There was a period back in time when there were so many different computers and consoles to choose from. I grew up living the 8 bit wars but my best gaming years was during the 16 bit era. Started with a second hand Commodore 64 and then after around 15 months of savings, close to Easter of 1992 I was a proud owner of an Amiga 600.

One thing I will never forget during this period is that almost every other machine had its own version of a video game title, there were so many variations of a video game title, Amiga and Atari ST might be the closest exception to that. We were all jealous of the arcade video game title versions and we were dreaming that it would be ideal if our machines could be capable of reaching the quality of an arcade cabinet machine at some point.

So many years passed, so many platforms are history, and even the arcade cabinet machines are like relics nowadays. Year after year with the technology being more and more capable of graphics, animation, sound etc, we reached a point where the game titles are very advanced in quality and readily available in our living room, bedroom, wherever, and of course they offer identical experience across PC’s and game consoles.

Modern video games are great, but to me they have lost that charm of being different across machines with different specifications and capabilities. If you have played a game on lets say Xbox, most likely you’ve seen everything and the experience on a PC or Playstation will be the same more or less, so no need to check up the video game title on another platform even out of curiosity.

We were wishing for the best version of a game title in our home, in front of us in our very own 14 inch monochrome or (for the lucky guys) colour monitor. We were wishing that we could bring the arcade cabinet experience home. Well we sort of got what we wished for, at least from the perspective of video game title quality, but we lost in the meantime many things.

We lost the ability to brag to our friends that our trusted platform is better than their own, we lost the ability to make others understand why our version of the game was better than others, that our machine’s colours were better, the sound was more appealing and so on :). 

Of course we knew that we were over doing it with our brags and deep down although we could never admit it, there were something in another platform that we were fond of and we wanted it to be part of our platforms video game title too.

Lastly we lost the curiosity to investigate a video game title for different platforms in depth, to compare the pros and cons of each version and discuss with our gaming pals about the ideal version with all the best features combined. 

It feels like the whole gaming community culture has changed over time and this is not a bad thing because people evolve, but if you lived that magic era of the so called 8 and 16 bit wars then it’s something that you will always remember and miss.

Sometimes we have to be careful of what we wish for, sooner or later technology wise you get practically what you are asking for, but the magic is lost, and that magic is something that there is no hidden recipe to bring it back. 🙂