Old games. They keep coming back, don't they? Here's another one, clawing its way up through the damp graveyard soil, grasping for new life. Shadowgate is a 1980s point-and-click adventure, being remade by its original authors. It looks like a good thing, a game that merits existence.
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Here's another old game, clawing its way up through the damp graveyard soil, grasping for new life.
But there are bigger questions. Are we experiencing one of those nostalgia frenzies that sweeps through gaming every now and again? Or is re-invention of the past an integral part of gaming's present?
There's that famous phrase. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
This melancholy opening line has become a good deal better-known than the novel that followed. In The Go-Between, an elderly man in mid-20th Century Britain looks back at childhood events from 1900. The world he nostalgically recalls shows little resemblance to the one he lives in now, and yet its legacies are inescapable.
The Go-Between is set in an idyllic high summer, but it’s a dark tale that explores the idea that we are not who we were. Our past isn’t merely a different place, it’s inhabited by a different person.
In gaming terms, the past is everywhere, nostalgia is experiencing a boom, aided by digital distribution and crowd-funding. It’s an emotional phenomenon, a fad, one that’s worth exploring.
Alas, it’s one that may falter as each of us comes to the understanding that playing a HD Kickstarted remake of some decades-old game is somehow missing a critical element; that being the person who so enjoyed the original, your former self, now gone.
This is not a universal law. Many games are endlessly playable in their own right, mostly those that have continued to be played down the years, that have never really left us. In 1983, I played Defender every single day, and I have played it at least once a year since then. It is not a dusty article of nostalgia to me, but a living piece of my rolling present. (By the way, I get a little worse at it, every year.)
Leaving aside period-enthusiasts (they are entitled to their fancies, and I make no criticism of them), we might all be able to name a few dozen old games that we’d happily play today, because they stand the test of time. But gaming has produced countless thousands of games that were enjoyed in their day, and that probably deserve to remain there.
In 1985, I played a hundreds of hours of a Sinclair Spectrum game called Spitfire 40. I loved that game, but have not seen or played it in more than 25 years. To pick up Spitfire 40 today, to even examine it on YouTube, would be to damage a cherished memory. It’s not merely that I have played a few dozen flight sims since then, all better, all that they have progressively improved the genre to an almost infinite degree, it’s that the 15-year-old me who owned a Speccy in 1985, and the world that I inhabited, is too far distant to make an emotional connection through that particular experience, or, in fact, through almost any medium, save the odd song or smell or photograph.
And so the endlessly crashing waves of nostalgia leave me unmoved, faintly perplexed. My 12-year-old niece posts Tweets about TV shows she watched when she “was a kid”. Twenty-year-olds infest sub-Reddits with images of mistily-recalled games and toys from the Proterozoic era of 2003. Kickstarter is besieged by developers menacing us with threatened remakes of mediocre mid-1990s RTSes. If the past is a foreign country, it’s a destination that other travellers seem to enjoy a lot more than I do.
I turn to Dave Marsh for some answers. He has been making games since the 1980s and has been, as they say, around the block, covering everything from his own hit games to online MMOs and cartoon platformers.
His most famous work is e aforementioned Shadowgate, a 1987 dungeon-adventure in which the player interacted with on-screen images (a chest, a door, a pile of bones) and either died (most probable outcome) or progressed. The game was wittily written, artfully painted and well-liked. Although launched for Mac, it enjoyed its greatest success on NES. YouTube vids of Shadowgate have garnered tens of thousands of views and many warm comments of the 'oh, man, I loved this game back in the day' variety.
Marsh and partners have launched a Kickstarter to remake the game for PC, possibly tablet, and perhaps even console, for the 21st Century. Point-and-click adventuring, games from the past, well-regarded developers exploring an entrepreneurial outlet, these are all meat, potatoes and gravy to Kickstarter.
Marsh understands that the final game he produces will need to appeal to people who played the original, overwhelmingly the guys stumping up the cash. And this is exactly why he knows that the very last thing he wants to do is remake the exact same game.
To do so, would be to disappoint his audience. They may understand this, or they may not. It makes no difference. As the game’s creator, he appreciates the subtleties of the term “remake”.
He says, “The first thing we had to figure out was whether or not players are interested in playing a game that was something they loved in their childhood, whether or not it holds up today. A lot of the things you remember from your childhood are about where you were, how it felt in that place in your life. It’s very difficult to recreate that, so we decided we just wouldn’t try.”
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A lot of the things you remember from your childhood are about how it felt in that place in your life.
He adds, “We asked ourselves, ‘Are we going to make an exact port of the game? Or are we going to change the majority of the puzzles, but keep some of those iconic locations that people remember?’ We went with the latter, because if somebody really wants to play Shadowgate on the NES, they can find an emulated version out there. But just re-creating exactly what they saw before didn’t seem very fun to us.”
So the new Shadowgate cannot afford to rely on the simplistic puzzles of the 1980s and early 1990s, even though they seemed fine at the time. Too much has changed. The player’s sense of power within the world is too important to be left in the past. Players today just don’t want to progress through worlds on a trial-by-error basis. They want to feel like they’re smart, like they are in control and no amount of nostalgia is going to change that.
The puzzles have advanced but they do not fall into line with what we think of in modern gaming as ‘puzzles’, that being collecting things and arranging them in a certain order. Marsh explains, “There are plenty of games out there, where you go into a location and you play a game of Concentration or some hidden object game and you open the door. That doesn’t interest us. We’re more interested in story puzzles. We’ve been spending more time saying, 'If we were to have an area here that requires that you come in, and there’s water filling the room, how would we get by that?' What would we do? What is a logical puzzle that we could create that doesn’t require you to put together ten stones, or whatever.
“For the most part, we just look at it and say, 'What’s a logical progression?' What can we do that feels like it’s pulling from the storyline, rather than some abstract thing that you could do on Pogo? The word ‘puzzle’ now comes across as something that you put together with blocks. I guess we’re just saying that it’s more of a storyline puzzle.”
So the idea of ‘puzzles’ has changed, But what remains is the sense of place, the locations, the characters, the art-style and the writing because even if they are not wholly timeless, they have a forgiving quality of timelessness.
He explains, “It still needs to fit well with what players remember Shadowgate being. That’s always a thing you have to be careful about. If I tried to turn Shadowgate into a third-person RPG, people would say, ‘this isn’t what I remember.’”
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We want to go for an art style that has a more painterly feel.
Marsh and team looked at the possibility of rendering environments in a more three-dimensional fashion, but decided to go with a look that chimed with the original, even if it makes use of the advantages of modern computing.
“It’s the same in that you walk into a room, you solve the puzzle, and then you walk into the next room. We didn’t want to deviate a lot from that. We like that feeling of being able to solve something in the room without worrying about whether we were positioning the camera correctly and looking exactly in the right corner. We want to go for an art style that has a more painterly feel.”
We have reached a point in gaming where graphical fidelity to the real world, even in games that portray three-dimensional spaces involving corridors and cauldrons and dragons, does not need to aspire to absolute ‘realism’ in order to quality for serious consideration. Gaming is a broad creative idea.
It’s curious that when Shadowgate first came out, games did not represent the world as well as, say, color illustrations in a book. So Shadowgate’s blocky-looks were state of the art, then. Now games are amazing at rendering complexity. And yet we find room for art that does not aspire to complexity for its own sake, because it is pleasurable. Shadowgate seeks to flourish in the modern world, not by looking like a 25-year-old game, or like a brand new game, but by looking like itself, by standing outside the confines of technological progress.
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In the 1980s, adventure games were, literally, stories. How strange this feels to us today.
And finally there’s the writing. If you look at a gameplay video from the original, you’ll be struck by just how many words are in the game, and how strange this feels to us today. In the 1980s, adventure games were, literally, stories. Narratives and consequences were delivered in words. Again, a modern audience won’t suffer to sit through text unspooling endlessly on screen and so more use will be made of voice-overs. But also, there is room for games that embrace words and text and don’t treat them as if they were nasty glyphs from the imagination of a child.
Marsh says, “Not everything has to be about sound bites and instant gratification. Many people want to go ahead and enjoy an intelligent game, something where you invest your time in the story, instead of just launching a bird at some pigs. Certainly there are games that are really fun to play for a brief amount of time, but we are more interested in saying, ‘How can we expand the narrative?’
“Some people aren’t really willing to invest that much time, but I think there are people who are interested in getting to the prose and understanding it and building a richer environment – or, in the case of Shadowgate and these types of adventure games, a richer game – by having a little bit more text. A lot of players care about understanding what the world is like.”
There is clearly some enthusiasm for bringing back this game. Shadowgate is currently more than mid-way towards its Kickstarter goal of $120,000. And yet, the Shadowgate of 1987 remains back there, a memory for many of its fans and an inspiration for this new game that seeks to progress the idea of adventures, rather than encase point-and-clicking in the glass cabinet of nostalgia.
For daily opinions, debates and interviews on games you can follow Colin Campbell on Twitter or at IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
