Maybe Logging 100 Hours On NES Games Should Be A Requirement For All Unity Game Developers

... to understand level design, game-play, etc.

But who knows. What a disconnect. Lol I am sorry but this honestly makes me seriously wonder if kids are really getting smarter. Such a challenge figuring simple things out. Makes me wonder if all of these FPS games have wired their brains to only think about graphics and shooting.

At least there are a few who appreciate arguably one of the greatest most well known games of all time. And interesting they all appear to be pulled into the game despite what their comments are.

 

As an artist playing games helps you for analyzing levels and its design and you earn some experience.

But I don't think this will be a requirement in the nearest future as AAA companies look at your "years of experience doing X" rather than "hours of playing X type game"

 

This is not a requirement to making video games.
Developers of Nintendo games didn't play 100 hours of Nintendo games because there were not many Nintendo games until a developer made more Nintendo games.
See the logic?

 

Ha ha. Yeah I get that. I mainly shared it for the nostalgia and figured others might find it interesting how modern teens (at least these) react to the NES and SMB. It's lighthearted not meant to be deeeeeep.

 

I get ya. It was hilarious!! lol
I even commented on the video some weeks back.

 

It is really amazing how people forgot about the NES.

Lots of Great games on that system

 

While teens cant make sense of NES, old people can't use modern toasters properly. :/

 

Simply..no. Beat the Unity game engine and you have something that can put bacon on the table. Now..100 hours of that before you can begin spamming the work for hire forums..Yes.

 

Lol! Imagine updated collaboration forums with MMORPG stuff:

About me:
I have very little programming experience but I still learn. However I am a good leader and make good ideas! I also spent thousands of hours playing WoW.

 

I've always been pretty sure most are doing just the opposite.

 

I blame Texas. I'll put these in spoiler tags because from experience in showing these to people, I know not everyone can handle it. It's old news, but yea, this happened:

Spoiler: NSFW

One
Two
Three

 

I don't see anything wrong with those. But I guess I'm probably just "anti-intellectual."

Anyway that's headed toward politics so back on topic:
I'd rather spend 100hrs making games than playing them.

 

Yeah, but most NES games sucked hardcore ass. A few discovered the basics of what it's now called "game design" by pure accident or intuition.

I often wonder why do people think there's no value in learning from what's been done.

 

I think this wouldn't be controversial though, because it was universally laughed at and did NOT make it into legislation anywhere. I agree anyway to keep things not-political just in case a tangent leads to an actually controversial political topic.

I wouldn't mind a 'game history' class to take instead of american history. We have to take american history like 10 times in school, I think we won't immediately become terrorists if we skip one of the many duplicate WW2 classes.

 

You don't need no history class and NES you need to go play those games

 

Studying NES games isn't too helpful if you're making 3d games, at least not so much that it should be a requirement. I mean its better than nothing obviously and there is stuff you could learn, but there are more relevant games you could study. It's like saying a film director should be required to watch 100 hours of black and white movies from the early 1900s...

 

Untrue, companies like Nintendo, Capcom and Konami knew what they were doing from the get go. There was no stumbling upon game design and most of their games are gems. LJN, on the other hand, sucked HAAAARD at game making!!!

 

I thought this would be a good subject for some lively discussion. Another video is the teens reaction to Mike Tyson's Punch Out which they all seemed to like a lot.

I often look to these older games for inspiration and to better understand game play. 3D does not change the rules. Some people just think it does. It is still about play mechanics, interacting with the game world, objectives, obstacles and balancing it all. And yes what makes it a great study for game design is contrasting the games that really sucked with those by companies such as Konami and Capcom who made some of my favorite games. Studying such games shows how to make a fun game and drives the point home that high def superb quality graphics do not make a great game.

 

If you ask me, kids should be forced to start playing games we grew up with when they reach the age of 5 or so. Every 6 months upgrade them to a new console, that way they can respect what we humans have done.

Give them an NES, 6 months later an SNES, 6 months later a SEGA Genesis, 6 months later a Sega CD, then Sega Saturn, then Dreamcast, then PS1, then N64, then PS2, Xbox, PS3, Xbox360, PS4, Xbox One.

I bet you throw these kids today a SNES game it would take them forever to win Super Metroid.
God I miss the old SNES games and stuff.

 

When teens today become adults they'll say the same thing.

"God damn virtual reality! I remember when we actually used controllers, it's just not the same anymore!!"

I do think teenagers have been more attracted to the graphics now-a-days, I actually remember when (I think) they reacted to Minecraft or something, one of the teens said that "Why would I want to play this game? It has terrible graphics, when you could be playing something with better graphics, like CoD."

As for logging on hours on NES for game design, I was unfortunately was not born in the age of NES, so I did not have the luxury of playing the "golden ages" of games that you've had on an NES. ;C.

To conclude... Ya'll are just old.

 

That is something I have been wondering. Games these days seem to be so simple. Granted many of the old school games were stupid hard like 1 hit, 1 wrong turn and you were dead. Back to beginning of level. And usually while you were trying to figure out what in hell you were supposed to even be doing. But in comparison games today seem to hold your hand a lot at least in the beginning.

 

Then, play them and don't make them.

EDIT: It was only slight dyslexia that led to that remark. But still, encouraging other people to torture themselves leads to incredible character growth, for them.

 

Dude give me a break the vast majority of NES games were horrible. You can't just pick the few best companies and say oh nes games were great... That's revisionist history!

 

And Nintendo Entertainment System was not "the get go". Home console video games almost died completely before NES even came along. There were years of bad games on many consoles, basically like the app market today, crap was everywhere. Nintendo Entertainment System was no exception to this.

 

A lot of the games definitely sucked. I have a library of 40 NES games right now. Just started collecting them a few months back. Out of those 40 about 8 are what I consider good games.

BUT... one of the reasons I like retro gaming so much is the vast amount of things they tried. I have always thought they had some cool ideas but the implementation sucked. The programming was often very poor. Or they did dumb things like tying enemy appearance to a specific location. You could literally walk right kill enemy. Walk left a bit. Walk back right kill enemy. Repeat forever. Lazy implementation.

Still they had a lot of good ideas. So I always thought man I wish I could have worked on that. It could have been such a great game! Anyway they are good for inspiration, they are good for what not to do and about 20% or less are good for what to do.

 

I just did.
Those companies had games to remember and 2 out of 3 of them were established well before video games exists. Which means they knew how to make games(not video games) for kids.
Many companies made bad games, but why should I care?
Question: Anybody played Dirty Harry on NES?

 

That's the thing, though, I think it's less "oh, they sucked!" (a modern interpretation of many of those games) and more, "they didn't really know what they were doing in the first place." In 1985, they didn't have the benefit of Game Design curriculum. They didn't have Digital Art classes. They didn't have Writing for Interactive Entertainment 101. They had a few KB on a ROM chip, and whatever they walked into the room with. Oh, and computers with kilobytes of memory of their own.

There was no Unity. If you wanted a better animation system/rendering system/whatever, you had to go uphills both ways while writing assembler files, and pray to God (or, the deity of your choice including but not limited to no deity at all) that you didn't brick your machine (this was before bloatware made computers cost a reasonable amount, mind you), or at least, didn't overlay memory onto the wrong sequence of addresses, or didn't introduce a memory leak. ...And they liked it!

 

Absolutely I agree they were experimenting and trying to figure out what makes a game good. More than that they were experimenting trying to figure out how to even do things period (programming wise).

When I mentioned "I always thought man I wish I could have worked on that. It could have been such a great game!" what I meant was... at the time I was programming on my trusty old C64 in Assembler. And a main reason of how I gained a lot of experience in development was by trying to figure out how to duplicate things I saw in the commercial games of the time. Only make them better. Fix the implementation. So, I often would code up a first level or at least a screen or two (for scrolling games) worth of a game. Try to duplicate the cool stuff. And fix the bad stuff. So, I know it was possible for them to make the games better! But again a lot of them were inexperienced programmers. And most of the time the projects were rush rush got to hit the deadline. So a different environment. I had the luxury of spending as much time on R&D as I wanted to fully master stuff.

I guess that is another reason I have such fond memories of that time and enjoy retro games. It is when I first got "the bug" for game dev.. And I came up with solutions for issues. Like I knew there had to be a better way of tracking what the player and enemies were currently doing. So I called it actions. And realized I could make them do whatever I wanted achieving complicated behavior by chaining the actions together. I called that action chaining. At the time I did not realize it but on my C64 in Assembler I was using what I would later discover the eggheads called state machines.

But I definitely appreciate the challenges they had. We had to optimize our code greatly in those days. Literally counting CPU cycles. I used to know exactly how many cycles each instruction on the Motorola 6510 CPU took to execute. And yeah they had to cram as much as they could into a little space. That's why tile maps came along. Something I still think is smart to use even today.

Anyway, I am just rambling now so will shut up. lol

 

Most of our game designers clock about 2hrs a day at work playing WoW. Does that count?

 

That's a great work environment!

Hey with your team's experience with Unity I am sure you all could knock out a good little Christmas game with just 20 minutes per day over the course of a week. Just in case any are getting bored with WoW. Lol

 

Thing is,

while I've played games longer than most of the forum's been alive, I have to call bs on this one. You see, most of the old games were designed like poop, played like poop and had absolutely no connection to modern day gaming. Level designs were atrocious as was the playability.

Original mario's physics wouldn't ever pass muster these days, even on the most primitive indie title. Rose tinted glasses and great memories - yes. Relevant for today's gaming theory? nope.

Far better idea is to take the best recent titles and work toward something new. Do I have an edge having played the classics? Yes - but only because I played them when it was relevant. I cannot recommend them as good source material to learn from for an aspiring designer today. The fact is most of those games did not want to be those games. They're approximations and compromises. They wanted far more, smoother physics, more realistic graphics - proper 3D - all these things were pipe dreams, and what you're left with are games which were designed with non stop compromises. These days, there's almost no compromise.

And this is coming from someone who was there at the start. Gaming and game development has come a long, long way, and there's no good lessons to learn from the classics, except perhaps incredibly unfair difficulty, zero tutorials and bad unforgiving design.

Was a hell of a lot of fun at the time though

 

That's true. I see them as mainly some great ideas that were unrealized. But there were some games that were good. Just not very many. But then I think the same could be said for today's games especially mobile games. I recently started checking some out and it is amazing how simplistic some are. Some actually look like an early WIP thrown out on the market. Of course, they look glossy (usually) though.

Also, I guess it is a matter of personal preference but I hate the feel of games supposedly using "real" physics. Maybe it is just how people are tweaking the values but to me it is often like the player is in a low G environment. Too floaty.

 

You also need to log 100 hours coding in Perl using while using vim through an SSH tunnel to modify a script that will do the actual code update after all the services have been brought down safely in order and then bring everything back up in order safely or else automatically revert, having logged all changes and sent out the appropriate emails -- and worst case scenario paging the sysadmin if email is down.

And it should survive Chaos Monkey.

 

You don't care?
I direct you to my signature.

 

As an "older gentleman", I agree with @hippocoder - those old-school games are incredibly fun and nostalgic (I currently own and use an NES, SNES, c64, Amiga 500, etc). In 95% of cases though, they are NOT a lesson in good game design. They can be useful in a what-not-to-do kind of way though...

Having said that, I'm building a game design career making homage games to the 1987 classic "Dungeon Master", so there is certainly merit in a healthy knowledge of video game history. Just because a lot of those games are more frustrating than fun these days, doesn't mean they aren't full of amazing inspiration.

 

This thread may be going off topic but just wanted to mention when my dad was young he had to walk 6 miles to school... up hill both ways. I heard that several times growing up.

Anyway, I think there is some value in studying the older games. Some people don't. That's reasonable. We're all different. But mainly I posted this because I was doing some research trying to find videos of reactions to playing different games. Wondered if there even was such a thing and found this video. And a few more. So figured I'd throw it out for people to see, get a little nostalgic and find out if anyone thought the old games had anything to teach us.

 

I agree completely. I use them as inspiration. They had a lot of solid ideas just failed on implementation due to lack of skill or technological limitations of the time. I remember playing Dungeon Master. Be very cool to have a modern game like that.

 

You can learn from those games the essence of what games are. Because that's all they are.

They didn't have the capabilities to compete with film in terms of storytelling, so they didn't. They had to rely on just the game itself.

If your game isn't fun with NES graphics, your game isn't fun.

That's what the take away should be.

 

So true. But that's the thing with the inspiration. Maybe dungeon master really wanted to be full on atmospheric 3D at the time. Maybe it wanted the feeling of you actually being there. Maybe it wasn't the original design but what they had no choice with given the hardware of the time.

It's interesting that we're being inspired by limitations, not by freedom.

 

That's only an analysis of the graphics. Maybe that's not the part of the game people found inspiring.

Edit: Or maybe people did admire the artwork.

2nd edit: In my experience, when I am inspired to draw something, other people are inspired by it... So you could be observing people being fired up by other people being on fire.

But I'm telling you, it's not the exact execution that people fall in love with but the idea behind it. Otherwise games like Terraria and Minecraft couldn't have players, because they're just trying to be something they never can...

 

I think that might be the main thing that the older games have to offer - given the limitations of the platforms at the time, game designers were forced to boil down their concepts to some very simple, pure gameplay mechanics. When you're severely limited in resources, you need to think very carefully about what's in and what's out, and often that can result in a much more critical analysis of what works and what doesn't.

 

You said exactly what I said but in a way that makes more sense to you. I agree.

 

Yes, that's a very interesting way of thinking about it.

 

This thread maybe could head to Game Design forum, if enough people contribute or ask for it.

 

Well... I was just talking about the game designers. Not the people who actually make games.

 

Hmmm....let me get back to you.

 

I don't think that we have fully explored every avenue with old game formulas. I don't think we ever will, either. We still watch the same basic stories over and over just with different characters, so why not enjoy the same games with unique twists? Sure, it's not as glamorous as being the first to do something new, but it's more of a respectable approach than people regard it as.

It's precisely because rehashing old formulas is considered so lowbrow, such a faux pas that the medium of games in general languishes in a stifling hell of inbred ideas. Like a blonde cali girl with a Starbucks coffee drink in one hand and a cell phone in the other, gamers (and designers) flip their hair and roll their eyes at the notion that we've anything to learn from the past. Each "new" idea is the previous idea with some slight variation. I can't even comprehend the number of first person shooters that have been created in the last decade. The gaming culture of today has the feel of the nightclub scene, with all the money jumping from one hotspot to another every other week and the same handful of Mega-publishers laughing all the way to the bank, because they're the only game in town. Meanwhile, independent developers seem content to watch grass grow and do whatever the hell this is called.

The talent gets snatched up, and who can blame them? I can't think of anything better, though, than being a moderately successful indie developer making enough money that I can work from home. I don't see how that's possible, though, unless I can start making games that I can actually make on a regular basis. And that starts with what's simple, and for that I draw inspiration from the oldies but goodies. All sarcasm aside, people have had great success with such an approach.

I do think NES is relevant even to this very day because nostalgia is powerful.

 

I think the NES games were good in general. Most suffered more from poor implementation than anything else. Or perhaps design. Depends on if the design was specific down to every nut and bolt or it was looser and the exact implementation was open.

Anyway, the retro area I look to for inspiration the most is probably the coin-op arcade games. There were a ton of of those games in the 80s and 90s. And actually if you take a good look you can often trace modern games all the way back to an early arcade game. Along the way you will find several games. Each building upon the other. Sometimes for better. Sometimes for worse.

The arcade games had the best presentation for the time of their release and were usually implemented quite well. And I probably spend more time playing old coin-op arcade games online than I do any other retro area.

If you look at old school you have to take in the complete picture. NES is just one tiny component of it.

One of my favorite sites is Game-Oldies.com

If you get a chance... go there and check out all of the systems and the games and tell me you cannot find some real gems. And you'd have to be a completely unimaginative person not to come away inspired with many solid game ideas as well.

If you like fighting games or shootemups check out the Classic Arcade games and the Neo Geo. Neo Geo was always a beast of a system having graphics as good as the arcade coin-ops of the day. In my opinion many of these SNES, Arcade and Neo Geo games look as good as or better than most games today (referring to the hand-drawn art in 2d games). I always thought the beginning of Neo Geo games was cool as most included a simple control tutorial. They had a lot of style.

 

Most of us into retro gaming just do not see the modern games as being better. And we get tired of seeing games that basically all look and feel the same. For example, I could get screenshots of many popular FPS games stick them in a collage and most people would probably think they were the same game. It wouldn't be so bad if they only looked virtually identical... but they basically play virtually identical. So, this is one thing that keeps people such as myself always looking for a good retro game to buy.

Second, and this kind of goes along with the above. These days with the graphics power available and every developer trying to achieve real life graphics quality... they are so obsessed with achieving that they kind of miss the point of games. As they move closer and closer to achieving photo realism (or video may a better classification) it simply makes all of their games look more and more similar. So ultimately, apparently without thinking about it, their goal is that one day every game will kind of be no different than me going outside. Of course, there will be different locations and such but the thing is it feels LESS creative. Less like exploring some new environment.

The modern games as far as game play offer no more or barely more play value than the most simplest of retro games in many cases especially mobile games. They look a lot better. Sound a lot better. Once in a while I see some creativity like Knack for the PS4. That game makes me think the devs have the right idea about what a game is.

It is simply difficult to even find certain game styles any more. You'd think it would be easier. Say I want a top down tank battle game like Jackal on the NES. One of my favorite NES games. Or a good side scrolling helicopter shoot and rescue. I am not saying there are no modern options period. I am asking where are they? If they exist they are buried under a ton of FPS military and zombie romps. So this is a huge reason we look to classic games and eagerly buy retro style games from Indys.

This is all just a very personal thing. But there are a lot of us retro gamers which is why we are starting to see more and more retro games appear. Which I think is awesome.

 

lol. I guess by your standards then I'm overqualified. I not only put in 100s of hours on NES, I also did so with Atari 2600, Colecovision, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, Genesis, and more.

But, honestly, although no one can make you do such things in order to create a Unity game, I think it's good to have a strong foundation in gaming in order to make games. So, experience with a wide variety of systems over th years is a definite plus.

As far as that video goes, I'm baffled as to how clueless some of those people were. How can you NOT know what an NES is? That's just wrong. lol.