Goodness that's a long post. I thought I was long winded! Good thinking, although I don't think one can deny the early 8-bit games as classics!

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: : The sounds, the explosions, the blistering gameplay, the wondrous playability. It still takes your breath away twenty years later. : : Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest, Defender, the list goes on and on. Classic arcade games - such as Battlezone, Frogger, and Sinistar - were very much an artistic form of computer games, a form with a very definite set of rules, just as Haiku has a very specific set of parameters which regulate whether or not a given poem is a Haiku or not. For instance, all classic arcade games offered the potential for infinite play, indeed winning the game was impossible; the game continues until the player loses all his lives. Most all classic games offered the concept of lives, where the player could fail or "die" a certain number of times before their game was up. They adhered to a simple, easy to pick up control scheme; after a minute of play, anyone could fully understand the controls. : : I'm sorry, but the endless procession of dodgy, lightweight 3D beat-'em-ups and soulless racing games we get today is a pale shadow of the variety that was on offer in the arcade 'golden days' several years ago. The arcade gaming industry has become a business in which fewer and fewer people are willing to take risks, and that's sad. The future of gaming seems to be bright but one thing that game designers need to remember is that no matter how many amazing graphics/special effects/killer soundtracks a game has, without the inclusion of the vital ingredient : : that is PLAYABILITY, the game will suck (and let's not talk about spending upwards of $1 just to start playing an arcade game today. It seems a quarter was the 'sweet spot' as far as cost to play went). : : Obviously, arcade games have become much more complicated since the first very popular arcade games started appearing in the late 70's and on into the 80's. The technology available back in the 70's and 80's was quite inferior to what we have on our desktops today. However, what the games in the 70's and 80's lacked in terms of technology, they more than made up for in ingenuity and playability. Some of those old games were just damned amazingly fun. : : Back in the early days, programmers fought against the limited technology available, and managed to squeeze at incredible amount into their games. This page contains ten times more information than the average Video Game programmer had at his disposal in the late 1970's. In todays games, memory and storage constraints are no longer really an issue. : : I am not doubting that some of today games, and their programmer / design teams are ground-breaking. But ask any of them, and I'll wager they have great respect for what was achieved all those years ago with such limited resources. Given the choice back then, their counter parts would have revelled in the luxury of the huge programming head room presented in todays systems. Ask some of them now and I'm sure they have no regrets though with good reason. Many of : : the arcade classics have a playability that remains unequaled even today, in the year 2001! Again, it all comes down to playability. Manufacturers at the time couldn't rely on graphics and sound alone to make people play a game - not in the long term anyway. Looking back at some of the classics, the concept and goals were so straightforward (so I hop this frog across the highway, across the river and into his house without getting hit? Simple enough!), yet the : : gameplay was just challenging and enjoyable enough to play it again when your lives were all gone. And again. And then again. It's all about the addictive gameplay. : : So why aren't there still actual arcades like there used to be in strip centers or even malls? : : One of the reasons is there became no more "HI-SCORE" based games. The early games where "Hi-Score Based" meaning that they never ended. The kudos here was in have the higher score over all your rivals rather than being the first to finish the game. Games like Galaga, Pac-Man, Hyper Sports, Gauntlet, etc. where all hi-score based and were fiercely competitive in their heyday. When they started to make "See The Ending First" style games, rivalries died a little bit as scores on these games were more or less meaningless. How many of you remember feeling a little bit of : : pride seeing your initials on the high score table after you were done playing? Did you ever get good enough to have other people come and stand and then watch in awe as you were obviously a 'master' of the game? : : The games being released today are extraordinarily different from the arcade games of the early Eighties. The old games were sold to the consumer quarter by quarter; if the player wanted to keep playing, they had to keep putting money in the machine. Today's games - are for the most part - aimed at the home market, be it PC or console, and as such are only sold to their purchasers only once. Home gamers, it would seem, want a game that they can finish, something that they can play for a while and then put on the shelf, having without question "beaten" it. Arguments : : could be made that this is not necessarily what all home gamers want, but certainly the businessmen have decided conclusively this is the sort of games people will buy, and as such the developer is often stuck making them that way. : : Taking off my rose-tinted glasses, we all know that a lot of the games from this 'classic' era were poor - but there are equally as many that have stood the test of time. We remember the good and the not so good with a happy smile regardless, each bringing back their own special memory. I often wonder if the pioneers who started writing emulator code that allowed all of us to relive playing those classic arcade games that we knew and loved ever envisioned this would turn into such a huge underground movement? Before that happened, we were all just sitting around talking : : about the 'good old days' and how the gameplay on those classics kept us coming back for more, spending a heck of a lot of our allowance or part time job money, not to mention the time invested. : : The bottom line is the classics are alive and well. A testament to solid game development. Truth in point ... my 10 year old son and his buds still fire up MAME on the PC after they are done playing Dreamcast or his fancy PC games and they all have a ball. Now THAT'S impressive when you can grab the attention of 10 year olds 20+ years later!

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