn it!), but I imagine a greater percentage of them will feel similarly to my two co-workers up there than older demographics. With movies and especially games looking so different today, it can really be hard for those without the nostalgia or at least exposure to these older forms of media to really get into them.

[Sarge]

Well, I do think that the current set of youngsters (i.e. not in their 20s yet) might be a bit more receptive to 8-bit and 16-bit classics. I feel like the folks that played a lot of mobile games or Minecraft or whatnot won't be as turned off by retro-styled graphics as some of the slightly older crowd. But by definition it's not going to be a big set. But the indie boom has absolutely opened up this kind of gaming up to more than there would be otherwise.

I think we also have to accept the fact that, even among gamers that grew up with this stuff, very few overall actually stuck with it. I mean, I know a lot of folks that left older games behind. Another factor with that age set is most of them have families and whatnot. They'd love to play a lot more, but don't actually have as much time to with other obligations, much less spend a ton of time on message boards. That just cuts into that valuable gaming time, amirite?

[Anayo]

Chuckster,

While posting this I kept wondering if I'm just being self-indulgently nostalgic about things I grew up with. Your coworker who wishes the 80's Star Wars looked like Rogue One just convinced me I'm not. The reason for this is one of my top favorite science fiction movies, Metropolis. I didn't see it until I was 23, so I didn't grow up with it. Also it's from 1927 so there's no way I could have seen it when it came out.

It's black and white and silent, but I love its rousing story about a dystopian future and a savior prophecied to deliver the masses from tyranny. The lack of audible dialog forces the actors to gesticulate in a sweeping, exaggerated way, giving it a somewhat otherworldly and surreal feeling. The special effects can be quaint, but they all serve to paint a vision of the future that's still engrossing to think about 90 years later.

Parallels can be drawn between Metropolis and older video games, because they're both working within limitations which technology later overcame. I think this shows that I'm not just reminiscing over childhood, there's a part of me that finds old limitations more intriguing than today's carte blanche excess. This fascination extends beyond the things I grew up with. While it's true that most people only care about what's impressive by today's standards, there will probably be some people in the future who view 8 and 16 bit video games the way some people today view Metropolis.

[nullPointer]

One statistic that I'd be interested in seeing with regards to all of this, would be the purchasing demographics for the NES and SNES Classic systems. Insomuch as those systems received media hype and the fact that they seemed to be very popular systems, surely it couldn't have only been us crusty old nostalgia codgers that were scooping up systems? Or were they released in such small numbers that it really was primarily the older set buying them up?

[Gunstar Green]

It's black and white and silent, but I love its rousing story about a dystopian future and a savior prophecied to deliver the masses from tyranny. The lack of audible dialog forces the actors to gesticulate in a sweeping, exaggerated way, giving it a somewhat otherworldly and surreal feeling. The special effects can be quaint, but they all serve to paint a vision of the future that's still engrossing to think about 90 years later.

I had had a discussion about this thread with my girlfriend and her response was simple and summed things up pretty well. If something is good enough to stand the test of time it will. If it isn't it won't.

That doesn't mean they'll have mass appeal necessarily but there will always be people interested in their value.