Reflections on the Evolution of Gaming (part 2)

Reflections on the evolution of Gaming (part 1)

I have a few more thoughts to add to my last post. Occasionally I’ll find myself trying to explain concepts that make perfect sense to me but are completely foreign to my kids, such as long-distance telephone calls and how cheat codes propagated before the advent of the internet. There was a major shift in technology dealing with how we communicate between the late 90’s and the late 00’s. In between those times, there was this weird transition phase with things that are considered archaic, like limits/costs on text messages and a separate version of the internet designed for non-smart phones. It’s sort of like growing pains for teenagers, and how different parts of the body grow to their adult shape/size at different times, leading to awkward and gangly looking kids.


Likewise, console gaming went through a similar phase during the transition between 2D and 3D, which mainly affected the Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, and N64, which I consider to be the awkward teenager stage of gaming. Adam Koralik has said that his favorite generations of consoles were the 4th and 6th generations, corresponding to Nintendo’s SNES and Game Cube eras. His reasoning is that the designer/programmers developed the concepts and found out what they could and couldn’t do on the NES and N64 systems and learned how to make the games for those systems, but were somewhat limited by the technology. When the next generations came out, they could finally make the games they were intending to make all along. I firmly believe that the game Miyamoto was trying to make was A Link to the Past, but was unable to do so when he made the original Legend of Zelda, and likewise, something like Twilight Princess is what the Ocarina of Time developers had in their head but had to scale it back quite a bit to fit the N64’s capabilities.

During that era, there were certain practices that are considered weird by today’s standards that we just had to accept, and they all pretty much came about because of hardware limitations and other considerations. I’m going to mainly compare the original Playstation and the N64 here for these examples. Games like Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII got around the PSX’s inability to create large 3D spaces by having the backgrounds be pre-rendered static images while the 3D characters were limited to where they were allowed to move. The 3D models were fairly blocky and didn’t have a lot of texture mapping. Because of the relatively large amounts of disc storage (for the time, anyway) developers could include pre-rendered video clips as cut scenes, and some games actually had CD quality music played and recorded with actual instruments instead of digitized music or MIDI files. While loading times are still a thing these days, they were looooooong back then, and programmers tried all sorts of things to mask loading times. Another fairly unique characteristic was the “jitter” that accompanied polygons due to not having floating point values.

Meanwhile, on the N64, there were things such as an odd mixture of 2D sprites on 3D planes (like the trees on Super Mario 64 or the racers on Mario Kart), oddly the reverse of FFVII. Characters were still blocky, but slightly less so than the PSX. Both systems did camera tricks to show off the 3D capabilities, like how it swerves in/out/around the characters during a battle on FFVII, or the Lakitu Bros camera flying around Peach’s castle which both gave a tour/aerial view in addition to showing off. Due to cartridge limitations, pre-rendered Full Motion Video was basically out of the question, and was replaced with real-time rendered motion capture clips. These are still in use today, as the big advantage is smaller storage requirements but also having it reflect the situation accurately. By this I mean that games like Rogue Squadron will show the pre- and post-level cut scenes with whatever vehicle is chosen by the player instead of playing the clip of the suggested/preferred ship for the level. Music was still mainly produced internally by the sound chip, but there were instances of digitized music from real sources (like the Star Wars theme in Shadows of the Empire).

Another interesting relic of this “growing pains” period are the FMV games. With CD-ROM technology, it was far easier to store video clips, and it made developing what are basically, “choose-your-own-adventure” games that don’t involve much playing, just pushing a button to make a decision here and there. It sounds all fine and dandy, but these games spend their budget on sets, actors, costumes, and other usual TV/movie stuff instead of artists and level designers. In theory, these games should be easier to make because there's no need for programming hit boxes, background/foreground layers, and palettes - just links to video files, and graphically it was assumed they would be more appealing because they're actual video as opposed to looking like 16-bit pixels. The goal was to blur the line between game and movie. But in almost all cases, the actors aren’t even good enough to appear in B-movies, and the sets are clearly the cheapest stuff they could find. The most well-known example (and probably the best game in this category) is Night Trap. Due to the low quality of the “games,” their popularity quickly waned when the novelty of CDs wore off. These kinds of games also introduced us to the concept of quick time events, which is where players are prompted to push buttons during a cutscene to make them more interactive.

Voice acting is much better these days, though not perfect. But in the earliest instances of it, it was far more likely to be terrible. The scene between Dracula and Richter Belmont is one of my favorite examples of this. Again, this comes down to hiring bad actors to save money. All of this came about because the door was opened by the monumentally larger storage capacity of the CD (as compared to cartridges), which is both good and bad. It was good because it lessens some of the constraints developers had been fighting for years and because it reduced costs on the manufacturing side; but it was also bad because a lot of developers felt that they had to fill the disc with content to help consumers feel like they got their money’s worth, choosing to do previews, licensed music, video cutscenes, or other filler and fluff. Something can also be said about limitations breeding creativity.

Something else that moved along the evolutionary track is how controllers work and how they are shaped. They started out as a button and a stick (Atari), but as time went on, the stick was replaced with a D-pad, and more buttons were added. Various other control schemes were tried along the way - track balls, number pads, dials - as well as different button arrangements and controller shapes. For fun, compare the proliferation of NES controller variations versus how few there are for today’s consoles. Over time, most controllers have sort of morphed together to become very similar. The current version of the PS5 controller, the X-Box Series X controller, and the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller have dual grips with mostly the same buttons/sticks in 

the same places (other than the left D-pad and stick being swapped on the PS). Sure, there were some hiccups in development along the way - motion controls, pressure sensitive or differently sized/shaped buttons, touch screens, 3 grips, and memory card slots - but eventually good ideas won out over bad ones and we seem to have settled on the ideal controller, at least one that works well enough for games in general. There will always be the random odd example like the DDR Dance Pad, light guns, or the Guitar Hero guitar, but the modern controller has the right amount of buttons and the right configuration for 98% of games.


Right in step with the controller development was how games were programmed to be played. Super Mario Bros popularized the, “B runs and A jumps” concept that most games have followed suit out of habit, and ones that don’t just feel . . . wrong. When 3D games first hit the scene, there wasn’t a ton of thought put into how one would control them, and many of the earlier games have really bad/awkward controls. Eventually, though, a game comes along with such good controls that most games started emulating it. Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 come to mind as examples of doing it so right that most games handle like them these days. Different ways of handling FPS and Third-Person views were tried but now they almost all control the same, which makes picking up a new game in the same genre a much gentler transition. Just like evolution in species, the good ideas persist and the bad ones get left by the wayside. Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat were the games to revolutionize fighting game controls, which still persist to this day.


I’m excited to see where this pastime goes, but hopefully we don’t forget the lessons of the past along the way.

Reflections on the Evolution of Gaming (part 3)