What's better? 90's or now?

Intro

Given that these days I’m getting somewhat long in the tooth, the concept was recently brought up to take a look back at gaming through the ages. I’ve done a fair amount of gaming in my time and as my bio mentions, this goes wayyyyyyyyy back to even the 80’s! But for our purposes here today, the 90’s are a much more relevant era given that this was the time which saw the rise of 3d gaming as well as other industry stalwarts which we know and love today.

Ahhhh, the 90’s

Imagine a time if you will, where the likes of Rage Against The Machine, Champagne Supernova and Smells Like Teen Spirit rocked the world, an era where the magnificence of a song like November Rain with all of its ridiculously broken artistic genius intent could get commercial airplay despite its almost 9 minute track length. The time of Michael Jordan (and then Michael Jordan again!), the Budweiser frogs and wassup ads (it snuck in during Dec ’99!), the Fresh Prince, Seinfeld, Discman, Commodore and Atari, Nintendo and Sega and of course, the humble PC. Print magazines with disks on the cover, demos being a real thing (anybody else remember 2^nd Reality??) games coming in big boxes with loads of floppies, before buying your first cd-rom drive and fiddling with mscdex to get Star Wars Rebel Assault working, not to mention the endless faffing with boot disks with customised autoexec.bat, config.sys and emm386 configurations to make sure your games ran.

But what was gaming in the 90’s? Personally, during the 90’s you could say I “discovered” myself as a gamer. Up until the 90’s, I played some text/ascii games as a kid, but during the 90’s I found games that made my jaw drop and my eyes bleed, I was hooked!

Who’s your daddy? Who? That’s right, the 90’s, that’s who!

Believe it or not, the 90’s in many ways was the grand daddy of many of the games you know and love today. A lot of notable IP was first established in the 90’s including (in no particular order!):

• Command & Conquer
• X-Com/UFO Enemy Unknown
• Grand Theft Auto
• Fallout
• The Elder Scrolls
• Gran Turismo
• Wing Commander
• Quake
• Doom
• Thief
• Civilisation
• Tomb Raider
• Need For Speed
• Resident Evil
• Championship Manager

A lot of these games, whether you play the modern incarnations or not, have greatly affected the modern landscape of gaming. This isn’t to say that gaming in the 90’s was all roses. There was system fragmentation on a scale that today only occurs in a devs worst nightmares, new technologies abounded and the seedlings of multi-core computing on the desktop. Yes it was exciting! Even IP/genres which started before the 90’s really came into its own in the decade (think the Falcon series, point and click adventure gaming, Full Motion Video Tex Murphy, the rise of the RTS with Dune II and many others).

What came from the 90’s? Let’s take a look

3D Gaming

You guessed it, the daddy of pretty much all gaming today (Candy Crush doesn’t count, this site is for REAL gamers!) came about in the 90’s. Up until this era, we had the glory of the point and click hand drawn adventure puzzle games, sprite based graphics up the yin yang, rail shooters with pre-rendered backdrops and side scrollers. Everyone these days likes to argue Red vs. Green, but before nVidia, AMD or ATI entered the fray, there was the original 3D vendor that defined a new genre. I’m talking of course about the 3dfx Interactive with their Voodoo series of 3D accelerators and GLIDE API.

Of course we all love the latest and greatest cards of today, but back then, it was ground-breaking. 3D was new, it was hip, it was awesome. This isn’t to say that the developments of today don’t matter, but 3dfx brought real time 3D rendered gaming to the masses. An industry now worth more than Hollywood movies. Think about it. That’s significant my friends.

The Rise of the First Person Shooter

Yes yes, I know. The FPS was around before the 90’s. Arguably however, this is where one of the biggest gaming genres of today received its defining moment (or several of them!) with the shot in the arm that id Software gave it by creating legend after legend, starting with Wolfenstein 3D, carrying on with Doom and then making the shift to proper 3D with Quake. Let us also not forget one of my personal favourites: Heretic, which although was still sprite based on the original Doom engine, was one of the first FPS games to incorporate vertical look and the now ubiquitous power up (anybody else remember the Tome of Power?)

Of course these games don’t hold a candle graphically to the FPS games of today, but there was heart, there was soul, there was gameplay. Life was good.

Simulation

The 90’s was also the era of simulation. Didn’t matter what your sim of choice was, chances are there was a sim for you. Flight was the obvious with Falcon 3 and Flight Simulator setting some of the initial standards, but it wasn’t all about flying. Car racing? Gran Turismo took the genre to the next level with what many regard as the beginning of a proper simulation capability when it came to cars and tinkering with settings. Golf? Links was for you. The list went on and on.

Innovation

Yes indeed, this was an era of innovation, graphics were important, but gameplay was king. The rise of Molyneux, Roberts, Braben, Meier, Carmack and others left us always wanting more. Whatever your chosen genre was, it didn’t matter, there was something for you here. Want to fly spaceships? Elite, Frontier and the incomparable Wing Commander series of games were for you. Manage a football (soccer for my American compatriots) team? Yep, Championship Manager was your thing. New IP and new genres came and went in the blink of an eye, if it was good it survived, if it wasn’t, it died (I don’t remember Leander on the Amiga getting any sequels…)

Games were simpler in the 90’s. Not as much money, time or effort was needed to make a game which sold as is required today. This meant it was relatively inexpensive to try new things, as a result, innovation was rampant and although it wasn't always good, it led to an explosion in gaming technologies, genres and IP. What a glorious era! As a new game didn't have the huge budgets of today, it wasn't such a risk to create something new, if it failed, back to the drawing board and try again, if it worked? Great! Make more! Risk on investment was pretty low in these days, hence companies were able to innovate more without worrying too much about the games which failed. The traditional "spray and pray" approach, a machine gun vs. a sniper rifle if you will.

But... Was It Better?

Well now that's the question isn't it? For those of us that gamed through the 90's I fondly remember some of the best pick up and play gaming experiences I've ever had. Sensible soccer was infinitely more playable than whatever the latest FIFA EA has pumped out is. New experiences were genuinely new as opposed to these days simply being refinements of already proven genres, styles, IP's and technologies.

For me, getting scared and jumping playing Alone in the Dark or Quake may mean I'm now desensitized so that Alien: Isolation isn't that big a deal to me. Perhaps to a kid today, they get the same tingly feeling I got when I was young when they play A:I. I hope so, it'd be a shame for them to miss out on that kind of experience. Maybe their experience is better than mine was, ultimately we'll never know.

Of course, it's possible that I'm looking back on the period with rose tinted glasses. Games were a pain to get running. Drivers had to be loaded carefully given 640k of base memory. Boot disks were needed for different games to change system settings. Sometimes games didn't play nicely with certain IRQ and DMA combos, extended vs. expanded memory or vice versa meant that emm386 became your best friend. Gah! Gaming in the 90's could be a pain. That much said, when you finally got it running, it was rewarding! Still, if you wanted ease of use, there were consoles and arcades for that...

That's right! Streetfighter 2 on the SNES, NBA Jam 2 player arcade! Oh the countless hours and coins I put into those 2 games respectively. This was an era of extremes, from gaming brilliance, to gaming  atrocities.

Was it better? No, not really. Was it worse? Also no. It was.... different. Perhaps that's a cop out answer, but it's the honest truth. I loved the gaming experiences I had in the 90's and wouldn't trade them for the world, but at the same time, I love a lot of the gaming experiences I've had since then and can say the same. Mass Effect trilogy? Epic. X-Com the reboot? The original but massively more engaging. Open worlders like Assassin's Creed? Love them (despite the atrocity that was Unity at launch, I used to pre-order the most expensive collector edition AC games up to and including Unity. No more). Of course let us not forget Star Citizen, what is shaping up to be one of the greatest games of all time!

We have great games in this day and age, we had great games in the 90's. But much like the music from the 90's that has now succumbed to a greater degree of commercialisation (hi from X factor, Pop Idol, American Idol, Autotune and all of the other non-music of today), evolution rather than revolution has become the norm in the gaming industry these days too.

Still, for every manufactured pop band/singer like One Direction or Taylor Swift, every so often, a chart oddity like the Kings of Leon, Killers or Gorillaz come along and make it big too. Perhaps not with the frequency of the indies of the 90's but it's a similar thing in the gaming space. As much as we may bemoan the standard, iterative, chuck out a new version every year or two of the formulaic approach, the money made from these games allows them the freedom to experiment with new IP and styles of game. The industry has matured and moved from the machine gun to the sniper rifle. Both are required, but they are different.

Still miss proper demos though. Future Crew and 2nd Reality forever. 3dMark doesn't count, you kids don't know what you missed XD

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