Because early developers couldn’t render graphics to look live true-to-life footage, they had to market their games on new ways to make games an enjoyable experience devoid of visual or auditory wow. Capcom’s Street Fighter II incarnations did this perhaps the best. Only slight graphical improvements were made from one version of Street Fighter II to the next, but the game play was changed quite a bit. Whether it was the inclusion of new moves for the player-characters of the now-standard scoring system for combo attacks introduced late in the series’ career, Street Fighter II games relied heavily on new game play options to continue drawing players in. With contemporary games, gamers are all too often content to be impressed with more spectacular graphics even if the game they are playing is the same game they have played numerous times before.

Retro games are classics for all of these reasons. With the focus on challenge and innovation they are still enjoyable today. Will gamers really be playing Halo or Black ten years from now, or will they have moved on to the next big thing? My guess is that they will have moved on. A game doesn’t last without winning game play.

That is not to say however that all contemporary games are doomed to be forgotten. There are many games out there who are very much so new age while still retaining old-school principles. God of War, for example, was a graphical feast with a soundtrack worthy of a motion picture. But the game play was king. God of War’s combat engine and level design captured the precision and intensity of the classic games while giving asking for the more problem-solving based skills needed in current games. The game’s most unique game play element—the “Simon” like mini-games—asked for the reaction time and coordination needed for classic games, and while the player-character Kratos demonstrated a wide-variety of combat moves the controls were simple and easy to learn. God of War marries new technology with old ideas; that is the reason why it was accepted so well critically and commercially.

And even games that lose the old-school ideas in favor of technological innovations aren’t bad games. They demand new sets of skills that are just as handy outside the gaming world as the skills their ancestors asked for. These skills are more related to abstract skills of creativity and open-ended thinking, and there are less enjoyable ways to develop these skills than playing games.

And the greatest irony is that, as mentioned earlier, retro games are starting to rely on new technology to survive.

Gamers should never forget their roots. Playing retro games not only enforces a set of skills that can import nicely to current titles but also lets gamers—especially younger gamers—experience games when game play trumped presentation. There’s no better way to examine anything than when it was stripped down and in its raw form, and video games are no exception.

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