Luca72 said:
I think most of the medium is going to disappear with time as it evolves. The SNES games we talk about now probably aren't going to be discussed by the next few generations who never encountered them naturally. A few standout games will represent each "generation" or "technological jump", but most are just part of the stream.
For example - Hollywood made probably hundreds of movies in the film noire genre. That genre is important because it influences the style of crime movies today. However, we only remember a handful - Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, High Sierra if you want to get crazy. The individual films aren't important, it's the legacy that is.
So a game like Daggerfall or Morrowind might be remembered for their scope. GTA III or IV might be remembered for open world gameplay. Hell, Doom might be remembered as an early FPS. Who knows. But most of the things developers are implementing into AAA games right now are only impressive for this particular moment. If a game is sold on graphics and "realism" alone, it's not going to matter in a few years when graphics have dramatically improved. I remember an Extra Punctuation article where Yahtzee wondered if future generations would think todays games are weird for their pseudo-realistic clay-looking faces. I think that's absolutely correct - what looks impressive now only looks impressive because of what preceded it. What follows will more or less eliminate what we have now.
But the other thing is who really cares if these games disappear? It's all part of the process. That magical experience some of us had with Commodore 64 games or something on the Gameboy is identical to the experience a kid is now having on a PS3 or 3DS. And that kid will grow up to believe his experience was more valid than a kid in 2030 playing a game on his Quantum Processor Crystal. As long as the medium keeps growing and evolving, the individual elements don't matter as much.
We're all footnotes to everything - that's evolution, baby.
Yes and no.
The thing to understand is that with previous generations of games they were really crude and using primitive technology to convey things in a fairly abstract sense. We've gotten to the point in the last couple of generations that artwork pretty much stands on it's own merits and is pretty much perfect for what it is, your seeing pictures good enough where you could publish them or hang them on a wall. The music being created and used is as good as anything mixed in a studio, because really... that's what it is (and studios are using computers for that matter). Technology does move on, but we've reached a point where the improvements are less extreme than they were before. We've gotten to the point where the music is music, and the pictures stand on their own, it's not a matter of saying "well this is good for a sound card" or "we have twice as many colored blocks in our pixel pile as the other guy", if we want photo
realism it can be done, but arguably we still see a lot of 2D still art and such because photo realism isn't what
always works.
One of the things that came up with this generation of games in paticular is that it wasn't so impresssive compared to the last generation that people lost all interest in those games. Heck, huge amounts of effort have been made just to modify PSone games so they can be resold to run on current systems because that is what people want, many games from that era still hold up, and find new fan bases today. It's also why backwards compadibility has become such a big issue, fans wanting to keep their libraries, but companies realizing they can make money by re-selling people the same products.
As far as older games from the SNES, Genesis, etc... those games survived and became timeless largely because of their relatively small size, and the ease of emulating them. Tons of people, including new gamers, play those games nowadays because really you can get your hands on dozens of them with minimal effort. One of the first things that seems to happen with portables is people finding ways to emulate a lot of that stuff for them. Realizing this is in part why you periodically see companies re-releasing compilations of old games (Sonic's Genesis Connection, etc...).
The big question with the games of this generation is largely going to be accessibility, they are simply too large to easily store, transmit, and archive in bulk. Later this might change, but by the time it does, there are questions as to how much of this stuff will still be out there, though I imagine it will endure to some extent. I also suspect over the next few years of the next generation companies will begin doing whatever it takes to re-sell copies of old games in the new formats.
Overall though my point is that I think claiming any generation of games is really "dead" is pushing things. As much as it might make sense on paper, there have been huge communities dedicated to nothing but emulation and abandonware, and similar things, many of which don't advertise because of technically being involved in piracy, or existing in a shaky legal gray area. Overall the less official attention the better. Today's games are going to be tomorrows fodder on emulation and abandonware sites in 10-15 years with thousands of new gamers discovering old treasures constantly.
