I had a thought yesterday as I was heading to my “Intro to Film” class. In that class, we watch a few recent movies, but most of the movies and clips we watch are black and white films from decades ago. We study those because the effects are more simple and rough, not as smooth/hidden/perfect as modern-day films. Also the technology was more limited, so for example the movie we watched last night didn’t have zoom because it wasn’t invented yet (the camera had to dolly forward to “zoom” which isn’t quite the same). There also, obviously, wasn’t CGI, so any editing was done by hand.
Anyway I got to thinking, what if the same applies to computer games? We game developers constantly play modern games which are massive and complex and made by huge teams of people, but maybe it would be good for us to go back and seriously spend some time in the older, simpler games — the games which were created with older technology by fewer people with smaller budgets. Maybe those would be more realistic for me to play and try to imitate, rather than attempting a huge game which is way out of my league and failing.
Richard Carter 