A recent thread on X by author JD Cowan kicked off a trip down gaming memory lane.
In particular, he addressed how AAA studios killed 2D games for a generation.
Related: FF7: The 1st Unfinished AAA Game?
JD is right. The fifth home video game console generation was when game devs swithced focus from making games that players wanted to play to making games that developers wanted to make.
The advent of new technology that allowed devs to build the digital sandboxes they’d long dreamed of, coupled with an unhealthy obsession with novelty, created the era of gaming that’s held up worse than any other.
What hits you over the head when you go back and play 2D sprite-based games is the level of craft that went into squeezing the most out of every limited color and not-quite-square pixel. Art is a work performed to a standard. You can acknowledge the limitations of NES, Genesis, and SNES games, but you can’t ignore that those same limitations forced developers to up their standards.
In hindsight, the self-delusion and gaslighting perpetrated by game devs and journos pushing the 3D craze was just insulting to everyone’s intelligence.
A major cause of Generation Y’s terminal nostalgia was growing up when every form of mainstream entertainment hit its zenith. Millennials and Zoomers might give some pushback, but if you were a kid during the third, and fourth console generations, you just took it for granted that every new installment of your favorite movie, TV, and game series would be better than the last. The release of each new Final Fantasy game, for example, justified the hype.
Yet the gravy train had to run out sometime. And eventually, Cultural Ground Zero came for 2D games.
Related: Ground Zero
Hard as it is to believe now, every game publisher and media outlet hailed as an unalloyed triumph the overnight transition from this:
To this:
Nor was that phenomenon exclusive to Final Fantasy. From about 1990 to 1995, every major studio squeezed higher performance out of its flagship series, despite having only two dimensions to work with.
It sounds counterintuitive, but having to work within limitations can help artists make better art. By the same token, removing limitations can lead to artistic sloth and vanity.
What the corpos in charge of the vidya industry around Ground Zero missed was that the change from 2D to 3D constituted switching from a cool medium to a hot medium.
Your senses interact with 2D games on a whole different level than what are in essence interactive 3D movies. So the latter can never provide the same experience as the former.
That’s how AAA studios killed 2D gaming.
Thankfully, 2D games have enjoyed something of a renaissance in the handheld and indie markets.
Still, I’m haunted by nagging thoughts of that other timeline in which Sega of Japan didn’t veto Tom Kalinske’s deal with Silicon Graphics, and gamers got a RISC chip-powered Sega Saturn.
A man can dream …
How do you think the video game industry would be different today if AAA hadn’t killed 2D gaming? Speak your mind in the comments.
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