Music has Motown, Basketball has James A. Namesmith, and videogames have the coin-op arcade cabinets. It is important to every man, woman, and child to know where they come from, what it is that makes them who they are. Videogames are no different.
When Micro$oft rolled out the Xbox Live Arcade to go along with the 360 and the Wii followed suit with it’s Virtual Console hundreds of previously forgotten about classics had new life breathed into them, and justifyably so.
Legendary titles like Golden Axe (my personal all-time favorite) and Super Mario Bros. should never be cast aside for the sake of polygons and Blu-Ray HD-DVD Players.
Seriously, what is more kick ass than a 7 foot dude with an axe named Death Adder?
Without these titles, which laid the foundation for the mega-success the videogaming industry is today, who knows what would’ve come of our little 1’s and 0’s. After Atari single-handedly crashed the market in 1983 with colossal stink-a-roo’s like E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark things looked pretty bleak until Nintendo came on the scene in 1985 with their NES and upstart Sega, previously a division of Tonka Industries, released the Sega Master System.
Thankfully the developers of Raiders of the Lost Ark held true to the movie right down to Indy’s pink warmup suit and the scene where he transverse the blue void to get the ancient Hockey Stick of Rah.
Ok, enough with the history lessons. The point is not only were these classic titles needed in the mid-80’s but they are need now as well. We need to remind the newer generations of gamers that not everything was about how maxxed out your Pokemon was, how many hours you logged into Final Fantasy VII or your worldwide rank in Rainbow Six: Las Vegas’ multiplayer. It was about getting that high score, maximizing every last second from that quarter, and fun.
For anyone with these consoles that offer a trip back to the Golden Age of Gaming sans a tricked out Dolorean you owe it to yourself to check out where gaming came from.
“Know you roots”? “Micro$oft”? Has a 13-year-old taken over buttonmashing.com?
@mgroves – It’s like a reflex for someone to write Microsoft with the $. It’s unavoidable. I fixed the typo, though.
I didn’t even own a Gensis and I logged a lot of time on Golden Axe. That was a good time.
Heh, I’ve been adding the “$” in Microsoft since I can recall, I didn’t even know I did it until I checked I read this, too funny.
I do try to strive to be young at heart, maybe not 13 young particularly because that was a rather acne-filled period for me but young nonetheless.
Hopefully the point, which was that these games should be enjoyed by generations to come and to understand and appreciate their simplicity got across. If not, well then I guess I just suck at getting my point across.
heh, always remember, “you can only be young once, but immature forever”
Yup, and I really need to proofread these first before publishing them!!!
Ah. Grammar notwithstanding, DR, you just keep getting better and better. I loved the Indy description.
I just picked up SMB2 and Adventures of Lolo today and put about an hour into both. The nostalgia was overwhelming.
I can’t wait to blasted move (less than two weeks) so I can devote more time to playing and writing.
Appreciatethat, Nat, nomally, well in real lif anyway, I am quite articulate, online… not so much 🙂
I played so much Golden Axe this past year. My friend downloaded an arcade emulator and all the greatest games, and we went to town on that thing so much.
I’m actually in the process of building a homemade arcade cabinet that i’m going to stuff my old gaming machine in and get some of those arcade gamepad controllers…
it’s going to be sweet.
Every now and then I pine over any Golden Axe cabinet that is for sale on Ebay, my goal is to have one in my basement in my next house and it will be mine, OH YES, it will be mine!!!