I also wanted to say that old video games can be appealing for reasons other than nostalgia. Only recently I played through chrono trigger and symphony of the night, both for the first time, and they are amazing even by today's standards. People enjoy old books, movies, etc because they are still great, why can't video games be the same way?
I've long been a Final Fantasy fan. I was introduced to it with FF7, a game I still continue to love—and am more than a little excited for the impending PS4 remake. It's a gold standard for me. My sons (16 & 12) and I recently embarked on playing through the entire Final Fantasy catalogue. I'm currently on FF4, while they're still finishing the first. We've all been having a blast with the playthroughs, as well as discussing comparative gameplay, art, mechanics, etc. they're just fantastic and timeless games.
Best of all, my boys now want to work together to make a game. My oldest has already made an FF clone on his TI-84. If their interest holds, it could be an awesome project to work on together.
Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time. Its images and music have been part of my life since I was ten years old, so I've often wondered how I would perceive it if the experience were new as an adult. Glad to hear that it held up so well.
To be fair, loads of XIX century novels are considered boring for today's standards mostly because they were born as serials, paid by episode or even by word, and published in newspapers first. After the media landscape evolved, their appreciation diminished; similarly, old games suffer from the rapid evolution of their platforms / media.
Well, we know about a lot of abandonware since the times of Gilgamesh and Ulysses. Even what we managed to preserve is usually executed with emulated languages, because original runtimes are lost or evolved beyond recognition. Some are ports of pirated or censored copies, on completely different architectures, completely reskinned and modded beyond recognition.
The result is, to be brutally honest, that reading Beowulf is a chore; most Shakespeare works need a walkthrough; Dante's Inferno is fun but we'll never appreciate it in the same way as XIII-century political junkies did. And so on and so forth for huge chunks of literature.
In short, most old literature is not as accessible or enjoyable as contemporary pulp. You have to accept these limitations as you consume it; which is why Plato does not sell as much as J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown. Similarly with games, we cannot expect today's kids to appreciate what came before them. Some will, some won't. That's just how it is.
Again, this generalization is not valid for me, there are lot of counter examples like Marcus Aurelius. But apart from that, it's mostly a fashion problem. Sure the fashionable item will sell more (it is usually designed for). That tells nothing on the rest. You are right that we will never have the same context, and that some artworks are starting to be beyond enjoyability, but it's not always the case. For music for example there is folk, not fashionable but enjoyable even for kids, and maybe one day people will play an old Zelda as they could have listened to Stairway to heaven.
>we cannot expect today's kids to appreciate what came before them
Anectodically I've had many opportunities to play old video games with kids and they all appreciated them, in fact I'm not sure they could tell that it was old games (Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi's Island (Snes) on the top my head).
Edit: to continue the analogy with music, it would have been has there was a race to write the symphony with the most instruments, with ads telling you to always upgrade to the next symphony for your listening pleasure. Then one day some people started to notice that some ancient guy/girl with only their guitar or voice was as well enjoyable, and if not a better a different emotional medium. It seems obvious but for video games every time you say that some old games had something that we may be missing you get the usual "you are a nostalgic old fart"
> Again, this generalization is not valid for me, there are lot of counter examples like Marcus Aurelius.
Great example: we don't have the original, we rely on translations of a single XIV century copy written in a dead language (classic Greek). Depending on translations, we may or may not enjoy it -- I'd argue you probably wouldn't read it in XV century Catholic Latin. In other words, we love playing the (excellent) 3D version of Sid Meier's "Pirates!" rather than the original crappy-looking 2D version; in a few years, we'll probably be playing the VR port. That's fine, but it requires some effort -- either by us tolerating the crappy original, or by developers/translators constantly bridging the cultural gap.
Similarly, folk music might require instruments that are expensive or hard to find these days, like an accordion or concertina. Again, enjoying it requires effort at some level.
> Anectodically I've had many opportunities to play old video games with kids and they all appreciated them
Sure, but would they go out looking for SNES emulators on their own, rather than looking forward to XCOM2 or some shiny new MMORPG? Unlikely. Granted, the "side-scroller platform" genre is a bit fossilized, so it's probably easier to approach classic games in that category; but a lot of other genres have aged really badly. No self-respecting teenager would take Double Dragon seriously these days, nor any Atari 2600 game.
In short: like with literature, appreciating old games requires extra work at some level.
I would heavily disagree that kids wouldn't go looking for SNES emulators on their own or playing retro games or what not. I mean, look at the Virtual Console on various Nintendo systems. It's pretty darn popular, even among people who never grew up with most of the games on it. Same deal for Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, Steam, GOG, etc. There's obviously a large number of kids and teens who would prefer playing a NES or SNES game to one of the newer ones.
And hey, enough kids go looking for SNES emulators that the average user age in a lot of ROM Hacking communities is between 13-18. The vast majority of people at SMW Central are well under 18 years of age, and likely didn't grow up with the SNES game:
I 100% agree with this. A lot of older games are appealing simply because they're good games in general, and are seen as a new experience for people who didn't grow up with them. For example, how many people likely played Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask for the first time on 3DS? Or before that, the Wii Virtual Console? Yet for a lot of people coming back to them, they still consider them some of the best games of all time.
Heck, I do, and I'm one of the people who never played either til then.
