2026-10-25
I have lately been fascinated by old games. I've been spending a good portion of my free time in those worlds from another time.
And by this I don't simply mean booting up an old game and playing it. Instead, I've been recreating the experience of playing those games back when they were new, as closely as possible.
Like, one of the last games I played was Flashback, on a Sega Mega Drive plugged into a Sony Trinitron from (I think) 1997 or 1998.
What draws me to this is not purely nostalgia. At least that's what I like to think.
Of course, games were made for profit back then too. But it was still a fairly small industry, seen as a children's toy, and most people working in it were there because they loved games, not because they were looking for the best return on their money. Even those who did want profit didn't really know what would sell: there was no telemetry, no player data, no A/B testing. Development was cheap, so they gambled, and some of those gambles were completely insane: a talking fish you raise in an aquarium, a game based on someone's dream diary.
I'm not saying that there are NO games anymore that are made out of passion; there definitely are, some of them fantastic. But today, market logic shapes everything: the engine, the mechanics that recur in every second game, the platform it runs on, because that's what is expected to sell. This is also why, for example, playing a 90s game as a re-release on Steam doesn't "do it for me".
Obviously I do use and appreciate Steam, especially compared with basically every other big gaming platform, but it still operates on technofeudalist logic. Achievements try to keep you on the platform with short dopamine boosts. Every game comes with digital trading cards that you can buy for real money and trade on the platform's own marketplace… But I don't wanna get into this too deeply here, I'm veering off course.
Playing a game like Flashback on original hardware feels finished, unhurried. Nobody is trying to sell me anything.
made by Hagbard Celine | hagb.cel@proton.me