 I'm Scott. I'm Rym. We are the host of Geek Nights. It is a podcast. If you enjoy this, there are thousands of hours of us doing this online for free. I don't know why you'd want to go listen to it, but it's there. At least someone has. And today, we're going to talk about nostalgia, because we, everyone who comes to a PAX, everyone who plays games. Not young people. Young people are too young to have nostalgia. Even young people have nostalgia for younger times. You know, you're playing with your Legos, and you're like, you know, man, remember Duplos? Duplos were good stuff. I wish I had some Duplos. Like, for example, I like the game Aerobiz. I'm probably the only... Is there any single person here? One clapping, guys. I have deep nostalgia for a game on the Super Nintendo, where you literally play the CEO of an airline, and call board meetings, and look at sales projections. Like, I am not in any way exaggerating what this game is about. But nostalgia is a funny thing, because the definition of nostalgia, like, what this word means, it's sort of that it's sentimental, it's wistful, it's an affection for something in the past, but more importantly, we're looking for the associations, the feelings we had, not necessarily the things themselves, and we might not even remember those things that well. I don't know if I want to play Aerobiz today. So, in gaming, gaming, video games in particular haven't even been around that long. No, but it was a video game invented like the 80s. They're barely older than me. Yeah, there are probably people at this PAX who played the first video game. I mean, movies aren't even that old. Movies are maybe like 60, 70 years older than me, right? It's like, wow. People think like, oh, that's an old movie. It's like, that movie was made when your grandpa was young, probably. So you'll get these situations like Windjammers, where a game will get popular in a certain time, a certain place, and people kind of get obsessed with it, and now we're in an era where we're getting these second and third phases, where the games industry is going back and mining games that were previously popular, and trying to bring them back, because there's a lot of money and nostalgia if you haven't noticed. Right, it's not just in gaming. It's sort of obvious, at least in the U.S. culture, right? Just how much mining of nostalgia there is, you know, I don't have numbers on this, right? But everyone sort of gets this general feeling like, hey, over time, it seems like there's a lot more remakes, re-dos, and comebacks these days than versus, say, in the 90s, right? It seems like there are more original things. You know, if you go and look at, like, go to Google and you can just type in, like, movies from year, and it'll show you across the top, like, you know, posters of all the movies. And if you do it, just take a little thing, like, all right, how many of these were new and how many were remakes, and then do it for, like, 2018, and it's, yeah, you're gonna see. It'll also start to feel pretty old when you realize how long ago movies that you don't think are that old are from. Oh, it's that 20th anniversary of thing when you were a teenager, oh my God. So we all, like, everyone who played the N64 GoldenEye, really, like, they think back to that as being a really good time. And we're gonna explore over the course of the next hour what's really going on there because a lot of the things that we might think we have nostalgia for, it wasn't necessarily the game itself that is worth bringing into the future. So let's start with remakes and sequels, like, what is a sequel? What is a remake? What makes a remake work? And it so happens that a while ago there was the perfect storm. There's a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System called Bionic Commando, popular in the speedrunning community, popular in its day. Popular in Rims House, which is why it's on this panel. It's, like, the only game I've ever played where I'm within maybe 20 minutes of a speedrun record. 20 minutes is very far from a speedrun record. The record is, like, 20 minutes. So double that, and that's about what I can do. Okay. But Bionic Commando was a very popular game, and it got remade. It actually got kind of remade in two ways. So this was a while ago, but basically Bionic Commando's Nintendo game was remade, faithful to the original, sort of as a promotion for a 3D, more serious triple-A style remake. Right. So they were remaking Bionic Commando, a property, a Capcom property, that had only been used once. There was one game of it ever. Well, right. There was a Game Boy version of Bionic Commando. That doesn't count. All right. They were re, they were taking that same story, right, the same characters, the same universe, making a brand new 3D game with it that you, right. And then to promote that game, they were like, let's remind people what the original Bionic Commando was like. So they also made Bionic Commando re-armed, which is almost kind of identical to the original game. It was like a two and a half D game. And it had the same maps as the original game, you know, had the same, right, 2D action going on. And the promotional cheap to develop game that was a remake of the original sold way, way more than their high high budget. Those are the first week sale numbers for these two games. So a triple A game and basically a marketing tool. And it's very worth noting that Bionic Commando re-armed. It was the only one that actually got a sequel. So they made a sequel to the remake. So what was the deal with Bionic Commando? Like we need to explore like what was good about Bionic Commando? Why did this happen? And this is often a difficult question to answer. If you're making a 3D remake, it looks like someone thought that the great storyline of Bionic Commando and these characters everyone remembers was the deal. But no one really cared about Bionic Commando for the characters. No, it was such a poorly translated game that I think people especially in the United States didn't even know the characters or what was going on. Also the characters were just literally guy with hook and Nazis. Yup, I mean as a kid I thought the guy in the middle was Super Joe and he really couldn't tell playing the game. You had to read the manual to know and the manual wasn't that great either. Like nobody's cosplaying as Destroyer 3. I need hair to be destroyed. But it also had a bitchin' soundtrack. And it's worth noting that they fully recreated that soundtrack with modern technology in the remake. So the soundtrack was really good, but you're not going to remake a platformer just because it had a good soundtrack. Right, you know, you could take the Mega Man 2 music and put it on like tic-tac-toe, it's not going to work. It might work a little. A lot of kids were introduced to the fact that Hitler is in this game and didn't really know what was going on with that. So the game almost had the sort of mystique or infamy. I mean someone says a swear word and then Hitler shows up and then Hitler explodes. And you're a kid and you're playing this NES game and you're like, wait, was that Hitler? Yes, it was. And you tell your friends they wouldn't believe you. Well, because it was in the Japanese version it was obviously Hitler. In the American version it was like, wink, wink, it's Hitler. Yeah, the game was originally called Hitler No Foucaps. You're like, Hitler's Rebirth. The original name was not Vatican Amanda. So was it the gameplay? Yes, it was the gameplay. The gameplay is why this game was remade and why the remake was successful as opposed to the IP driven spiritual successor. Right, there have been platforming games for a long time. There have been platforming games where you also have a gun like Contra. But I recommend it was basically just Contra except you have this hook that you can swing on. Instead of jumping. Right. You cannot jump. All you can do is walk left and right, crouch and use this hook. And the hook was actually, for an NES game, surprisingly flexible, right? You think about like, you know, the whip in Castlevania on the NES. You could only whip like this way and that way. But on this Castlevania 4, on the Super Nintendo, you could dangle it and swing it all around like a lasso and do all kinds of craziness, right? The hook in Bionic Commando for an NES game was shockingly versatile. You could go up, you could sort of get an angle and do a little Spider-Man. Right, you could do all this crazy stuff with it. And that made this game stand out for every other platformer since, maybe? Now this is where we're going to go the rest of this panel. We're going to go deeper because you can't just say, oh, it was the gameplay. The gameplay was good. Let's just remake the gameplay. It just so happened that Bionic Commando had a really good set of gameplay because gameplay has many different components. There were boss fights in Bionic Commando. They weren't actually that good. And you'll notice in the remake, they completely redid the bosses because the boss mechanics kind of sucked. Also weren't like some of the bosses repeated in lame. Yep, that pit-pat-pat guy, you could just stand behind him and shoot him in the butt and he would just die. Like he couldn't even hit you. The game was super frustrating and super difficult relative to kids who were playing it at the time. Yeah, I cannot beat Bionic Commando 1 easily. It would take a while. Yep, and they recreated that, but it wasn't too difficult. You have all played games like Silver Surfer that were too difficult. And if you just remade Silver Surfer today, no one would play. Right, Bionic Commando Rearmed is somewhat challenging. I'm sure people aren't really good at games, might not be able to beat it. But it is way easier than actual Bionic Commando. Even though you're nominally on like the same map with the same hook that operates the same way, just the controls and the feel of it and the visual and the timing and the spacing, right? It's like that looks like the same level, but how come I can beat that part so easily in Bionic Commando Rearmed and not so easily in original Bionic Commando? Because they shined it up, right? They polished that turn. So it was basically that hook. And it got to the point with this hook that when they made the remake, they actually had to reverse engineer things like how fast does he swing? How fast does the arm go out and retract? All the physics from the NES era, you know, before there were physics engines, it had to be recreated perfectly because it just so happened Bionic Commando was the easiest possible game on Earth to remake. It's one of the rare NES games that was basically perfect for its era and really just needed some polish. They just polish it up, made that guy really funny looking and made a really great game just by copying something that was already great. Sometimes you can get away with that. So let's talk about two situations where that did not work. So does anyone play Act Razor 1? Anyone, anyone. I think it was made famous because Act Razor 2 just got an SGDQ or an AGDQ speedrun. It did. That was a great speedrun. Go back and watch it. Anyway, everyone who's played Act Razor knows that Act Razor 1, there's two parts to the game, right? There's a town part which is on the left there where you're like sort of like SimCity, Greek God kind of thing. I don't want to explain it all right now. And then there's a sideways action game where you walk left and right, you jump, you swing your sword and kill guys. They were both kind of mediocre, right? You had to do both of these games. It was like two games in one, which is why it was such a great deal, right? And personally, I like the town part a lot better than the walk sideways part because the walk sideways part was sort of unremarkable, right? There's a lot of action platforming games where you swing a sword, Demon Sword, Ninja Gaiden, and this is way worse than Ninja Gaiden, way worse. So this game was really popular. But it seems like what happened is that the people responsible for the game didn't actually understand why it was popular. It was so popular that they made a sequel, a big budget sequel. And in that sequel, they decided that the thing people liked about this game was not the you are God play like low rent SimCity and then also go into that city and fight monsters. It was just make a generic platform or make like Ghouls and Goblins with some jumping. Right. Now the Ghouls and Goblins with some jumping makes for a great speed run. It made for, in my opinion, not the greatest game. I knew kids who bought Act Razor 2 and couldn't figure out how to unlock the town part. Right. How disappointed would you be if you bought like Biana Commander Remake and it only didn't have the hook, right? It's just the talking to Nazis part. So another instance where this happened was WarioWare, the WarioWare franchise. And at least I'm talking about the U.S. sales and U.S. audience specifically. The height of WarioWare was probably on the GameCube. Right. So WarioWare was originally a GBA deal where everyone knows, I hope everyone knows, you play like these cool, really short mini games and you play a lot of them really fast and it's a whole load of fun. But on the GBA, right, the original WarioWare games, this is an entirely single player experience, sort of like, you know, like when you play on your phone today, right? It's a really good phone game, but we didn't have phones that played good games then. Yeah. So they were actually great if you were pooping. Right. They were just like the perfect pooping game, but it wasn't like legendary, right? What was legendary and what sold the most was the GameCube game, WarioWare Incorporated, which included competitive multiplayer. So the deal is that this part was fun, but it wasn't fun enough. People didn't care that much about these kinds of micro games. Some people did. Some people did and like it sold well, but this was the magic because they added a whole metal layer on top of real-time competitive multiplayer and there were a million different pretty complicated modes to make this happen. The game was designed for people sitting in the room together playing a kind of frantic multiplayer versus game. All right. And thanks to the magic of the GameCube, you could have four controllers on one TV, right? Everyone would get in on it like it was Smash Brothers, right? And you were all playing these tiny mini games together, trying to do them better than your friends, faster than your friends. And then there was like a meta game wrapped around them to see who the actual winner was. So this is the simplest mode, the disco mode, which is pretty much, if you fail three times, you lose your crowd and you're out and the last person standing is the winner. But the turtle mode was just the way to go. This is the best mode. The way it worked is as you lost at games, you would get more turtles under your butt and it would become unstable like a Jenga tower. And in between each round, you had to stabilize your turtle stack to see if you could continue playing. Oh, and when you die, you turn into a turtle and you're running around biting the bottom of whoever's turtle stack beat you. So they added a pretty complex multiplayer game and that multiplayer game just used the micro games themselves as sort of the currency to make the real multiplayer game work. And it's going to go really well. We played this for years. The entire life of the GameCube, since this game came out, we played this like any time we got together with people. There is only one other game on Earth that I have more nostalgia for than this game and we'll talk about it later. The only thing that was able to unseat this as the local multiplayer go-to was Jackbox. Until Jackbox, it was all WarioWare Incorporated. So sales-wise, this WarioWare seemed to be the highest-selling WarioWare in the US and it was all downhill from there, partly because of competition from phones, partly because none of them enabled multiplayer well. If they had multiplayer, it was kind of hacked in, didn't work that well, didn't facilitate the specific experience that the audience of this game liked, which happened to be sitting in a room with a bunch of people playing microgames together. That one good part in Mario Party that you're trying to get to constantly. When WarioWare came out for the Wii, we were so excited. I pre-ordered that biz. It came right away. We were like, oh my God, it's going to be all the fun of WarioWare for GameCube, the seven different multiplayer modes. Plus, you'll be mixing in the Wii mode. We're going to be doing swinging stuff and all kinds of things. I'm going to have to pull that snot back into her nose manually. It's going to be great. But actually, what ended up happening in WarioWare for the Wii, all those multiplayer modes were garbage. They were not good. They were barely there. So there's another situation. We're going to continue on. This is the game I have the most nostalgia for ever. What about the situations where there's a thing that a huge number of people assume obviously should be remade, was a peak gaming experience, and yet it never gets remade? Like why does that happen? How many of you actually read Penny Arcade? Okay, okay. You know this is the Penny Arcade, that's fine. So I don't think you understand that until recently, Tribes 2 was this giant FPS game where you're flying around as a dude with guns. Even today, no game compares to the early 2000s Tribes 2. This is a game where you can literally have 70 people playing together on an enormous map like 35 versus 35. Was it really that many? You might be misremembering this a little bit. It was a lot. It was not 70 due to nostalgia. You see, even we're vulnerable. It was a large number, larger than Counter-Strike or anything like that. But not 70, it was a lot. You could also, you could play this on a 56k modem and it worked. Well because most of us had 50s k modems back then. That was a long time ago. I know, right? Yeah. Also you could just get into vehicles, right? You could bomb things. There was so much. You could set up little turrets. Like the amount of stuff you could do in this game is insane. Everyone has a jetpack. It's ridiculous. So I got to take you back to an earlier time when we'd be in college and I'd be skipping class playing Tribes 2 and Scott would come home from class and skip his next class and just sit down and start playing Tribes 2 and then I'd skip my next class. I basically just played Tribes 2 for an entire year instead of going to class. I ran around to like three different game stores the day this came out to try to find it on CD-ROM. And we weren't the only ones obsessed with this game because Penny Arcade up until like maybe five or six years ago this was probably the game Penny Arcade had talked about more. I think before World of Warcraft came out this was the game that had the most Penny Arcade comics. Like I don't think you really understand they talked about this for years and years and years and then like... That's the best one. Because the game was infamous for patches would come out and every patch made the game worse. Right. So I don't know if you understood Tribes 2 in the game that's also the best one. There was a forum for the game in the game. It wasn't like a separate website and people there would say oh you should change this you should change that you should change this and unlike most game developers who ignore all the fans who tell them what to do they actually did what the players told them to do and the game went... Now the players who were the most vocal were nostalgic for Tribes 1 which wasn't that good and they wanted Tribes 2 to be more like Tribes 1 but if you made it more like Tribes 1 only Tribes 1 kind of people will play it kind of like how there's an era where more people were playing old Counter-Strike than new Counter-Strike. The other players who were the most vocal were the ones who weren't that good at the game and they would say oh ban this I keep losing to it Ban this thing fusing Yeah, make that thing go slower I can't hit it, it's not fair and then they would do right so what happened is they kept patching the game and ruining it and ruining it and then once there were no more players they made one final patch to reset everything and then the game died. So the game was really popular and the last time Penny Arcade talked about it the joke was basically someone released a trailer of a game that looked like it had some Tribes-like mechanics in it and they were like why would you do that there's no way you're actually making Tribes there's still nostalgic for this game as much as we are a lot of people are and it turns out a lot of games have been made by multiple studios that are very similar to Tribes too There's even games with the Tribes license Tribes Ascend came out is it still going maybe? I doubt it at this point There are a lot of Tribes games with or without the Tribes license that are basically trying to be Tribes you have a jet pack you have the spin fuser gun that shoots blue discs to death you have a giant map with hills that you ski on or you have vehicles maybe there's a lot of games that try to do this they're all garbage compared to something made in the early 2000s well are they garbage because the thing here isn't are these games good or bad a lot of them are actually great games the problem is what's wrong with us why can't we scratch this itch why do I look at all these games that are 90% Tribes too and I'm just like ah it's not enough it doesn't do it doesn't quite do it that's literally the joke in one of these things a while ago oh this other Tribes game doesn't quite do it I don't know what to do so there's something going on here we're gonna get back to that we're gonna talk more about what a remake actually is where do games come from and I want to use a really interesting example of what eventually led to overwatch which came up a lot in the Q&A today I mean that's the how game these days the one people talk about the most so the lineage of games is important because games don't get made in a vacuum games borrow from other games some games aren't actually sequels or remakes to previous games but people who like those games use elements from those games to make their own games so games have this evolutionary lineage and you can trace core elements as they get brought forward over the years quick back in the day had to capture the flag mode quick too had to capture the flag mode and in this old era there were all these games that kept evolving on this you had capture the flag you had team fortress you had mega team fortress team fortress classic and this all eventually culminated in probably the last game of that core genre weapons factory if you ever played weapons factory it is ridiculous it makes overwatch look very simple yeah even though this is really the graphically doesn't look good mechanically the way the game works there's like a zillion classes they have a zillion different weapons you can choose which hand you're throwing grenades from you have to write scripts to throw grenades with one hand while you're shooting guns with the other hand also this game is fast really fast like you can go across the whole map in like a few seconds rocket jumping grappling hooks like anything you can imagine is in this game it's a weapons factory you can make any weapon there so there's a million key bindings a million characters the game is so complex that you could really only learn it by having someone teach it to you you had to learn scripting all this nonsense and this is kind of the style of game that overwatch eventually became this game got remade a couple times in the modern era and we'll get to that but there's another game I want to talk about because sometimes the gene lines of two games merge see maybe you play Counter Strike there was a game that came out a long before Counter Strike that was a few years before not long before long in the span of games two or three years in the span of when I was in high school playing games Action Quake 2 was a mod of Quake 2 that basically made it proto counter strike it's called Action Quake because it was meant to like replicate what it's like to be in an action movie right jumping through windows driving cars right all you think about the things that happen in action scenes in action movies chase scenes right that's what they were going for so those are sort of the things you could do in Action Quake multiple people who worked on overwatch have said in interviews repeatedly that Action Quake 2 is one of the primary sources of inspiration for overwatch and Action Quake 2 was a game that was played very heavily by the exact same group of people that played weapons factory like it was the same class yeah this is Quake 1 by the way that's why no that is Quake 2 is it these are both weapons factory oh man okay so Team Fortress and Team Fortress were on Quake 1 Team Fortress Classic was on the Half-Life mansion and Garbage and weapons factory was on Quake 2 and Quake 3 many people don't remember that because no one played it it didn't scratch that itch even though it was better in almost every way it didn't scratch it for me either so where did overwatch come from well look at Counter Strike Counter Strike took the core of this game right Action Quake 2 that was the game where you died and didn't spawn again until the next round where the weapons were realistic right and it's like Action Quake 2 that wasn't the primary feature of Action Quake 2 the primary feature of Action Quake 2 was it's like an action movie the primary feature of Counter Strike was when you're dead you don't come back until the next round so they took the aesthetic the feel like the way the game works and that's basically what evolved into Counter Strike those kinds of games but overwatch took a very different element from this it took the feelings evoked in gameplay it took that experience of there aren't a lot of controls or at least they're not that complicated you can dive in and the action starts immediately but they dropped all this other nonsense you don't have to have 18 different kinds of turrets for the marine to throw out independent of the engineer it was actually four kinds of turrets 18 just sounds like a bigger and scarier number it's still a big and scary number so Counter Strike ended up going on to have its own crazy thing and the fact that Counter Strike is still one of the most widely played games and is still like a series that he sport is kind of amazing this is a total aside but when I was making this panel I found a slide from one of our lost Geeknikes panels we did a talk at PAX West back in 2010 about we called it egregiously unrealized potential and we were looking at old games that no one had ever remade like XCOM and saying why doesn't someone remake XCOM it's a tragedy that no one's remade almost everything we talked about that panel has since been remade but I found this slide and it's sort of interesting to the popularity of Counter Strike that the core elements that the people who made Counter Strike borrowed from games like Action Quake 2 were so strong for gamers that Counter Strike remains popular to this day and in 2010 two different versions of Counter Strike were both the number one and number two game played on Steam total that's kind of crazy so Team Fortress 2 also comes from this exact same lineage remember we had made fun of Team Fortress Team Fortress Classic was the game that actually most people played because well arguably it wasn't as good as it was like just there yep and it just worked you didn't have to be a weird nerd writing scripts to make your grenades work the game just worked Team Fortress 2 could have been overwatch it could have been the game that blew up the world and it started to blow up the world then it started to fade I was so excited because my nostalgia you thought about taking a day off work when Team Fortress 2 came out that's not even a joke I was going to take the day off we were like we've been waiting so long for Team Fortress 2 you have no idea because all I wanted was to relive the childhood that I had playing weapons factory Team Fortress 2 was the first game in modern history that was going to give me that experience again all those other games we talked about the weapons factories those were all free mods made by the community the only games that you bought were Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Half-Life you didn't buy any of those they're all mods Team Fortress 2 was the first someone spent a lot of money to develop this Team Fortress for you and that's why it was like oh my god this is amazing so these games are superficially similar there's flags you have or objectives you have to achieve or payloads you have to move you've got classes that have different kinds of weapons but we got to get into the deep details of fundamental game mechanics to see why these games despite being from the same lineage inspired by the same things even based on the same properties in such to some degree ended up being so widely different and having such a widely different fan base Team Fortress 2 brought a lot of elements from these old games like ammo characters have ammo that can run out and you have to go replenish that ammo somewhere that was a big part of old Team Fortress games old weapons factory games and all those things they borrowed the solution for those things they pretty much just borrowed from all those old games you went back you had a little safe zone you could go to and there was ammo there but what's that mechanic actually doing a game it slows the game down it adds extra work you have to do in the game that isn't the fun part to get to the fun part it wasn't fun to run back to the base and stand somewhere and get your ammo back it wasn't fun to be fighting on the front line and be low on rockets and have to give up in retreat that might have made the game more realistic it might have satisfied some game designers desire to make the game play a certain way but the reality was it slowed down the pace of the game and limited the part that was fun because the part that was fun was shooting rockets at someone forever right you just think about like some of those things like just having ammo that's the reason you had ammo is because well Wolfenstein 3D had ammo and then Doom had ammo like you didn't even consider when you're designing your game especially because you're making a mod on that engine you don't even consider like what if we just don't have ammo that's like that doesn't even cross your mind you're thinking about other things like what's the map going to look like right so Overwatch went with a more modern mechanic they dropped the idea of ammo you don't run out of rockets and now you're screwed you just have the sort of the clip the local ammo that is infinite so instead of running out of ammo and having to run somewhere and do something you run out of ammo in this two second exchange where you have to decide when do I hit reload but you never have to go through this longer ritual so it made the beats of the game closer together it made the game faster it made the game more engaging and it thus made the game more like action quake too right by making they did a game mechanically right they went completely outside the box completely nothing like what was done before but actually somehow the feel ended up being more like what was done before so another difference between these two a very specific detail difference was that Team Fortress 2 pretty much all the characters have a shotgun they have their special weapon couple of special weapons and they have like a basic weapon so as a result all the characters have this sort of default option they can use to do damage because that's how all those other games worked weapons factory all those old games everybody had a shotgun and 20 other nonsense weapons as a result the characters felt a lot senior than their character design might appear they look very different they'll have a very different special weapon the special weapon runs out of ammo and everyone in the end just got a shotgun Overwatch said screw that this character has a completely different set of weapons this character is literally just a ball rolling around on the stage like they made everything really different why did everyone have a shotgun in Team Fortress 2 because everyone had a shotgun in weapons factory why did everyone have a shotgun in weapons factory because it was a quake mod the point of all that is that if you're going to look at these kinds of games remakes, nostalgia, anything you really have to distill games down to very fundamental components to be able to have that conversation to be able to understand what it is about a game that you liked that was fun that made the game work and you also have to understand by separating it all out kind of like when you make moonshine some of the stuff that comes out of that still is super poisonous and some of the stuff that comes out is the fun kind of poisonous so you got to balance between the two a lot of times if you make moonshine wrong you get some of the bad poison in with the good if you just take some old game and say, oh, characters had triple jumps in this game so I'll just add triple jumps to my game maybe triple jump wasn't why people liked that game and now everybody's blind right, I mean when I was a kid like super young before my memory I like my moonshine joke before my memory was very good I watched T-Man I had T-Man action figures I had Masters Universe action figures I too you too, watch T-Man I mean, I don't know if anyone else is here is old enough to watch T-Man don't watch T-Man don't I didn't because of the technology level of the day there was no internet no nothing I did not see or hear any he-man again until I was in college and I had internet and said, oh man there's internet now I got an idea I can go back and watch that he-man and in my brain because I'm a stupid animal just like everyone else my brain had good things associated with he-man because I watched it when I was like three so then I found a he-man video and I started watching it and I was like, wow this is bad and it's like I had a good feeling associated with it so my brain wanted more but I didn't remember that actually the thing I wanted more of wasn't actually that good I just had a good feeling associated with it for some other who knows what reason right so people when things get remade these days there seems to always be this like cultural conflict that occurs with every single remake and every single medium and every single genre of no you're changing that thing I want the exact same thing as before unchanged usually someone who remembers the original thing and actually liked it for what it was versus people who have a good feeling associated with the original thing but when you remake it you got to make something different and better otherwise they're going to hate it and that's when you get like you know a Voltron or a She-Ra or something right where it's like, ah yes if we make the original again only these weird nerds will like it we need to make something new and just keep the same characters so that we can actually have anyone pay money for this but paying attention to the weird nerds weird nerds is a mixed bag because especially second third generation game developers game developers and designers who played games and are now making games they'll often borrow elements from games naively they'll borrow them because those elements felt good to them in a time and place and they don't really understand what it was about those elements you see this a lot the most in Models Models have brought so much baggage from the old days that I don't know if you can even separate it from the genre at this point I don't know so if you don't know the first Mobus came from Dota which was a Warcraft 3 mod again a mod and much in the way that all those other mods in Frequake were keeping things like ammo around the mod for Warcraft 3 had to keep certain things because that's how Warcraft 3 worked and you can only change so much in a mod and you had mechanics like last hitting you can only get experience when you play the last hit to kill a guy let's think about this for a second it does 90% of the damage and then I poke him and then I get all the gold what's the deal with last hitting like does anyone actually like last hitting someone does yeah someone definitely does people are really good at it I mean I liked Aerobis right there are people who like you know who don't like Nushira and they like battle demon what purpose does last hitting serve in a game what is it doing to the game or a better question why is it there it's there because all these Mobus are based on a mod called Defense of the Ancients that had last hitting because that's how they made the mod and then the community who played it was into that that was if you changed it those people would get mad and like the tribes people developers were listening to them unlike the Counter-Strike people they didn't listen to the people who were telling them what to do with Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike is still around and tribes too is not it's a little more subtle than that sometimes these things like emerging gameplay can actually really mess this equation up because it so happened that in a lot of the early Mobus if you removed last hitting it removed an element that was of the game that was skill-based and difficult to execute and if you removed that the game became much less skill-based so by removing some of these old elements like being good at last hitting was a way to get better at the game once you've achieved a certain plateau removing that element gave good players less room to grow it gave the fewer like very skill-based avenues to expand your enjoyment of the game and to prove that you were a better player so it became because the game didn't offer other successful avenues of skill demonstration last hitting became integral to being able to demonstrate your skill in the games and simultaneously people were used to it and would freak out if you took it away from them another way to look at this if any of you play roguelikes roguelikes are a very popular type of game which is really just take an existing game and tweak it slightly so like add rogue elements to the game has anyone ever actually played rogue? okay rogue is not you better don't play rogue if you have to play if you go close to rogue just play net hack it's going to be way better so here's an example there's something very interesting because when you use the term roguelike normal people just say oh this game is roguelike because it's like rogue it has some of these elements the main feature of rogue that people think of is a procedural generation so every time you play the game you're going to be getting a different map that the computer just generated like a completely unique game the map is different the places you're going to go are different the other thing is that when you die it's game over you have to generate a new game and start from scratch those are pretty much the two main things that people consider to be like roguelike so what if I said you were objectively wrong because there was a conference where the Berlin interpretation was authored do not read all that the Berlin interpretation is a very long document that explains all of these specific elements that make a game as like rogue as possible with extremely detailed definitions so that you can objectively look at any game and say how roguelike is this game a bunch of nerds are really upset that people are calling things like FTL roguelike and they were like no it's not roguelike it's not enough like rogue and they had to make a whole system to prove how like rogue you are now there is a time and a place for this sort of thing this is a very good job at distilling rogue to its core components it's a good exercise in semantics yeah, taxonomy but it's not a good way to figure out which of those elements are poisonous if you're actually developing a game you should not be using this as a guideline to say this is I should make my game according to this and follow all these rules right? another thing that people tend to bring forward kind of often especially you know with chip tunes with pixel art people will be nostalgic for a lot of things about a game and sometimes the thing is the art the context stuff like this so you'll be nostalgic toward pixel art and sprites because those are the games you grew up playing so people make a game that looks pixely and you feel well inclined toward it in the era where people might be nostalgic toward like old muddy playstation graphics or they might be nostalgic toward the worst possible UX in human history that is the Ravenloff game on the PC it is a first person D&D game that you should never play so on the one hand technical limitations of old systems old consoles old game engines are often good because when you develop games with them those limitations bring about creativity it's like oh well I don't have enough memory to do the thing that I'm imagining I can't really figure out a way to do something else and something amazing appears right I was just at magfest and the composer the Mega Man 2 music was there and of course the first question someone asked him was like hey you made the original music with like keyboards and guitars and drums and pianos right like how did you deal with the fact that you had to play that same music with an NES sound ship and he's like you know to begin with right it was sort of annoying that the NES you know NES version more than the original you know whatever recordings that he had from the studio right so the technical limitations can bring about creativity but not always sometimes they're just limitations you couldn't do what you wanted right so because we have that instance of technical limitations bringing about creativity doesn't mean that they always bring about creativity there's plenty of times where it's like well your game was just Metroid 1 where you could not play this old Ravenloft game on the PC so let's go through briefly we're going to look at a bunch of games and try to distill out of them what are their core elements and because this is the nostalgia panel I only pick games that one of the two of us is nostalgic for so that's the privilege of being up on the stage I guess but Outlaw is an Atari game that I had deep memories of playing as a kid I was obsessed with this game you know what it's great it's still great this game is still great I used it as a kid but I had played it and then when we played it later in life going back to it it wasn't a he-man situation this game is lit right all you do in this game is the two pretzel cowboys and the two pretzel cowboys each have a gun and all you gotta do is shoot the other cowboy and sometimes has a cactus in a way or a moving wagon or something or a wall or who knows what all you do is shoot you can bounce the bullets off the walls you can play with or without ammo it's your choice pretty much it all you do in this game are like many Atari games it is a very simple direct competition game symmetric simple two player fighting directly the games over when it's over like POM like that is an element you do still out of old Atari games because that element even today it's super fun it's really fun to play a really tight two player game but don't draw other elements you don't need to use what like 18 pixels to make the game the western theme is not what made this game right the letting people choose their own modes is not what made this game the soundtrack did not make this game there was no music I can recreate the soundtrack for you right now pew we did a whole hour long talk on Atari game design at a previous tax it's on YouTube so we'll just move on what was great about Super Mario 3 everything yeah but specifically what would we still out of Super Mario 3 what did Super Meat Boy steal from Super Mario 3 I think that's the best thing about Mario 3 and Mario 1 and 2 a little bit less so right is that the controls were so tight and I learned I remember this again because on the plane here I was playing new Mario Brothers U Deluxe on my Switch and they intentionally it seems made the controls on new Mario U a little slippery right even though you're not on ice it feels like I'm on ice right it's like I let go of the right button and I expect Mario to just stop immediately it keeps you moving a little bit on Mario 3 it was on you let go of right you stop right you bear unless you're in the ice level right where it makes sense now this is tricky this gets technical this is something we can't get into the details I remember with Bionic Commando I talked about then to reverse engineer the exact movement and physics of the game because it felt so good this is a side of game design a lot of people don't talk about like in public panels or anything but the math of exactly how your button presses interact with the game that is a science but it's also an art you have to understand what feels good to players and be able to mathematically express that and the shortest path to doing that is to find an old game that felt right and just copy it without knowing why because you're copying such a tiny distilled element that you're unlikely to bring other baggage with you you're not going to bring the weird pixel drawing on the right side of the screen along if you steal the timing on B button presses think about that you press the B button there's a certain amount of lag like fraction of a millisecond before the computer knows that you pressed the B button and now it figures out okay Mario has to throw a fireball that takes a certain amount of time how long should the animation take before the fireball comes out how many frames of animation should you have how fast should you play them you've got 60 frames a second to work with how many frames you're going to spend with the fist how many frames before the fireball appears how fast is the fireball going to bounce forward all those things had to be timed so precisely to the millisecond or it will feel off but if I put 10 milliseconds of lag and you play Mario 3 and the fireball's a little delayed you will know unless you've never played Mario 3 my advice to game developers and designers out there especially at indie studios if there's a game that you're being a spiritual successor to find a pro speedrunner of that game and hire them as a consult like I'm not even joking that is the fastest way to get the exact all you need to do is have them play it and say not feels off not feels off feels right right it's like if I make two batches of cookies you can just sort of tell something different about this one I can't say what but this one's wrong Chrono Trigger the height and end of a genre in many ways what could we steal from Chrono Trigger does anyone really like that grinds like no one wants to level up anyone like grinding people like grinding there's got to be one dude out there who likes grinding old people don't like it but people like grinding was it the characters in the story probably I cared a lot about those characters a little bit I cared about the more than characters in other video games but the big world the million different environments the scope and scale similar to Earthbound Earthbound and Chrono Trigger share one common element well these are many elements but one element that's important is that a sense of scale in what is a pretty simplistic gameplay gives you a lot in a game if I would steal anything from Chrono Trigger it was just that broad sense of scale the world was big and the world was alive even though it wasn't alive it was just a JRPG very similar to many other JRPGs Mega Man 2 Scott's game it's my game I play so Mega Man 2 is nostalgic for me do we need the Berlin interpretation of Mega Man games oh no everyone knows Mega Man games what is a Mega Man game Mega Man games jump and shoot man jump and shoot Mega Man done there have to be enemies that are too low or too high for you to shoot without jumping that's right you also need to have at least nine people in a ring that you can fight in any order you want Mega Man 1 at less than nine yeah that game sucks Mega Man 1 does kind of suck it's not good it's a reason I had Mega Man 2 and 3 and I didn't have Mega Man 1 also because Toys R Us didn't have Mega Man 1 Mega Man is an interesting situation because the distillate Mega Man games what people like about Mega Man is so distilled that we're still making Mega Man games that are basically exactly the same as the old Mega Man games if you took Mega Man 10 and went to me as a kid and handed it to me I would lose at it just as badly as I lost in Mega Man 2 and I'd love every second it is really interesting to see how they made Mega Man 1 2 3 4 right and it's like okay they got 2 it's like they got better right but then they started getting a little not better like 6 7 right it's like it was still the same formula but there was just something about it like maybe someone will say Mega Man 7 is better than 2 but I don't think so right but it's interesting to know that once they went you know they went off they didn't you know keep making it fancier and fancier and it's also they had Mega Man X which is sort of like this we alright we'll make a separate thing where we can do the fanciness and keep upgrading right it was like a separate outlet for their desire to make you know a game where they actually update the technology so if I did still one core element out of Mega Man it would be the fact that Mega Man games to a fault will introduce elements of gameplay and challenges in a very specific and preordained fashion they'll show you a thing and you'll see how it works then they'll show you the thing and now you have to deal with it but there's nothing else in the way you can deal with that thing then they show you the thing with a complication like now it's at the top of a ladder then they have 10 of that thing they give you this very specific progression to learn how to play the game and a lot of games do that you know Mario games do that but Mega Man does it with nine levels to choose from and each level has its own different thing and then if you do the levels in certain orders you'll get items that let you creatively get around it's like alright here's a simple moving platform here's a really dangerous moving platform I got my own platforms thank you I'll just jump over here I'll blow through a bunch of these quickly Super dodgeball old NES game versus competition just like that Atari game the problem with a lot of these old versus NES games everything you distill out of this game is kind of bad because if you actually get good at a lot of these games there's no more skill you're both equally good the game is random or the game literally never ends there's almost nothing you can steal from this game all of its core mechanics break down upon the game all of its core mechanics break down upon further scrutiny right GoldenEye Halo I would argue the only thing to borrow from Halo 1 or GoldenEye on the N64 is that these are the first experiences most people had playing multiplayer FPSs right people had this huge nostalgia for GoldenEye a lot of people do right and the reason is that when GoldenEye came out you don't realize on the PC that was the time when there was the mega TFs and everything I was playing weapons factory and I'd look at this nonsense it was GoldenEye was like this because of the limitations of the N64 but people weren't playing weapons factory because you needed a crazy PC and you need to be a crazy nerd who knew what IP addresses were in order to play multiplayer weapons factory I know this was the first multiplayer FPS that was actually accessible to people that you could actually get and play without having to be a computer nerd so the core element to draw from these games is the fact that you're playing an FPS against someone else in the same room nothing about the actual gameplay was that notable in the era now I said Halo 1 specifically I don't want to I'm not trying to crap all over later Halo I was talking about the first one when Halo 1 came out we were already playing Counter-Strike I don't even know if I want to I don't like MOBAs we don't like MOBAs I've always hated them I like the core of MOBAs right it's like you're on a team you're working together to fight in this isometric view to go destroy the thing on the other side you got these lanes the basic parts I like but every single MOBA I don't like we already talked about last hitting but like complicated item trees a million heroes to keep track of trying to remember what all their powers are lots of the powers are really annoying like ha ha you're frozen or ha ha I'm invisible or ha it's like I can't deal with all that I think what people like though an element I would distill out of all MOBAs is posturing the idea that all these games are in their essence once people are good is you got a bunch of people who are kind of like edging toward each other with very powerful weapons and backing off a little bit and edging forward and then someone edges forward a little too far and then all hell breaks loose that is the most fun part of MOBA so that's the part you got to distill out these games aren't actually that fun in a modern era yeah so I didn't play the King's Quest 1 I'm not that old I played like the later ones where you click the mouse and you right click to change the cursor to be like the eyeball and the finger and the sword and all the other different things or like quest for glories yeah those are a little bit easier to play than King's Quest 1 but the thing is for these games I feel like most people remember like the story that was so epic right the adventure part but actually playing the games these days is really annoying and unfun you remember these obtuse puzzles and obtuse sequence of actions just to continue the story better off as a movie or in entertainment software make it more like a game where you click to make the story continue click to make things happen move around a thing you explore distill that out but don't actually make it puzzles just make it an interactive make it a game as opposed to a game use a different definition of game Metroidvanias what's the one thing about Metroidvanias well I think there's two things about Metroidvanias I said one too bad there's the get item to access new area thing going on right you know it's like I can't get I see some dangerous place in lava I can't get through there then you get the various you know yes you can find the ghost in that lava without dying yes and you explore this whole giant map right and I think the other thing is just like you said about Chrono Trigger the bigness right Super Metroid even today if you play it casually feels big like that map is enormous Symphony of the Night it's a double map this whole thing is upside down on top of itself it's huge right and I've seen a lot of new Metroidvania games and they're just not big it's like dude you don't have the memory limits of a Super Nintendo cartridge anymore why don't you make a game that's like five times as large as Super Metroid you don't need to make more mechanics just make that map insanely big so I could spend like a year exploring it right but newer Super Metroidvania games even if they're good like say Hollow Knight not really as big it's like people need it they distilled different elements out of it this comes back to that Know Your Audience thing do you want Scott to spend money or do you want someone else to spend money Dance Dance Revolution of all the rhythm games except Dance Rush because it's too new we can't talk about it does anyone know where Dance Rush Machine is? anyone know where an arcade is? yeah Dance Dance Revolution the thing you distilled out of it is that unlike all the other rhythm games this one is the closest to actual dancing and moving while still being primarily a game with score and skill yeah there's a lot of them out there like say Parapara Paradise right it's like okay it mostly exists to teach you all these Parapara dances for old Japanese clubs where they used to yeah just dance you're learning like real dances it gives you a score but no one gives a crap about the score right DDR it's like okay it leans a little bit more towards the score side the score matters you're still you're still moving right and then you got down the other end you got pop and music which is just score no dance you just hit the buttons right that's worthless DDR is like this only game that's right in the middle right where it belongs and there's also pop or whatever not pop and music pump pump with the five buttons instead of four buttons I just don't like five buttons it turns out it doesn't matter where the buttons are DigDog old arcade games what do we steal from old arcade games cause actually a lot of old arcade games modern remakes of them tend to get it wrong old arcade games are designed to go on forever and to steal your money they didn't actually have to be that good they just had to steal your quarters right people are nostalgic for these it's a lot of the same reasons I was nostalgic for he-men right it's like because you played it when you were young and put a bunch of quarters in it you have these fond memories but actually the games are not that good I think what you steal is aesthetics and simplicity but never try to remake the mechanics of most of these old arcade games the mechanics where they're usually due to technical limitations like DigDog is actually one of the ones that's actually a good game compared to say like space invaders it's like no you need to do a lot to space invaders to fix it you need to make a more modern shmup like an Icaruga kind of situation natural selection this is an old one everybody played this at all the old natural selection people played Subnautica more people play alright this is the first game they made the Subnautica people made this first it's a mod for Half-Life 1 if you can believe it the weapon doesn't look like it but all the other stuff does yep and there is this sequel they pushed that engine to the limit this game is an RTS and an FPS it is the dream one person is playing an RTS looking at the map with a top town view giving orders building things and then people playing an FPS are going around building the things and following the orders you can be either one but if I had to distill something out of this game because the game ended up being not that fun unless you had the right group of people in it the thing that I would distill out of this game the thing I'm actually nostalgic for is the time and place and people I played it with the community I played the game with was the magic the game just happened to work for that community if you took a different community of gamers and threw them in this game it tended to be a kind of awful experience there were times in which the game got crazy popular and then some servers would be good some servers would be bad it was all about finding the right people who were playing the game the right way and if you had those people playing a different game that game would have been good to verify the core nostalgic element of a game might not actually be the game itself it might be something outside of the game so what about those cushions like there's a map and a million numbers on those games that I love inexplicably that's all you don't play these games there's almost nothing to borrow from these games these games are literally just a product of the limitations of the hardware at the time if you're going to remake these games take characters in story and make a completely different game I love these games I would never actually try to get anyone to play them with me Mario Kart is a whole what's fun about Mario Kart what is the one-sentence explanation of what's fun I think we're different there's like there's two classes of people who play Mario Kart there's people who just want to have fun party time with their friends and for those people it doesn't matter which Mario Kart you play and in fact the double dash one might be the best one in the GameCube because you can get people to actually care about racing and winning and for those people you need to play the GBA Mario Kart because that is the only skill-based Mario Kart it's the Fox Only Final Destination version so last and least Civilization 2 because this is we're going to get into our broader points we've got about 6 minutes left to drive our point home I probably played more hours of Civilization 2 than I have played any game in my entire life with the possible exception of Tribes 2 but how would you play Civ 2 and I'm going to paraphrase because I remember House Count played Civ 2 I played it in a very bad way Scott would basically put himself on a giant island because you can make custom maps in Civ 2 by himself and just play for hours making a giant Civilization uncontested meanwhile the rest of the Civilizations are on crappy islands by themselves on the other side of the world and then I would go with boats and destroy them I would just play the game I would just make a world and just play what I was actually doing like the thing I was getting out of this game was killing time because I was in high school I literally had nothing better to do so the time that you played a game and the context in which you play it is one of the most important things in determining what you enjoyed about a game and what your nostalgic for it's not just the game itself it's what else was out what else could you play at the same time as this game Civ 2 it's not a game to play today but back then there was nothing else like it except Civ 1 that was not worth playing alright so you're making a game and if your audience for that game has a lot of free time like high school kids in the 90s your game can do really well you could make the game same exact game so much better than the original game objectively you improve every aspect of the game but your audience is now 30-year-old people who don't have free time guess what your game is not going to sell now even though it's objectively vastly superior to the original and it's not even just what your life was like because there was a time for money to survive and I just played games all day every day so I would play a lot of games that weren't actually that fun per unit hour spent playing them but I had a lot of time to kill so I was also different the Scott that would sit and play Civ 2 as a game where he just kind of pokes at it for four hours I don't think that Scott exists anymore that Scott's dead he died a long time so if that Rimm and Scott died and then someone remakes the game that we keep saying we're not here to play the game if you think about like we're legacy version right so it's like the old me died and the new me now exist but the only thing that was carried over was this memory I like that thing but nothing else was carried so as much as I want Tribes 2 to be remade I don't think it ever can be because what I want out of Tribes 2 isn't just that gameplay because there are games that get 90% there I would need to also somehow it would need to change my body to make me 20 something years old and put me in college and if a game studio can make that I don't think they need to make games they could just make at that point I think they've made a cult I mean so to get all the way back to the slide in the beginning those games I don't know I've seen people talking about these kinds of Tiger electronics games nostalgically they literally only existed because that was the best technology to entertain children in the backseat of a car before real video games existed before you didn't have enough gameboys for all your kids you could afford these things we're even older we didn't even have those I had these little plastic things with like ball bearings in them that you'd shoot around I had those too but we also had I had that Sonic 3.1 actually specifically I eventually saved up and got a game gear I had a Street Fighter 2 also that was the great best one so in the last hour why do you keep using the slide I love this slide also AGDQ had a really good Simon's Quest speedrun where did we go what's the point of all this one when you play games you need to be able to explain to yourself and understand what are the core elements of that game right what is it this game has a lot of stuff going on it's like if it's a modern game and it's not outlaw but what is the part of the game that we're actually enjoying what makes this game different for you no no no you're getting ahead of me what's it about what are the core elements and then separately of those elements which one actually made it unique a lot of platformers but what was special about that one it might be nothing it might be nothing unique about this game if there's a game you like it might have something special and unique about it was it just that you played that one first what did you personally and specifically like about that game like I'm not gonna this is Kaboom and Atari game that I like but I know in detail exactly what specifically I liked about this game and I know that I will never recapture that it might be that you think the game is good simply because of you not because of anything to do with the game to be a better person let's get outside a game and let's make it all interesting introspect understand why you like things many people are unwilling to do this and even more difficult understand why other people like things you don't like we don't like mobas we hate mobas I hate them but I hate them I do hate them okay that's fine my opinion is okay I shouldn't bother you about why you like mobas I know why you like mobas just because rim hates mobas doesn't mean you're a bad person if you don't agree with them if you don't like someone else's game you should understand why they like that game because then you'll have a deep insight into their darkest soul and even more importantly if you don't like a game you should be able to explain exactly why you don't like it otherwise you're just a hater I hate it because I got out of a hole and then I walked and then I wasn't trying to follow the hole but I fell in the hole anyway also this game is way better than you think so if you understand why you like games you'll know more about yourself you'll be a better gamer you'll be a better person and we are out of time I hope you enjoyed this alright we'll see you guys in one hour we'll learn more about this game okay if you want to see videos of dozens of other talks we've given including the Atari game design one we'll have one of these vintage flyers from 2006 we'll learn what a podcast is these will explain to you in detail what a podcast is and what a pod catcher is does anyone even call the pod catcher somewhere no no no haha