How Games Used to Look: Why Retro Gaming on a CRT Looks Different [video]
You know how food tastes better when you’re hungry? That’s the element of nostalgia that is still unaccounted for in the emulation/preservation scene.Most of us who grew up playing games were hungry for it - our parents allowed us a fairly limited supply of games, on their budget and schedule, and they probably put limits on when and how long we could play them for, right? Maybe we had to travel to a friend’s house because they were the only one in the neighborhood with a particular game or console. Furthermore, entertainment options in general were limited, and the games offered a genuine novelty that you couldn’t get anywhere else - even the crappy ones. Thus we savored every opportunity to play, and the satisfaction of that hunger is what our nostalgic memories are built on.Contrast to today, where you can download NES.zip and possess literally every game on that platform, almost instantly. As an adult, you can play as much as you like. But you probably don’t even want to play that much because you’ve also got a universe of streaming TV and movies and media and a back catalog of AAA-games a mile long and VR and gadgets and social media and a million other entertainment options, distractions and responsibilities. We’re not hungry at all - we’re obese from media and stuffed to the gills with it.