Why does eating a mushroom make a plumber large? Doesn’t matter, it’s fun! How does Pokemon biology work? Who cares, I’m going to spend the rest of my life catching these critters! I love this era – realism and common sense never got in the way of play or sheer joy and wonder of these digital playgrounds for kids. Įarly classics like Super Mario Bros (1983), Sonic The Hedgehog (1991), and Pokemon (1996) emphasised things that children my age would like – fun gameplay and fun characters. This was when arcade games were reaching the end of their popularity and 3rd gen and 4th gen video game consoles (notably 1983’s Famicom/NES, 1990’s Super NES, and 1988’s Sega Genesis) were coming in strong.Ī large number of popular triple-A titles became introspective and started to use cinematic storytelling techniques to tell narratives full of character growth and weightier themes of responsibility. Let’s start where I started, in the late 80s to late 90s, in what I’m going to arbitrarily call the Childhood Era. That got me thinking about the video games I always love: how have they changed over time, and how might they continue to evolve? I’m, of course, speaking only from my perspective, as a boy born in the 1980s who grew up with popular video game trends practically marketed specifically towards my demographic. “Well, that’s to be expected,” I responded, “the media we love tend to grow and change as the people who make them grow and change.” (I didn’t have the heart to remind him that Star Trek admirals have always been evil, though.) “The universe has gotten darker and everyone just shoots everyone,” he said, “and the admirals are all inexplicably evil.” My friend and I were talking about the new Star Trek: Picard recently, and he was complaining about how the series wasn’t the same as The Next Generation.
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