I started playing video games in the SNES era.
I actually had plenty of computer games when I was little, perhaps the most prominent ones in my memory were a kid-oriented exploration game called Cosmic Osmo, and a somewhat more famous title made my the same pair of brothers a few years later by the name of Myst. But when I was 10, I got my first true video game console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. And indeed, I had spent a great deal of time at friends' houses playing games like Super Mario World, Secret of Mana, and Donkey Kong Country 2.
Maybe about ten years ago, 8-bit graphics, from the prior, NES generation, had something of a comeback in art and culture. T-shirt adorned with images of 8-bit Mario or Pac-Man started popping up, and you had things like Scott Pilgrim vs The World, a movie based on a series of comics that were both largely inspired by early video games.
In more recent years, I imagine as people more in my age group who might have been a little young to have played the NES when it was the current system have become content creators, it seems as if 16-bit graphics like those of the SNES have entered a similar space in terms of nostalgia. Capable of greater fine detail and a broader range of colors than the 8-bit era, the sprites and images of the 16-bit period are, to my mind, more aesthetically pleasing. In particular, the big RPGs from Squaresoft out of that era: Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana, had a uniform and effective art style that seems to be the best example of the 16-bit era's look.
But it got me thinking: will this nostalgia train keep rolling into the N64 era?
The N64 came out the year that I got my SNES, and though it feels as if they were very different times, I actually wound up getting mine a mere year later. The N64 was a revolutionary system, and really shepherded video games into the 3D era. The N64, along with the new Playstation, saw many of the game franchises we'd known for years as two-dimensional, sprite-based worlds translated into fully three-dimensional spaces. Sure, there was plenty of cheating, like how Final Fantasy VII largely had three-dimensional characters in front of pre-rendered two-dimensional backgrounds, but Super Mario 64 really wrote the rules on how to do a game in 3D, maybe most importantly in how they introduced the idea of having the player control the virtual camera (in the game, they justified it as a Lakitu hovering around with a camera.)
Translating once-2D games into 3D was the driving ethos behind the era, such that we wouldn't get another traditional side-scrolling Mario game for a decade.
And graphically, the old sprite system didn't really work when you wanted to be able to see objects (and more importantly, characters) from every angle. So graphics needed to shift into a totally new system. But it was a new process, and the power required to render these things in real time was pretty massive, meaning that we got blocky characters with low-resolution textures.
In terms of gameplay, this era was absolutely revolutionary. But in terms of graphics, it was, well, ugly.
It didn't seem like it at the time. I remember seeing a television spot for Ocarina of Time (which is now basically the Seven Samurai of video games - a standard choice for greatest of all time) and being blown away at how good it looked, but man, if you go back to it now, it's all blocky models and stretched, blurry textures. I think compared to other games of its era, it was a big improvement, but you'd never confuse it for, say, Breath of the Wild.
Graphics improved profoundly in those early eras - the Gamecube/PS2/Xbox era saw things get a lot better - consider, for example, that Super Smash Bros. and Super Smash Bros. Melee came out a mere two years apart from one another, and yet they seem like they come from different centuries (which is actually true!)
But, largely due to the way that you get diminishing returns with processing power - like how the difference between a 60-polygon object and a 600-polygon one feels huge, but the difference between one with 6000 and 60,000 is barely noticeable - graphics seem to have hit a bit of a plateau, or rather, the improvement has been in subtler areas like lighting.
Playing the remake of Shadow of the Colossus, it got me thinking about whether we'd ever have a nostalgia for that PS2 era of graphics. In terms of games, I actually have plenty of fond memories of that video game era. The PS2 was a period in which I felt a greater drive to try out new games, and it seemed as if that console had a massive library.
But while it was a massive improvement over the previous era (32-bit, 64-bit... the whole "bit" nomenclature kind of broke down) a lot of games from that period still look pretty awful by modern standards. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - the GTA game I've definitely played the most - looks way, way better in my memory than it actually does. I popped it back in a couple years ago and was totally shocked at how blocky, chunky, and flat it looks.
The Shadow of the Colossus remake, at least of what I've seen, basically does not change the gameplay at all. The Colossi are (I think) in the same places, and work the same way. It's really the same game, but in many ways, it now actually looks the way that the original looks in our memories.
So is there value to the old, chunkier version of the game? Or are we simply to move on and allow this remake to be the definitive version of the classic?
To put it another way: was the dawn of 3D graphics merely the first step toward photorealism that subsequent generations have only improved upon, or is there something there that modern graphics left behind that is worth preserving?
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