Video Games have changed. It's good and bad.

     Christmas 1989, I was only 4 years old, but I can still tell you what I got for Christmas that year. That year, my brother and I got a Nintendo Entertainment System from my parents. (I think mainly my dad, my mom is still upset over how much time I spend playing video games.) It came with the standard 2 controllers, the Nintendo gun, and the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt Combo game. The rest of my life growing up under my parent's roof was spent arguing with my mother about me playing too many video games. (see above statement)

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make playing cards. They release their first video game in 1977.

    Buying video games back in the day was a risky business. There was no internet, and it was usually months before you could find any sort of reviews in print. (In Print!!!) There were lots of horrible games made. Games were released with catastrophic bugs in the code, or unintelligible game play, or sometimes just way too hard. (check out AngryVideoGameNerd on youtube for some extra-vulgar examples) 

    I had several of these titles on my shelf, stacked in the back corner of the entertainment center gathering dust. Every once in a while I would pull one out, blow out the dust, (remember when you had to blow on your video games to make them work?) and play around for a few minutes before remembering why it sucked so much and putting it back in the pile. There was a game called Dino Riki that we had for decades and I never once beat the first level. (and I'm sure I just called someone's favorite childhood game trash)

    Hundreds, if not thousands of video game companies rose and fell over the next several decades, but now the industry has settled into almost the exact format of the movie industry. We have powerhouse studios, and anything else created is considered 'indie'.(think 20th Century Fox vs Electronic Arts) The other, and largest influence on the video game industry, was the widespread availability of high speed internet.

Picture taken shortly before someone's mother got laid.

        I got in fairly early on the internet gaming craze. I played hours and hours and HOURS of Quake online. (that's Quake 1 mind you. low resolution, dial-up internet, and the peak of my FPS gaming affinity) I had a 15K dial up modem, and the bane of my existence were the LPBs (low-ping bastard, this used to be a cutting insult) from big cities that were the firsts to get broadband internet. Growing up in Butte Montana meant it was years (it felt like an eternity) before that same technology became available to us.

    When it did arrive, it turned out to be a bit of a curse. (to me personally.) My first truly high-speed connection to the internet was my freshman year of college, right out of High School. I failed out that year due to Halo and a little internet game called Gunbound. (for the whole sordid tale, see my first post)

    After failing out of school, I nursed my wounded pride with a little game called World of Warcraft. Here is a game so great, so all-consumingly fun, that it is exactly that - all consuming. WoW was, and remains to this day, the only thing I have ever been truly addicted to. There were years of my life when I would spend all day at work thinking about what I was going to do in WoW that night, and every waking moment not spent at work, playing WoW.

You owe me two years of my life back Blizzard.

    I was able to kick the habit years ago, but my wife and I still get cravings to play it. Thankfully, however, we have horrible internet at our place, and we cant run WoW on two computers simultaneously. (we tried 😔)Here is where (I think)the development of video games is both good and bad. The internet has become such an integral part of video games, that it is no longer possible to have a game that does not require internet. 

    One of my favorite parts of opening a new video game was opening the game manual and reading through your upcoming adventure. Game manuals went away a decade ago. Manufacturers decided it was much cheaper to simply put these manuals online. Now they have gone a step further. Now it isnt unheard of to leave the store, take your new game case home, open it up, and the only thing inside is a code to download the game.

    I live in a rural area, so far out of town, that the only 'high speed' internet available to me is microwave internet. (I'm in line to get starlink, but my order isn't expected until mid 2023) For those of you unawares, that means my internet connect comes from a signal a mile down the road. Days when it's raining, snowing, or just too windy, I have no internet. When I do get internet, I have to share my bandwidth with all my neighbors. It is so bad that I can't even stream a movie on Friday or Saturday nights.

    So when a new game comes out, to me it means two days worth of downloads before I get to play once. I really miss the days when the entire game arrived ready to play in the box you only had to pay for once. And industry insiders, if you are reading this, let me tell you, we all feel that way.