The Height of Gaming

I've been a gamer for almost as long as I can remember. I'm old enough that I remember playing Pong, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Asteroids at a friend's house. It's when I got a Nintendo though, that things really changed, and gaming became a big part of my life. Some of my favorite memories are of checking out games at Blockbuster with a friend and spending all night trying to beat whatever game it was. We'd mark the cartridge so that we could check it out again the next weekend if we didn't manage to beat it.

Eventually though, I moved on to PC gaming. My cousin introduced me to games like Starflight, Starflight 2 and Anacreon, which completely blew my mind.

It's hard to describe what even just seeing these old screenshots (especially of Anacreon) brings up for me. I'll forgive you if this looks like the worst most boring thing you've ever seen–like playing a business spreadsheet. But, as a kid, it felt like running an empire. Even the animated bubbles on the title screen struck me as the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

I played these games an old AT&T computer, something like this:

It was awesome because it had an internal hard drive, which meant that I didn't have to play Anacreon from a floppy disk, so it was screaming fast. By screaming fast I mean that I didn't need to read a book why the computer was loading the game or taking its turn.

It's funny but even now I can look at the Starflight planet map and see a hostile terrain filled with alien life, minerals and exciting potential. I can look at the Anacreon star map and see a nebula next to vast uncharted space.

I remember that my cousin had a massive Starflight map in his room charting all of the worm holes and such for whichever game he had in progress. If you got lost or ran out of fuel in that game you were done. Similarly, in Anacreon, once you got behind you were done, and there went literal weeks of work in some cases.

Originally this was going to be a post about how I progressed from console games to hard core PC games and back to casual games but instead I want to pause on these old PC games. I'm honestly not sure if it qualifies as a "genre" because I can't think any others in this category. There were your Dooms and Wolfensteins and such but not exploration or turn-based games like these. I don't want to reduce my thoughts here to "games were harder and therefor more rewarding", or even "when you had crappy graphics you had to make a compelling story", I think there's some truth to both of those statements but there's also something more.

More than anything I find myself wanting to draw comparisons between these old games and games like Stardew Valley, Minecraft, or Terraria, at least in the sense of something beautiful and special coming from both passion, and constraints. Anacreon, Stardew Valley, and Minecraft, were originally a single person's passion project. That's incredible to me and I can't begin to express my admiration for these people. Starflight came from a just a five person team.

It could be that these games loom so large in my memory because I played them during formative years, but I like to think there really was something unique about them. Modern games from large studios take hundreds of people and, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars to make (Destiny took $500 million to develop???), that doesn't make them worse of course but certainly different. If you're going to single-handedly craft something over years and years with no real expectation of making a living out of it then your passion will likely come through in the end product. It will feel different I think.

I know that my kids will feel the same way about Minecraft one day as I feel about Anacreon. Granted, Mincraft became (and still is) a worldwide sensation, but the origin was similar. I sometimes wonder what would have happened with Starflight or Anacreon had they come out now, where it's so much easier for something to be shared and go viral. But, honestly, these games probably are with us in the sense that they inspired early game developers.

Anyway this post, which was supposed to be about my current gaming habits, turned into me rambling about ye olden days. Still, it was a fun to learn a bit about the origins of games like Starflight. It surprised me to learn that EA Games of all companies was behind it. I find the entire field with its combination of story, art, and technology to be endlessly fascinating.