Sitting around, shooting the shit with your friends and somehow or another an old game gets brought up. “Man, Final Fantasy VI was such a good game.” “I dunno, I haven’t played it.” “Why not? It’s one of the best FF games, if not the best FF game, ever. You should give it a try.” “Can’t do it. I can’t go back to old games. It just looks so old.” This happens to any game you bring up from the SNES generation, PS1/N64 Generation and the PS2/Xbox generation. For many, there’s a window that first time-players are willing to try a game and once that time passes, it’s hard for them to give it a try. This even happens to people who have played it long ago, but I think the window for replaying it lasts longer than for those that didn’t play it during its original time, but without hard numbers its only speculation and I might try to find this out in a different article.
Then why are some games easier to go back to than others? Funny enough, it seems easier to go back to games from the NES/SNES and even some PS1-era games than PS2-era games. Does this mean that the older a game gets, there’s some magical threshold that makes it easier, more desirable to try it instead of less? Well, I wouldn’t say that. Most of the games that I tend to find myself and find others going to play and replay are games that are closer in creation to SNES/NES type games, meaning 2D-Platformers and RPGs. I think the big ingredient to longevity is what was found in the many games of this generation of consoles.
GameIntrospection 